CVC Unplugged
The CVC Unplugged podcast is a weekly show that brings you fascinating and wide-ranging conversations with leading corporate venture capital investors, subject matter experts, startup founders, journalists and other market participants to keep you informed of the most important trends affecting early-stage investing.
Episodes
Demand 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 ...
The 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, fo...
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 ...
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 h...
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 th...
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 decision...
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...
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.
The post BMW i Ventures: Carmakers must i...
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?
Investing in fintech is hard wherever you are, but what if where you are is known for its economic and political turbulence? My guest today is Sebastian Spena, the managing director of Galicia Ventures, the corporate VC unit of Argentinian financial services company Grupo Galicia.
The post Best N...
We’ve got a bit of a different episode again this week – Fernando sits down with GCV’s editor-in-chief Maija Palmer, who asks him some questions about a recent report he wrote for GCV’s Global Energy Council on the topic of getting first-of-a-kind cleantech technologies and projects of the ground.