Interview with Albert Bielinko
This week, I have a rare interview with Albert Bielinko, General Partner of Titanium Ventures. Titanium Ventures has about $1.35b funds under management, which is about the same size as AirTree, and may be the largest Australian VC firm you’ve never heard of. With their recent rebranding, I expect this to change!
How has your career evolved so that you became an investor in deep tech startups?
I’ve spent more than a decade in investing roles, both within Titanium Ventures where I am a General Partner and before this at an infrastructure private equity firm and advising at Goldman Sachs. I’ve always greatly appreciated the power of science and technology in solving some of humanity’s most pressing problems - including keeping disease at bay, responding to climate change and feeding a growing population. When I was young, I read with marvel that in the 1800s it was widely considered that humanity would run out of food. Luckily for us, in 1909, Haber invented a process for converting hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia. The Haber-Bosch process increased per farm productivity by 5x+ which avoided mass starvation. In the last few years, deep tech solutions to climate change have especially interested me. I love talking to scientists and university professors about their work.
What do you think needs to be considered when investing in deep tech, compared with other types of startups?
Total capital requirements tend to be more important with deep tech where the time to commercial traction is sometimes longer. Understanding how much capital you may need to source and your fundraising strategy (equity, debt, JV level funding, grants etc) versus technical and commercial milestones is really critical. In deep tech, we often find that there are different approaches (such as chemistries) to solving the same problem so understanding the strengths or weaknesses of a proposed approach versus others that have been tried, and how this relates to the market opportunity, is quite important. Clearly, we will only realize the huge impact that deep tech enables if the solutions can really scale, so we spend a lot of time understanding any potential limitations to scale. Finally, much of the specific talent required can be difficult to source so links to universities help. Fortunately, deep tech can help address some truly massive problems.
Can you give an example (or two) of a deep tech company you’ve been impressed by?
So many!
Titanium Ventures is fortunate to be an investor in Samsara Eco, which uses AI to create synthetic enzymes which can recycle plastics (even if dirty or mixed) by breaking them down into their monomers so they can be recycled in an endless loop. They had a world first breakthrough where they recycled nylon 6,6 for the first time, with partners like Lululemon. This is incredibly exciting and enables textile to textile recycling for the first time. I even bought a jacket from Lululemon (which used Samsara’s technology), which was previously a pair of leggings! Creating virgin plastic is carbon intensive, so this is a proven approach that can be scaled to lower carbon. Imagine a world where we don’t need to use carbon to produce new plastics again.
We are fortunate to be an investor in Cohere Technologies which has shown that it can increase telco spectral efficiency by up to 50%, in work with Vodafone and others. This is like Google Maps but for spectral efficiency. What a tremendous value proposition! Titanium Ventures even backed a programmable humanoid robots company, UBTech, a few years ago. They make robots which can recognize and engage with you…and even dance! They are seeing a lot of uptake in education and aged care use cases, amongst others. Teaching kids and addressing loneliness are good examples of valuable problems that deep tech can help solve.
Why do you think Australia doesn’t (yet) have deep tech startup successes mentioned in the same breath as Atlassian, Canva or Airwallex?
We have some huge companies like CSL and Cochlear and many others that are growing well that may be in the next generation of deep tech scale ups. I know many founders and investors working hard to add many new names to this list (maybe your company?)
I wish Australians celebrated deep tech success stories and potential more and I think it may come down to the tall poppy syndrome and focus elsewhere. Whilst not as recognizable as Snapchat, we have amazing universities and technical talent and deep tech can solve some truly massive problems. If only we held scientific prowess in the same high regard as sports, we could win the export Olympics!
Many deep tech companies have a hardware aspect. How do you see software companies fitting into the deep tech category?
Whilst most tend to focus on hardware companies when deep tech is mentioned, we certainly classify some software companies with deep IP as deep tech. For example, our former portfolio company Crowdstrike revolutionized the cyber security market by turning static firewalls from Symantec and McAfee into dynamic endpoint protection using machine learning. This innovation changed the world - and catapulted them into a US$66B market cap business at time of writing.
Similarly, OpenSolar (where I am a Director) provides the world’s most widely used solar design tool. They create AI automated designs for solar installations in seconds, optimizing against a tremendous number of permutations. They then make it easy for solar installers to create optimized proposals all integrated with financiers, wholesalers etc, thereby enabling electrification and decarbonization at scale. They are scaling very quickly (and hiring!).
What podcasts/books/people have influenced your perspective on investing in deep tech?
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates is a great one, which covers many solutions to climate change. The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman is a compelling glimpse into the effect of AI innovations. Finally, A Positive Climate provides great interviews with climate tech champions.