Co-Founder in Residence
Deep Science Ventures
Co-Founder in Residence
Deep Science Ventures
Science-driven venture creation across sectors
Deep Science Ventures · United Kingdom (Remote) · Full-time · Posted 2026-02-10
Workplace: remote
Department: Agriculture
Join us to build: we’re seeking entrepreneurially-minded individuals with deep technical and commercial domain expertise, who are eager to solve urgent unmet challenges through venture building. This role offers a unique opportunity to work at the forefront of agtech, leading a company solving challenges of climate adaptation for food security and the wider bioeconomy.
The role is full-time, remote initially until venture incorporation and spin-out (circa end of Q2 2027), location TBD.
Deep Science Ventures (DSV) is on a mission to create a future in which both humans and the planet can thrive. We use our unique venture creation process to create, spin-out, and invest in science companies, combining available scientific knowledge and founder-type scientists into high-impact ventures. Operating in four sectors—Pharmaceuticals, Climate, Agriculture, and Computation—we tackle the challenges defining these areas by taking a first principles approach and partnering with leading institutions.
Driven by mutual conviction in the huge unmet need for driving a new category of agricultural technology: priming resilience in crops, DSV has partnered with Renaissance Philanthropy to accelerate the development of venture creation at the intersection of climate risk, plant biology, and deployable agricultural products.
You will join DSV’s venture creation programme as a Co-Founder-in-Residence and work closely with the DSV and Renaissance Philanthropy team to spin out the new company. During the programme you will refine, improve and complement existing scoping work on:
Preparation for Investment Committee (IC) will involve fulfilling our investment criteria, recruiting advisory and co-founding team members, and parallel fundraising for additional expansion funds.
Assuming success at IC, you will receive pre-seed investment and spinout the company by the end of Q2 2027. You and your co-founders will own a significant stake in the business and continue receiving support post-spinout.
Across global agriculture, climate volatility is no longer a ‘once-a-decade’ disruption - it is becoming an in-season operating condition. Drought and heatwaves are already driving severe regional harvest losses, with cascading impacts that reach far beyond the farm gate: price shocks, food insecurity, and destabilised livelihoods. Even where catastrophic crop failures are not occurring, the evidence base is clear that climate change is already depressing yields and amplifying climate-related production losses in major cropping systems.
Despite this reality, most crop resilience strategies remain anchored in a static view of risk. Today’s dominant approaches focus on breeding or engineering permanent stress tolerance into plants, or introducing permanent protective structures. While effective under chronic stress, these solutions come with an inherent trade-off: technologies that protect yield under adverse conditions present a burden when conditions are favourable. For many crops - particularly rain-fed cereals and broadacre systems - this ‘carrying cost’ is economically unacceptable. In practice, growers are left exposed to short, acute stress events (such as a brief heat spike during flowering or sudden water-logging after planting) that can irreversibly damage yield but do not justify permanent genetic or infrastructure compromises.
We believe this creates a compelling opportunity for a new paradigm: on-demand plant resilience. Instead of locking crops into a constant defensive state, plants could be temporarily primed to withstand stress only when risk is imminent - and then returned to a high-productivity mode once the threat passes. Advances across plant biology now make this vision increasingly plausible. Emerging tools such as RNA-based interventions, virus-enabled gene modulation, signalling peptides, and stress-responsive biologicals point toward the ability to transiently activate protective pathways, reprogram development, or stabilise yield-critical processes during vulnerable windows.
This approach has the potential to address not only extreme climate shocks, but also the everyday volatility that quietly erodes agricultural value: mistimed flowering, pre-harvest sprouting triggered by humidity, transient root-zone stress, or short droughts that reduce grain fill. Importantly, these interventions could be deployed in-season, aligned with weather forecasts or early stress signals, creating a more adaptive and responsive crop protection toolkit.
Commercially, this space remains wide open. Existing biostimulants and stress-mitigation products are often blunt, inconsistently effective, or poorly matched to specific climate risks. Meanwhile, large incumbents remain focused on conventional chemistry, genetics, or incremental biologicals, leaving little coordinated effort around truly inducible resilience platforms. At the same time, regulatory and technical signals show growing feasibility for novel biological and RNA-based crop inputs, while grower demand for tools that protect yield reliability under volatility continues to accelerate.
Essential Values
Essential experience (must-have)
Core science depth (PhD or equivalent industry R&D know-how) in plant physiology, crop science, molecular biology, epigenetics, microbiology (or similar), with knowledge breadth across technological areas relevant for priming plant resilience such as:
Delivery systems for biologicals (e.g. nanoparticle design, encapsulation chemistry, triggered release mechanisms, protectant formulations);
Crop environment engineering (e.g. seed/root coating formulations, biodegradable matrices, water management at plant scale).
Translational execution: e.g. taking traits / actives from discovery to field, managing CRO/CDMO programs, building regulator / investor / customer-ready data packages; and / or partnership development (growers, CROs/CDMOs, suppliers) and scalable IP strategy.
Equivalents considered: deep industry R&D in agtech / biotech or a PhD with applied field work and comparable outcomes.
Preferred experience (nice-to-have)
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:
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Science-driven venture creation across sectors
Deep Science Ventures builds new companies by turning scientific knowledge into startup ventures. It combines scientist-founders with existing expertise to create high-impact businesses in Pharmaceuticals, Climate, Agriculture, and Computation. The process centers on a first-principles, evidence-based approach and close partnerships with top institutions to translate research into real-world solutions. Unlike typical investors or incubators, it acts as a venture creator that co-develops ideas, forms teams, and guides the whole company-building journey from lab concepts to market-ready ventures. The goal is to enable breakthroughs that help humanity and the planet thrive by addressing major challenges across its four sectors.
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