Stephane Janson on carving a niche for potential deep tech investments

April 24, 2023

Within our team we have scientists and engineers who are uniquely placed to conduct specialist due diligence on early-stage deep tech companies. For this reason, Pacific Channel has carved a niche for itself as a venture capital company.

Deep tech is broadly defined as something that requires a lot of time, talent, effort, and knowledge to bring to market. It’s probably easier to define deep tech by explaining what it’s not – it’s not the next social media application or e-commerce solution. We’re exploring investments in companies focused on agritech, medtech, cleantech, and foodtech. They’re companies developing complex technologies that are solving hard problems and unlike mainstream technologies, there is generally no historical data to review. This means to really understand the merits of a potential investment, we have to unravel the complexities of the technology. This involves assessing elements that are technical and hard to understand.

This is quite a different approach to the traditional way of sourcing and screening deals, which is why we have scientists and engineers on our team, and who take a significant role in assessing an investment. Because they have the capability and are comfortable reviewing scientific literature, academic journals and other relevant technical materials, they can help the rest of the team determine whether the technology is novel and potentially investable.