Co-Founder in Residence, Zero Emission Steel (Open Application)

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is an open application for expressions of interest. Active recruitment for the role will begin later this year.

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 Co-Founder in Residence and work closely with the DSV team, using our methodology, to spin-out 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 CHALLENGE YOU'LL BE SOLVING

Ancient and remarkably versatile, 2 billion tonnes of steel is manufactured a year, requiring some of humanity's most complex engineering. It makes up critical parts of our buildings, cars, ships, machinery, factories, bridges, appliances and more. Meanwhile, producing it from raw iron ore burns 1 billion tonnes of coal, emitting around 3.5 billion tonnes of CO2 into our atmosphere each year. An equivalent sum of CO2 to all the exhaust fumes of every flight on Earth, four times over.

Bringing this CO2 emissions number to zero is essential for avoiding climate change. There are three methods of attack:

1. Switch off as many polluting plants as we can, in other words, reduce or substitute demand for steel
2. Change facilities that already exist to become carbon neutral through fuels, or capturing emissions
3. Build new plants using novel technologies to create a new best-in-class technology

The first route has limited potential and might be better solved by regulations, the second route suffers from difficulties in plant shutdown, high-volume carbon sourcing and retrofit complexity; the third route of fully renewable steelmaking offers the most promise.

Partial electrification is already possible; 25% of steel is produced via Electric Arc Furnaces with many new technologies such as Hydrogen DRI, Molten Electrolysis and Alkaline Electrolysis undergoing development. Yet, with current technologies direct emissions continue to be high because fossil carbon is still used for slag foaming, anode construction or rapid process heating. Next to that, indirect emissions have not been solved, as running continuous processes of steel making using intermittent renewable energy sources would depend on expensive energy storage.

Electric ironmaking is facing significant challenges across the space, from energy storage for renewable power to sourcing high quality net-zero alternative carbon and utilising low-quality iron ores.

OUR APPROACH

In an ideal future we would want a steel plant that is fully compatible with intermittent renewable electricity and heat and ensure steelmaking uses fully-renewable carbon sources for alloying. Some of the options to do this, are to commercialise and integrate renewable heating, medium-temperature processes, alternative energy storage systems, and alternative carbon sources such as biochar and CO2 graphitisation. We also need to find ways to process low grade ores and find cheaper chemical reductants.

We have some ideas, but it will ultimately be down to you to determine the best commercial and technical route forward!

Requirements

• We are looking for an entrepreneurial and urgently motivated person who has a strong drive to solve some of the world's most pressing environmental challenges;
• PhD or equivalent industry expertise in metallurgical engineering, material sciences, process design, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering or a relevant field;
• We are especially interested in candidates with a good understanding or work experience in at least one of the following: metals processing technologies such as smelting of metals, electric arc furnaces, thermal or electrolysis processing of metal oxides;
• Experience with the development of novel electrochemical and/or thermochemical cell and reactor design is a plus;
• You have a broad knowledge base to draw upon and an passion in keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies;
• You are a creative thinker, enjoy thinking about the exceptions to rule, and enjoy a good challenge;
• You have a strong desire to build a company and ideally have built projects and teams in the past. You are a good communicator and work well in a team.

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.

This opportunity is funded by the Decarbonisation Ventures team of leading global mining company Anglo American, as part of the company's efforts to unlock and accelerate climate positive innovation through investment and industry collaborations. This opportunity is in particular aligned with Anglo American’s ambition to cut its Scope 3 emissions – which derive primarily from the use of its iron ore production in steelmaking – by 50% by 2040.

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.