Rob Desborough
The Pioneer
The frontier and an appetite for the unknown, goes first.
Rob Desborough reads clearly as The Pioneer on the OTA Media Leadership Index. As a general partner at Seraphim Space, one of the earliest venture firms dedicated wholly to space technology, he has built his leadership around backing companies at the frontier of a market most investors once dismissed as science fiction.
“So we need a very healthy capital market, and we benefit from that ourselves. We took that decision to create the world's first listed growth-focused investment funds looking at space. We're listed on the main market of the London Stock Exchange.”
“A sustainable space environment looks like from my perspective? Well, I think we're getting the technology there to now support that long-term infrastructure in space so we can really get the benefits terrestrially, but we have to be good custodians of that environment. And I think we are going to see the regulatory landscape shaping up.”
“So we launched the first fund in October of 2016. So it's nearly 10 years that we've been actively investing into space. And as I said earlier, for us, we're not space people by background. We're venture capitalists by background. I've now been doing deep tech investment for 20 years.”
“Clearly, defense has been awake to the opportunity around space for a long time, but from our perspective, we really see the big opportunity is with the commercial industry. And although perhaps in many cases, certainly in our portfolio, 80% of the companies are dual-use technologies. And that's a great reason for us to invest.”
Pull up a Chair with Bina Mehta: “In conversation with Bina Mehta, Chair, KPMG UK”
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