Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Breakthrough (Part 2): VC Arms of the Oil Majors

Our previous BREAKTHROUGH post (http://desulf.blogspot.com/2020/06/breakthrough-how-to-identify-promising.html) featured an article (Where Are The Deals? How VCs Identify The Next Generation Of Startups) describing the process by which venture capitalists identify breakthrough companies that might be worth investing in.

David Teten, author of the article, states …

Deal origination is a slow, labor-intensive, frustrating process

Two key words/phrases in Teten’s article are deal flow and filtering.

According to Wikipedia, “deal flow is a term used by finance professionals such as venture capitalists, angel investors, private equity investors and investment bankers to refer to the rate at which they receive business proposals/investment offers.

So, deal flow is important. It is from the flood of potential candidates that you can pick and choose to decide where to invest your precious capital. But here is the hard part … deciding which of the hundreds or thousands of potential candidates to invest in.  That is where filtering comes into play. And filtering, it turns out, is the most time intensive part of the process. Again, repeating Teten’s quote, Deal origination is a slow, labor-intensive, frustrating process.

If you have the time and energy to mimic the venture capital pros, this post may help.

Equally important, if you DO NOT have the time and energy, but you do have the money to pay someone else to do the work, at least you will have a better idea of what you are paying someone else to do. It will help you determine if you are getting value for money.

Let’s get started. Here are three Google® search phrases that may work for you, if your objective is to identify breakthrough technologies in the oil and gas industry.

TIP: Google® "venture capital" AND (petroleum OR oil OR gas OR hydrocarbon)
TIP: Google® "venture capital" AND (desulfurization OR dibenzothiophene)
TIP: Google® (novel OR innovative OR breakthrough) AND (desulfurization OR dibenzothiophene)

Bonus TIP: Read the resulting articles for key words to combine with “venture capital.” We’ll explore this in more detail in a subsequent Desulfurization Post.

An excellent article resulting from the Google® searches suggested above is “Reporter’s Notebook: Oil & gas venture capital investing autonomous vehicles, machine learning,” by Houston Chronicle reporter Marissa Luck. Note the range of interest by the venture capital arms of the oil majors.

///////
Houston Chronicle
Reporter’s Notebook: Oil & gas venture capital investing autonomous vehicles, machine learning
[ EXCERPTS ]
Marissa Luck June 14, 2019
Babur Ozden, Founder and CEO of Maana Inc. (https://www.maana.io/ ), comments during a panel discussion titled "Digital Transformation: Creating Value" at CERAWeek by IHS Markit (https://ihsmarkit.com/index.html ) in March. Maana is an artificial intelligence and software company that has secured investments from venture capital subsidiaries such as Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (https://saev.com/ ), Chevron Technology Ventures (https://www.chevron.com/technology/technology-ventures ) and Shell Technology Ventures (https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/new-energies/shell-ventures.html ).

The self-driving car startup Aurora Innovation (https://aurora.tech/ ) made headlines earlier this year when Amazon joined a $530 million funding round to advance its technology that aims in part to revitalize cities by reducing traffic. A less publicized investor in that round was the venture capital arm of the oil major Royal Dutch Shell - even though self-driving cars could mean less traffic and less gasoline consumption one day.

Data from the Silicon Valley-based research firm Global Corporate Venturing (https://globalcorporateventuring.com/ ) gives a peek into the future technologies that energy companies are getting behind. And it looks like a future with more automation, more artificial intelligence, more energy efficient operations and more renewable energies.

BP Ventures (https://www.bp.com/en/global/bp-ventures.html ) led a series A round of undisclosed amount for Powershare, a Chinese software and hardware developer for electric vehicle charging.

Shell Ventures partnered with Total Ventures (https://www.ventures.total/en ), the renewable power producer Orsted (https://orsted.com/en ) and other investors to fund the software startup AutoGrid (https://www.auto-grid.com/ ) that uses A-I and internet-of-things technology to help utilities better manage power grids.
 
Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures invested an undisclosed amount in a Series A funding round for Earth Science Analytics (https://earthanalytics.ai/ ), a Norwegian artificial intelligence company that develops data analytics software for exploration and production companies.

Carbon Engineering (https://carbonengineering.com/ ), a Canadian carbon capture technology developer, closed a $68 million funding from investors including Houston’s Occidental Petroleum Corporation and Chevron Technology Ventures, among others.

marissa.luck@chron.com
Marissa Luck covers the energy industry for Houston Chronicle.

Free full text source: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Reporter-s-Notebook-Oil-gas-venture-capital-13987223.php
///////

Google® Better!
Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

Follow Jean’s blog at: http://desulf.blogspot.com/  for continuing tips on effective online research
Email Jean at research@jeansteinhardtconsulting.com  with questions on research, training, or anything else
Visit Jean’s Web site at http://www.jeansteinhardtconsulting.com/  to see examples of the services we can provide


No comments:

Post a Comment