CVC Unplugged

Mawsonia

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.

Subscribe Listen in podnod RSS feed Show website

300 episodes
Updated Jul 10, 2025

Episodes300

Newest first

Jul 10, 2025 · 34 min
Advice from a CVC freelancer
What’s it like to come into corporate VCs from the outside as a contractor? My guest is Bruno Meireles de Sousa, who is an operating parter at Bidra Innovation Ventures, the CVC of phosphate mining company OCPGroup. And he joined me to talk about what he’
Jul 3, 2025 · 37 min
Secondaries are breaking into the mainstream
The whole point of investing is to hopefully get your money back at some point. But what if, as we’ve seen, the usual routes to doing that are effectively blocked off? Ideally, a VC might want to their startup to go public, welcoming in hundreds of thousa
Jun 26, 2025 · 14 min
Do we have enough energy to power the AI future?
The ugly truth behind the AI revolution is that it needs to be powered from somewhere. Every query you make into ChatGPT or DeepSeek of Claude takes energy. Energy that has to be generated at a power plant, transmitted through the grid, and then used at a
Jun 12, 2025 · 27 min
Why invest in LatAm
Latin America is one of the fastest growing regions in the world, with a growing number of unicorns, an increasing array of international investors looking to get a foothold, and ever more savvy entrepreneurs. Ahead of next week’s GCV Symposium in London,
May 22, 2025 · 55 min
Getting rid of bias in the investment process
Human decision-making – even when a lot of money is at stake, is not always rational. A lot of the time it’s based on intangible factors that influence people in ways that can’t be explained or justified by data or analysis – this is after all, the entir
May 15, 2025 · 44 min
Economic ruts are a good time to double down
In recent months we’ve seen quite a few corporate VC units either shut down, or get spun off, as their corporate parents grapple with how to deal with a tough macroeconomic environment. That’s not always the case though – we’re also seeing a number of oth
May 8, 2025 · 54 min
Investing in the in-space economy
Space has historically been the domain of governments – as that has changed and it’s becoming a more private sector-based commercial endeavour, something else has been changing too, and that is that whereas before space was a matter of launching things up
May 1, 2025 · 51 min
Dealing with an unprecedented demand for power
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 g
Apr 24, 2025 · 12 min
Protecting critical infrastructure is big business
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
Apr 17, 2025 · 43 min
Canada’s startups navigate the new normal
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
Apr 9, 2025 · 36 min
How CVCs can help hard-tech startups
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 Juli
Apr 3, 2025 · 32 min
How innovation can keep democracies ahead
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 b
Mar 27, 2025 · 13 min
Everyone is waiting for IPOs, but will market uncertainty delay them?
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
Mar 20, 2025 · 20 min
The coming Web3 acquisition wave
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
Mar 13, 2025 · 53 min
rEnergy Partners: Charting a new course as a spun-out cleantech investor
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 pl
Mar 6, 2025 · 45 min
Cencosud Ventures: Venture clienting should involve skin in the game
Pilot projects between corporates and startups are a dime a dozen, just about any large corporate can do one. The problem, according to my guest today, is after the pilot – why is it that so many startups’ solutions don’t end up scaling within a corporate
Feb 27, 2025 · 40 min
BMW i Ventures: Carmakers must innovate to navigate rapid technology shift
Investing in automotive is not what it used to be – it has gone far beyond just what makes the car itself better, but of course to the entire ecosystem and experience around them.
Feb 20, 2025 · 46 min
Leaps by Bayer: Agtech investors look for zebras, not unicorns.
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 t
Feb 13, 2025 · 31 min
Argentina’s turbulent economy is a forge for fintech founders
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 servi
Jan 27, 2025 · 34 min
Looking ahead at fintech’s comeback
The past year has been a big one for fintech startups. The high interest rate environment we’ve been under is slowly easing, along with the uncertainties stemming from having to wait for the outcome of the election in the US. The huge amounts of capital t