Latest Episodes
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Advice from a CVC freelancer
Listen nowWhat’s it like to come into corporate VCs from the outside as a contractor?
My guest is Bruno Meireles de Sousa, who is an operating parter at Bidra Innovation Ventures, the CVC of phosphate mining company OCPGroup. And he joined me to talk about what he’s seen going from unit to unit across a number of sectors.
He tells me about his experience going from a very big corporate in Cargill – where he did both venture investing and venture building – to a smaller parent company when joining Bidra Ventures, and what corporates should keep in mind when doing both investing and venture building.
We talk about what indicators he sees that a venture unit is healthy when he parachutes into it, how to effectively bring attention to things that senior leadership might find uncomfortable, and how to gain trust internally when coming in from the outside, and more. -
Secondaries are breaking into the mainstream
Listen nowThe whole point of investing is to hopefully get your money back at some point. But what if, as we’ve seen, the usual routes to doing that are effectively blocked off? Ideally, a VC might want to their startup to go public, welcoming in hundreds of thousands of new investors via an IPO and make their money back, at many multiples, that way. Or they might want a bigger fish to come along and acquire the startup outright at a higher value, providing their returns that way.
But IPO’s have been all but dead for a few years now, and despite previous predicitons that this might finally be the year they come back in earnest, that has not been the case. But people still want their money back, so they’re turning to the secondaries markets, where they can sell their shares in startups outside the context of a larger liquidity event that is out of their control. Secondaries markets have grown rapidly and continue to do so. Their visibility, and the attitudes towards using them, have also changed such that investors are much more comfortable imbedding them as part of their portfolio management strategies.
My guest today is Laurence Levi, partner at VO2 partners, a boutique advisory firm that acts as a broker-dealer for secondaries transactions, as well as a turnkey portfolio management service provider, focusing strongly on corporate VCs.We talk about how the use of secondaries markets have been on an explosive trajectory, and hav been largely destigmatised, whereas it used to be something many might have considered as an outlet for which things are going badly.
We touch on how the nature of the markets themselves have changed, whether the power balance between buyers and sellers have shifted amid the increase in activity, and where the trajectory is set to go even if other exit routes come back.
We also talk about how startup founders may be feeling about having new shareholders who they never previously envisioned as a result of them buying up shares on the secondaries, how valuations or discounting practices have changed in recent years, and much more.But first, I talk to GCV’s Kim Moore about how CVCs are opting to sell off parts of their portfolio’s via secondary transactions in order to pivot to AI.
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Do we have enough energy to power the AI future?
Listen nowThe ugly truth behind the AI revolution is that it needs to be powered from somewhere. Every query you make into ChatGPT or DeepSeek of Claude takes energy. Energy that has to be generated at a power plant, transmitted through the grid, and then used at a data centre to process and then send you the answer you seek.
The demand for power from data centres is set to triple globally over the next 10 years. And our grids are not ready. So what’s being done to solve it? How are going to make more power? How are we going to improve our ability send it? How can we reduce demand for it?
GCV recently released a report about this very topic, and I’m joined today by my colleague, GCV deputy editor Kim Moore, to talk about it.
You can read the full report here: https://globalventuring.com/report/global-energy-council-q2-2025/
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Why invest in LatAm
Listen nowLatin America is one of the fastest growing regions in the world, with a growing number of unicorns, an increasing array of international investors looking to get a foothold, and ever more savvy entrepreneurs. Ahead of next week’s GCV Symposium in London, I wanted to catch up with Bernardita Araya, manager of CMPC Ventures, the corporate VC unit of Chilean pulp and paper company CMPC, who will be speaking at the event about international investment in the region.
Araya talks about how the VC scene has been growing rapidly in recent year, especially in Chile where many new faces are entering the space, as well as how Latin American entrepreneurs, without the same kind of access to grants and other funding as founders in North America or Europe, tend to be incredibly cash efficient. International investors, she says, have been keen to enter the region but mostly with local co-investors.
We also talk about the challenges facing LatAm founders, including the prospects of expanding to other continents, as well as the natural advantages the region has, and about the growing willingness of it’s corporates to innovate and adapt, and much more. -
Getting rid of bias in the investment process
Listen nowHuman decision-making – even when a lot of money is at stake, is not always rational.
A lot of the time it’s based on intangible factors that influence people in ways that can’t be explained or justified by data or analysis – this is after all, the entire basis for the field of behavioural economics, and it’s not new information. So why, in an industry like venture capital, are people still led oftentimes more by their gut than their head? The answer, of course, is human nature. But in an industry that looks for outliers, that tries to go against the grain, why is it not more of a priority to minimise the amount of returns left on the table by counteracting well-known flaws in our thinking?
My guest today is Sharon Vosmek, CEO and managing partner of VC firm Astia, which has, at the core of its thesis, diversity. Not just diversity for its own sake, though Vosmek argues that that would be good enough – but rather as a tangible, strategic way to cast the net as widely as possible, and to eliminate the biases that ultimately end up hurting your return profile.
Astia recently released a white paper on what it calls the Sift – its method of sourcing and screening companies for investment, in a way that tries to filter out the pitfalls that people fall into because of their biases or hunches. Things like not starting the process with introductions, but rather an in-depth assessment of the business before face-to-face meetings, or drawing on the experience of a large diverse group of external advisors to assess each company – thereby also spreading the biases across a wider set of experiences.
At a time when diversity and inclusion initiatives are coming under attack, Vosmek defends this not as some gimmick, but as a way to demonstrably bring in more money – indeed, Astia’s data has shown a far lower failure rate for startups that have made it through the Sift, than the average, and a higher rate not just of survival, but of successful exits, than failures.
We also talk about the biases that still exist and how they may manifest themselves, the potential impact that the perception of being an “inclusive” fund may have on fundraising, and the wider impact of a current climate that is hostile to inclusion initiatives.
But first, I speak to GCV’s Kim Moore about how investors can take advantage of innovation in universities. -
Economic ruts are a good time to double down
Listen nowIn recent months we’ve seen quite a few corporate VC units either shut down, or get spun off, as their corporate parents grapple with how to deal with a tough macroeconomic environment. That’s not always the case though – we’re also seeing a number of other CVCs get launched, and some existing CVCs launch big new funds.
My guest today is in the latter category – I speak to Ingo Ramesohl, managing director at Robert Bosch Venture Capital, the CVC arm of German engineering and technology company Bosch, which is known as Bosch Ventures for short.
We talk about the brand new €250m sixth fund that the unit just launched, and their plans for it, as well as more broadly, why it is so important for companies to push ahead with innovation even when the going gets tough – and why those that stay the course can benefit from a competitive advantage in the market.
We also talk a lot about Open Bosch, which is Bosch Venture’s in-house venture clienting arm – we touch on how they select companies and allocate resources, why its important to be one of a startup’s early customers in order to be part of the innovation, and what areas the unit is looking at – such as data centres and healthcare – to help position it’s parent company for the massive industrial disruptions on the horizon.
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Investing in the in-space economy
Listen nowSpace has historically been the domain of governments – as that has changed and it’s becoming a more private sector-based commercial endeavour, something else has been changing too, and that is that whereas before space was a matter of launching things up where they will do something for a while, then they come back down. What’s emerging now is the prospect of an entire economy in space, for space – where things don’t always need to come back down to earth for maintenance, or refuelling, for example, and can continue to operate outside earth.
My guest today is Timur Davis, director at Munich Re Ventures, where much of his focus is trained beyond the atmosphere, in startups who want to operate in orbit.
We talk about how the unit’s thesis of investing in the picks and shovels of space – the enabling technologies that allow for the space economy to operate effectively – things like traffic management and servicing in orbit. We also talk about the changing business models – how the pendulum has swung back to startups searching for government-based revenues for their stability – as well why mid-stage space startups have trouble getting funded, the development of in-space regulations and norms, how much of space is wide open in terms of the competitive landscape, and much more.
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Dealing with an unprecedented demand for power
Listen nowDemand on the power grid is not getting any lower, in fact it’s growing faster than ever, and putting real pressure on the existing infrastructure. As more energy-hungry customers like data centres are coming online, better solutions need to be found to get more capacity through the system.
My guest today is Pradeep Tagare, head of investment at National Grid Partners, the US-based VC arm of National Grid, which is a grid operator active in the UK and the US.
We talk about the challenges facing grid operators at a time when the growth in demand for power is unprecedented, not least because of the phenomenal growth in data centres in the age of AI. We touch on how people are thinking about providing to these large demand customers like data centres, and what solutions exist to increase grid capacity even without a wholescale upgrade of the grid infrastructure itself.
We also talk about the progress being made in the area of distributed energy resources, and how the challenge of interoperability of those diverse energy sources is largely solved, and how AI can be used from anything from finding out where best to place data centres, to figuring out how to best reduce the problem of vegetation overgrowth which can bring networks down, and more.
But first, I speak to Kim Moore about the growth of the space startup ecosystem in Europe. -
Protecting critical infrastructure is big business
Listen nowThe world is becoming, if not a more dangerous place, then perhaps a testier one. Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen an intensifying staccato of cyber attacks against critical infrastructure and other large facilities, which can, of course, bring with it huge financial and operational problems.
It is increasingly not just a problem for individual companies, but for nations as a whole. Private companies may own energy assets, for example, but an attack that disrupts that energy supply is a national security issue.
What we have seen in response to this is a strengthened focus on cybersecurity that focuses on operational technology – the physical realm – not just the digital IT side of the ledger.
More and more investors are looking to back startups that protect not just data and digital systems, but physical systems that people depend on for their daily lives.
Joining me today is Stephen Hurford, who sits in the host seat to ask me about it for a change.
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Canada’s startups navigate the new normal
Listen nowMy guest today is Talia Abramowitz, managing partner of Deloitte Ventures, a unit which has made the vast majority of its direct investments in Canadian startups and is well-placed to speak to the feelings within ecosystem. We talk about how startups and investors are thinking of navigating the current uncertainty, and how far along Canada has come in terms of its CVC activity. The unit has also just recently passed its three-year anniversary since founding, so we talk about the challenges of standing up a new CVC, as well as the evolving business of AI, and much more.