Podcast

My 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.

It is commonly thought that if you’re dealing with deeptech, that means you’re dealing with long horizons and long timelines to make your money back after an investment, but that is not necessarily the case, according to my guest today.

I speak with Julien Fredonie, who heads up investments in Europe and Africa for Honda Xcelerator Ventures, the corporate VC arm of Japanese auto manufacturer Honda.

The unit looks at  deeptech and hardtech across a number of areas including decarbonisation, mobility, robotics and manufacturing, and I wanted to talk to Julien about how he sees CVCs coming along in terms of their ability to help those startups scale up. We talk about how much better suited corporate investors are today to back hard tech companies, relative to one or two decades ago. We also touch on the advantages of investing in the European and African markets, how a new generation of more tech-savvy investors is emerging, the importance of having a founder-focused investment approach, bridging the deeptech funding gap, and more.

But first, I speak to GCV’s Oishani Mitra about how India – one of the largest military forces in the world – is working hard to build its own defence tech ecosystem.

Innovation has long been one of the primary forces shaping power around the world. If your society is innovating, it will be more prosperous, more influential, and more consequential. 

In today’s world, we’re seeing some shifts in global power dynamics between democracies and less democratic nations. We’re also seeing traditionally democratic governments on the backslide, losing faith and confidence in the systems that have kept them doing so well for so long. 

My guest today is James Mawson, founder and CEO of GCV, who I wanted to talk to about the role that innovation has to play on the grand scale – how open societies are more conducive to innovation, and how innovation can help keep them ahead of their rivals.

Since the end of last year/beginning of this year there’s been quite a bit of optimism that investors will once again be able to count on the public markets for exits – with 2025 being highly anticipated as the year where listings will be back on the menu.  But that is now more uncertain – or at least the timing of it is – what with the amount of uncertainty that’s been injected into the market, for the most part by policy decisions in the US.
I speak to GCV’s editor-in-chief, Maija Palmer, about the hopes for public markets.

If we rewind to 2021, as we were starting to come out of the covid pandemic, there is nowhere you could look without seeing a flurry of investment rounds, many of them very, very big, backing Web3 and crypto startups. Everyone and their dog was looking to get a piece of the action.

Eventually, of course, it cooled off but it’s been making a big comeback in recent months, especially since the US elections late last year. What we are now starting to see, which we didn’t see even back when valuations were massive and everyone was looking for a crypto startup to sink their money into, is the spectre of exits.

Today I speak to GCV’s special features editor, Rob Lavine, about the growing tide of M&As we’re likely to see in the space, what kind of investors are looking to jump in, if we’re expecting the return of megarounds, and why gaming and entertainment is likely to be a huge frontier bringing in people who might not otherwise have been exposed to Web3.

My guest today is Greg Zavorotniy, who was managing director at what was then called BayWa Energy Ventures, and is now partner at rEnergy Partners. We talk about the advantages of being able to invest from outside the corporate architecture, the unit’s plans to raise a fund north of $200m to invest in cleantech startups, and their plans to bring in multiple LPs.

Pilot projects between corporates and startups are a dime a dozen, just about any large corporate can do one. The problem, according to my guest today, is after the pilot – why is it that so many startups’ solutions don’t end up scaling within a corporate post-pilot, and what can be done about it?

Investing in automotive is not what it used to be – it has gone far beyond just what makes the car itself better, but of course to the entire ecosystem and experience around them.

If you happen to be a human being, chances are you need to eat in order to survive. Agriculture is as crucial an industry to the maintenance of modern society as any other – and with a growing population and threats from climate change, finding new ways to produce more food is more important than ever. So why is it that investment into innovative agricultural technology has been so weak in recent years relative to other sectors?