Jacob Heath, partner at law firm Orrick, led the spotlight sector discussion on advanced mobility and energy, which revolved around the creative destruction of energy and how corporate venturing could help the world’s largest industry survive and prosper in its own disruption.
The panellists included David Hayes, chief investment officer at BP Ventures, the venturing unit of oil company BP; Diana Grauer, director of venture capital at oil and gas services company Technip FMC; and Avra Durack, director at National Grid Partners, the venturing vehicle of utility company National Grid.
Grauer commented on some of the challenge of tailoring technologies from startups to the specific needs of heavy industry: “I see an awful lot of digital transformation. What is challenging is that a lot of times startups do not know what our equipment does, so we spend a lot of time looking for partnerships and we have an open innovation program. We do not just provide the typical equity funding but also other ways to collaborate.”
Durack concurred: “There is a certain amount of innovation and lots of projects going on but there is a lack of commercialisation and it is not clear how customers benefit from it. So part of our role is to figure out how we change. There is a lot of consumer ‘fatigue’ in the market. There are a lot of great solutions but it is hard to get them adopted in the utilities and energy sector.”
Hayes shared details about his recent investment in portfolio company Calysta, a Californian biotech business that made fish food from natural gas, and revealed how his team had to “battle corporate memory of something that had not worked in the past”. Indeed, BP had backed a startup in this space before but eventually abandoned the investment.
The panellists also shared their views on the biggest opportunities for disruption within the next five to 10 years. To Grauer, such opportunities lay in “hybrid industrialisation of products” and “being able to use software in heavy manufacturing”.
For Hayes, it was the ability to know what one was using as a consumer and understanding one’s carbon footprint. Durack mentioned renewable energy sources and said: “That is where we would like to get and for utilities to lead the way.”
