• Main Sequence is a deep tech venture capital firm that is looking to find Australian solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.
• It takes some of the country’s most cutting-edge technology and creates companies around it, such as using CSIRO research to create plant-based meat company v2food.
• Partner Phil Morle explained to Business Insider Australia how it is tackling everything from climate change to world hunger – and how its next big space venture Quasar is going to help thrust Australia back into space.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

The startup scene rarely shies away from righteous self-promotion, but there’s at least one local player that might have a claim to changing the world for the better.

Main Sequence isn’t like most venture capital (VC) funds. It’s not in the game purely to find the next Uber or – as is more probable in the space – the next WeWork. The scope of its work is a little more ambitious.

In its own words, Main Sequence is the force behind the companies “solving the planetary challenges of today”. Refreshingly, it narrows down the lofty rhetoric to name six specific challenges. They number solving world hunger and climate change, creating global access to proper healthcare, supercharging industry, bridging the gap to space, and making the next intelligence leap.

“These aren’t problems that we can solve from our garages, or our bedrooms, or our co-working spaces. We knew that we needed to have a different approach that goes deeper than that,” partner Phil Morle told Business Insider Australia.

“You need to be very deliberate to find those answers. You can’t just put ads on Facebook and expect it to happen.”

The demand for a long-term strategy was evident in 2017 when Main Sequence was put in charge of the CSIRO’s new $100 million ‘Innovation Fund’. In short, its brief is to find Australia’s most important innovations and create viable companies to take them global.

Coincidentally, it makes the team one of Australia’s best shots at solving some of the world’s biggest crises, and creating billion-dollar industries in the process. No big deal.

How the magic happens

Armed with the resources to make it happen, Main Sequence began putting the pieces together.

“Usually you have part of the problem already solved,” Morle said. “You might have a very very talented scientist for example inside a university that knows how to do something so extraordinary we couldn’t possibly even imagine it. But they don’t know what to do with it and they certainly don’t have a quick path to market.”

Unlike what most startups do, Main Sequence isn’t trying to tap innovators for money, but instead provides them with equity for zero investment, enabling them to help build the company instead. What happens next is known in various circles as venture science.

“You basically start a company around a market opportunity and make sure it has everything it needs to from day one. That’s everything from resources and knowledge right through to a successful mindset.”

The model is a bit like producing a movie or a play, according to Morle.

“Bizarrely enough, I started my career as a theatre director. You might think, ‘what the hell does that have to do with all of this’, but it’s actually quite relevant,” he said.

“It’s the same kind of work really. You have limited resources and you have got to find and assemble a lot of moving parts to make something great.”

“The most important thing is the acknowledgement that no one of us can do it on our own.”

The v2food playbook

While that all sounds very theoretical, Main Sequence has already walked the walk, having founded v2food, Australia’s largest plant-based meat company. Specifically, it helps tackle not one but two of the world’s biggest problems.

“We know scientifically that we need to be able to make twice as much food in the next 20 years to feed 10 billion people, but we can only use half the water, fertiliser, emissions and other resources we use today,” Morle said. “Obviously meat is a huge part of the problem.”

Inspired to start Australia’s answer to Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, Main Sequence put together what it says were the four necessary ingredients.

First, find the right entrepreneur. In this case, food research and development (R&D) manager Nick Hazel was tapped. Find a partner in Competitive Foods, the owner of Hungry Jack’s, to ensure you’ve got direct access to the market you want to enter.

Then find a research founder like the CSIRO which can bring the scientific firepower to engineer your product. Finally, sprinkle with venture funding, mark out your milestones, stir and let it simmer for nine months.

“It took us that long from starting v2food to be shipping the Rebel Whopper to Hungry Jacks, and now the business is exporting all over the world,” Morle said. “We managed to do in nine months what took Impossible Foods five years and hundreds of millions of dollar to achieve.”

“That has become the playbook for us and we’ve used it to start quite a few companies in the past 12 months.”

The race to space

Right now, Morle and his team are working on the next challenge, and it might just reorientate Australia’s vision back to space.

More than 57,000 new satellites are expected to be launched into space in the next decade, according to the CSIRO, with the tech to help the world monitor bushfires, enable devices to communicate with each other, and everything in between.

Yet with tracking centres on Earth only able to keep an eye on one at a time, the capacity of the $130 billion technology is heavily restricted, preventing it from revolutionising all the other industries that stand to benefit.

Main Sequence thinks it has found the answer in Quasar, a company leveraging the CSIRO’s expertise.

“Space is the highway of the stars, but current ground station technology is the equivalent of one-lane on-ramps,” CEO Phil Ridley said.

“By making it possible to communicate with hundreds of satellites simultaneously, we’ll be able to ensure the thousands of satellites launching over the next decade have a way to call home efficiently.”

It’s one reason why Morle and his team want to delve deeper into space, knowing the opportunities for Australia is immense.

“Australia is already the southern hemisphere of NASA so we’ve got a great base here. We’ll be seeing rockets going up from Australia over the next decade. And companies like Quasar are going to be a very important part of that the space system of the planet, I think. And so we want to start a whole bunch of those businesses.”

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