About BHP Ventures

We are a dedicated internal venture capital investment unit, established to build and manage a portfolio of technology investments that not only help accelerate BHP’s innovation activities today, but also seeds future growth options for the company to thrive for decades ahead. 

We work closely with teams across BHP and with our outside partners to generate opportunities to support the company’s most important strategic priorities. Our success depends on our ability to engage as closely with our C-suite (Executive Leadership Team, or ELT) as we do with our start-ups and drive common outcomes.

Our portfolio is oriented around growth… securing the future growth of our current operations by accessing cutting-edge technologies and leading capabilities, growing our resource base in nickel, copper and other “future-facing” commodities by discovering and/or recovering resource first, growing our business into new verticals and horizontals, and seeding potential new business lines, such as carbon removal.

Our team is global, our portfolio is global, and our vision is big. If we are successful, our early-stage investment strategy will find and develop leading technologies and talent from across the world which, when combined with the power of BHP’s current capabilities, can together unlock significant value for our companies, partners and for BHP and its stakeholders. 
 

Expressions of interest are sought for an Investment Director within BHP Ventures, our in-house venture capital investment unit. The Senior VC Associate will be a critical member of our global team, driving end-to-end investing activities from deal sourcing through to investment execution, portfolio company management, team operations, and external and internal stakeholder engagements.   Every day you show up at work, be that at home, in the office or anywhere else, you’ll demonstrate a commitment to BHP’s Values… that means an overriding commitment to health, safety, respect, integrity, environmental responsibility and sustainable development and an obligation to comply with Our Charter Values.

About The Role

Your key roles will include early-stage company assessment and support, including:

• Leading the team of investors responsible for the venture investment origination and execution;
• Identifying, engaging and managing relationships with entrepreneurs, investors, and investment bankers to generate and manage organic deal pipeline; 
• Qualifying, prioritizing, managing, screening, and tracking a high volume of new investment opportunities;
• Acting as a subject matter expert on both early-stage deal structuring and technology investments;
• Undertaking independent research into technology areas in which BHP Ventures could target through its investments, over time developing expertise in multiple verticals to identify trends and recommend investment opportunities;
• Creating and maintaining market maps for strategic and financial targets;
• Gaining fluency and meaningful exposure to tech and the tech investing ecosystem to assess the attractiveness of potential opportunities, having regard to the strategic value BHP could realise through an investment and the commercial appeal of the investment;
• Leading transaction execution teams harnessing the insights and participation of key internal business stakeholders and potentially external advisors as relevant;
• Authoring investment memos and managing the investment processes from start to finish including coordinating with legal and finance teams.
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You will also be pivotal to ensuring world class corporate venture operations, including by:

• Serving as a board director and/or board observer for executed transactions;
• Supporting ongoing portfolio management and follow-on funding rounds;
• Enhancing the team’s internal efficiencies and communications by identifying opportunities to continually improve how we do our work;
• Communicating and collaborating with the utmost respect and integrity with all internal and external stakeholders;

About You

Candidates should have previous technology investment experience, with an understanding of risk and how to price it, and a familiarity with investment process, transaction documents, and key terms; including side letter negotiations and board director/observe experience.

You must be a fast learner, a careful listener, curious about everything, and able to quickly assess a range of technologies… Can you navigate from quantum physics to equipment autonomy to carbon capture and sequestration, quickly determine what could be real and what is likely to just be hype… all in one day? 

You must be comfortable and thrive in a fast-paced and unstructured working environment, which means you have a strong bias for action and impeccable attention to detail.  You’ll need to take initiative and be resourceful… BHP is a big, global company, but we are a small, nimble team engaging with leading start-ups… and you will be expected to make that integration “work”.

To be good at this, you will clearly understand the value of relationships and drive yourself to build and maintain your own broad network, internally and externally. That means being comfortable picking up the phone and calling someone; it means knowing how to write an engaging email, being responsive but not overly aggressive. It means listening to what people are actually saying and knowing how to see through the noise to spot the win-win outcome.

Perhaps most importantly, you need passion… passion about sustainable business practices and investing for global impact, passion for driving outcomes as part of an awesome team and passion about building your own career as a prolific investment professional.