GCV Powerlist 2016: Akira Kirton and Meghan Sharp, BP

The departure of Issam Dairanieh this month has brought a new structure to BP Ventures, with Meghan Sharp and Akira Kirton, pictured, as regional co-heads and both in GCV’s Powerlist 2016.

This reflects the team’s importance for the oil major. David Eyton, head of technology at BP, said: “Venturing is a critical tool within BP’s innovation ecosystem. The state of the energy industry today is such that the importance of accessing novel technologies and leveraging great partnerships with others is higher than ever.

“Venturing has proven its ability to deliver value to the technology companies we invest in, and at the same time deliver value to BP through technology deployment – a great symbiotic relationship that will endure.”

Craig Coburn, vice-president of technology commercialisation and venturing at BP, added: “2015 was a great year for the ventures team in delivery. We managed two financial exits – Taxon Biosciences and Upwind – five deployments of venture-backed technologies on BP assets, five new deals, and helped spin off and create two companies – Silicon Microgravity and Foreseer.

“This delivery was underpinned by the great work of our external partners outside BP – our co-investors and companies – as well as the great work of the venturing team and other internal partners within BP. We are looking forward to a great 2016.”

In a joint statement, the two co-heads said: “BP Ventures had an exceptional year in 2015, helped by investing in some truly great companies and co-investors. We saw some great delivery across our teams, with material financial and strategic traction demonstrated by our portfolio companies. As a team we are very happy for Issam Dairanieh, our friend and mentor, and wish him well as he moves on to his next development.

“Corporate venturing has hit a tipping point, and as CVCs we are leading on more and more deals and bringing others in. CVCs are also creating talent and rising stars. As co-heads of BP Ventures, we work together in a team environment that we believe support and nurtures creativity, high-performance delivery, and enables our team to be great corporate citizens and great family contributors.”

San Francisco-based Sharp came back from maternity leave just after Dairanieh left the oil major after 18 years’ service to lead an organisation that provides funding for technology that can cut carbon emissions, and to help set up a sustainability-focused infrastructure fund.

Sharp focuses on bio-based investments for BP and serves on the board of Chromatin, Biosynthetic Technologies and Verdezyne. Another of her portfolio companies, Taxon Biosciences, was recently sold to chemicals company DuPont. BP Ventures’ other “substantial” exit in the past year was the sale of Upwind Technologies to Vestas.

Sharp received her PhD in microbial genetics from University of California San Francisco, performed post-doctoral work in plant genetics at University of Chicago and the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford University, and received her MBA from Columbia University.

London-based Kirton was commercialisation director at BP Ventures and was named a GCV Rising Star this year, and he joined the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program last year.

He achieved a first in chemical engineering at Imperial College London but was “probably the slowest” person to run a marathon – dressed as a rhinoceros.

BP Ventures has invested more than $250m in at least 38 entities. Kirton is a director of Solidia Technologies, Liquid Light and Heliex Power, and a board observer at Silicon Microgravity. He is also an advisory board member to Encourage Capital, the Indian Fund for Sustainable Energy (Infuse), Israeli Cleantech Ventures and the UK Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).

He spent two and a half years on secondment from BP as strategy manager for ETI, a £1bn public-private partnership involving the UK government and industry names including Caterpillar, EDF, Eon, Rolls-Royce and Shell.

He said for his Rising Star award: “On a personal level, the two great successes we recently achieved, and I personally led, have been in shifting our organisational outlook into areas such as delivering spinouts of BP incubated technologies, leveraging co-investment from our CVC and spinout groups, and in conceptualising and getting traction in areas such as impact investing.

Kirton has helped co-develop two impact investing funds with government entities, including Infuse Ventures in India. He said: “It behoves all of us to continue to challenge and create new opportunities and ways of thinking for ourselves and this ecosystem.”

For the Powerlist award he added: “You will see this come out at a very high-level in the next month or so. We have been working with the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative on some pretty impressive stuff for the future.

“Much of what we have been doing has been on impact investing (BP-Masdar Tech Incubator) and in leading on spinouts and early-stage deals [by] bringing in VCs and seed investors rather than waiting for later.

“For example, [for] Silicon Microgravity we brought in Imperial Innovations and Cambridge Enterprise, with Tricoya Technologies we convinced Accsys and Medite to go down the VC path instead of a traditional joint venture approach, and are now actively looking for VC-backed financing alongside ours. More parochially, we actively delivered four new deals in the UK last year alone.”

These new UK deals included Rocket Route, Foreseer and Tricoya, while, in the US, BP Ventures has also backed Modumetal

Among key achievements in the past 12 months, Kirton said strategic value had been delivered to BP, and five of its portfolio companies – Xact, Fotech, Upwind, Eos and Eko – had deployed technologies with the oil major.

For the year ahead, Kirton said: “We have quite a few new deals in various stages of the pipeline. We have already closed two deals in the past six months and are likely to close at least two more.”