Founder in Residence, Priming plant resilience for climate risks in London

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.

About Dsv

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.

About The Role

You will join DSV’s venture creation programme as a 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:

• The technical thesis for crop systems that can be primed for resilience in the face of increasingly unpredictable and severe climate pressures (neglect and technical tractability);
• Commercial neglect (IP strategy, differentiation, competition);
• Value proposition (market, value capture, techno-economics);
• Regulatory strategy & positioning;
• Fundraising strategy & pitching;
• Optimising company strategy for the most rapid and de-risked path to Series A.

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 spin-out 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-spin-out.

The Opportunity

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.

We are seeking a Founder in Residence to build a company at the intersection of climate risk, plant biology, and deployable agricultural products. The ambition is to create a platform that makes climate readiness a controllable, on-demand trait – integrating scientific insight, smart delivery, and clear grower ROI into a scalable venture capable of redefining how crops are protected in an unpredictable world.

Who Should Apply

Essential Values

• You are highly motivated by unsolved challenges in weed control, and driven to challenge the status quo in agrochemicals;
• You are impact driven, take the initiative, make things happen, and think from a first-principles perspective to figure out what's really needed;
• You have clear entrepreneurial spirit and mindset, demonstrated through impactful innovation, and an ability to work in ambiguous, unstructured but fast-paced, demanding and pressurised environments;
• Collaborative nature, with the ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams.

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);
• Developmental regulation & priming (e.g. RNA / peptide-based modulators, epigenetic modification, heat shock pathways, hormone signalling);
• Plant-microbiome engineering (e.g. symbiont characterisation, consortia design, engineered exudate production, host-microbe signalling);
• Accelerated trait development & gene editing (e.g. tissue regeneration protocols, wild relative introgression, precision breeding pipelines);
• 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.

Cross-functional ownership across: R&D – Product – Regulatory – IP, evidenced by shipped results (trial outcomes, submissions, patents, launches); and / or design of pivotal field trials.

Venture creation/fundraising; and / or product leadership in agtech / biotech or adjacent areas. Equivalents considered: deep industry R&D in agtech / biotech or a PhD with applied field work and comparable outcomes.

Preferred Experience (nice-to-have)

• Previous Founder experience (in biotech)
• Previous C-suite experience (in biotech)
• Previous fundraising experience (VC)
• Commercial & BD expertise incl. network in agrochem/pesticide development (licensing, partnering, collaborations)
• Strong track record of building and leading successful teams.

Benefits

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:

• We provide optimised, purpose-built, proprietary tools, resources and processes to help create high-impact ventures from scratch, using our venture creation methodology;
• DSV and RenPhil's extensive network incl. leaders of biotech VCs, technical & commercial domain expertise, and wide-ranging portfolio company capabilities;
• We jointly provide an initial £250k (:$340k / €290k) investment governed by our Investment Committee to incorporate the new venture and develop early proof-of-concept data that is often needed to attract high-profile non-venture studio VCs. This funding is also key for obtaining grant funding, which often needs to be matched with private investment;
• You and your co-founder(s) together will own the majority equity stake in the company;
• We provide minimum guaranteed income of £4,166 per month (fixed), paid to each Founder as a consultancy fee until the company is launched and pre-seed investment is secured;
• We provide continuous support post spin-out, including fundraising, commercial partnerships, recruitment and team-building (amongst other things);
• Other Founders currently at DSV across sectors working collaboratively and supporting one another – a unique resource to draw on.