ABOUT THE ROLE

At DSV we’re looking for future Founders, entrepreneurially minded individuals with industry-specific technical and commercial domain expertise eager to solve urgent unmet challenges through venture building.

You will join DSV’s venture creation programme as a Founder in Residence and work closely with the DSV team, using our methodology, to lead the spin-out of a new company. During the programme, you’ll work on all aspects related to venture creation in this opportunity area, including working out the optimal approach to solve for the desired outcome, building a team and building a viable business case. Once the new venture is incorporated with pre-seed investment from DSV, you and your co-founders will own the majority stake in the business and continue receiving support from the DSV team post-spinout.

THE OPPORTUNITY AREA

Addressing the manufacturing needs of cement, steel, chemicals, aluminium, fertiliser, pulp & paper, glass, and industrially-produced food and drinks depends delivering huge quantities of heat to dozens of manufacturing processes. To supply so-called "process heat" to these processes, such as drying, fermenting, melting, boiling, steaming or curing etc, currently requires burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels generating 7.5 Gt/yr of emissions. Currently as much as 35% of these emissions are created from processes that occur below 120˚C, a temperature that is economical to electrify via heat pumps. Reducing these emissions in the immediate term (7 - 10 years) would allow humanity to stay on track for Net Zero by 2050.

OUR APPROACH

Converting our current fossil fuel usage to renewable energy through electrification of heating sources is already underway in some production settings, but progress is stifled by extremely challenging economics. Even at 100% heater efficiency, in the USA, operating costs for direct electrification (e.g. electric boilers) using grid electricity are 5 times higher than existing natural gas systems and in Europe the operating costs are double even today. The only device capable of bridging this OPEX gap is industrial-scale heat pumps. Despite this, the capital cost of heat pumps must fall by 10 times to a similar cost as fridge compressors and internal combustion engines, and installation costs by 10 times before they can become competitive with existing natural gas powered heating. We aim to achieve this cost reduction by selling a fully-integrated, modular heat pump solution.

Requirements

We are looking for a mechanical engineer with the following experience:

• Designing heat pump systems, including the compressor design
• Broad understanding of different heat pumping cycles beyond vapour-compression cycles
• Wide variety of high temperature refrigerants e.g. Ammonia or Water

Bonus experience

• Design of industrial equipment for installation, commissioning and operation with high levels of reliability
• Design of turnkey equipment for mass manufacture using line-speed processes e.g. casting, stamping, rapid machining
• Production environment design for mass manufacture

Benefits

By joining DSV, you’ll be joining a team of operators who have founded companies and led translation of science at some of the most respected universities, charities, funds and government agencies. 2/3 of the team have founded or led a company at C-suite and 65% have a PhD. Our team dedicate several hours every week to each Founder or founding team to provide tailored guidance, resources and feedback covering every aspect of what it takes to successfully launch a new venture from both the tech and commercial perspectives:

• We provide optimised, purpose-built, proprietary tools, resources and processes to help create high-impact ventures from scratch, using our venture creation methodology. Read more about one of our key tools here.
• We draw on opportunity area specific know-how provided by our network of Partners and Advisors;
• We provide £250k investment governed by our Investment Committee to incorporate the new venture and develop early proof-of-concept data that’s needed to attract high profile non-venture studio VCs. This funding is also key to get grant funding, which most often needs to be matched with private investment;
• We provide guaranteed income of £4,166 per month paid to each Founder in Residence as a consultancy fee until the company is launched and the pre-seed investment is secured;
• You and your co-founders will own a majority equity stake in the company;
• We provide continuous support after post spin-out, including fundraising, commercial partnerships, recruitment and team-building (amongst other things); plus
• There are dozens of Founders currently at DSV across sectors working collaboratively and supporting one another - a unique resource to draw on.

ABOUT DSV

Deep Science Ventures is creating a future in which both humans and the planet can thrive.

We use our unique venture creation process to create, spin-out and invest into science companies, combining available scientific knowledge and founder-type scientists into high-impact ventures.

We operate in 4 sectors: Pharmaceuticals, Climate, Agriculture and Computation, tackling the challenges defining those areas by taking a first principles approach and partnering with leading institutions.