Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016: Akira Kirton

Akira Kirton, commercialisation director for BP Ventures, the corporate venture capital (CVC) unit of the oil major, joined the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders’ programme last year.

This was just the latest in a string of achievements for Kirton, who took a first in chemical engineering at Imperial College London but was “probably the slowest” person to run a marathon dressed as a rhino.

Another stern test is coming up. The oil price falls over the past few years have put pressure on corporate venturing units across the sector, with a number of teams recently being pared back.

Kirton acknowledged he and the team were up for the challenge of “maintaining corporate excitement and interest”.

He said: “We are now in year eight of our cycle as a group. The good news is that we have delivered traction both in financial exits – such as the sale of Texon Biosciences to DuPont – and, most importantly, in what we call strategic returns.

“Our annual financial and strategic returns to BP now far exceed our annual investment capital, so we are in a great place. However, keeping our main corporate sponsors engaged and dealing with the management of change has been interesting.

“Across 2011-2015, we have had three different business unit leader changes, as well as three different investment committee and governance structures.”

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

Kirton spent two-and-a-half years on secondment from BP to be strategy manager for ETI, which is an £1bn public private partnership between UK government and industry names including Caterpillar, EDF, Eon, Rolls-Royce and Shell.

He said: “We have managed to build and create a great team across our venturing unit and pride ourselves on being good board members and investors. This includes working hard for investee companies and building great relationships with our fellow investors and board members. Our financial market value portfolio increase is well into the double digits because of this.”

On its strategic returns, Kirton said BP had five commercial deployments from BP Ventures’ portfolio companies onto BP assets, “returning significantly more than our investments”.

But Kirton is looking to “new frontiers”.

He said: “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, and he said: “It behoves all of us to continue to challenge and create new opportunities and ways of thinking for ourselves and this ecosystem.”

As to what all CVCs could do better to make it a stronger industry, Kirton said there was a dearth of early-stage investors in areas such as energy. He thinks all CVCs should try to add value to companies from the start, such as by creating commercial agreements alongside equity investment, and “adapt and evolve”.

“The CVC space has to continually adapt and evolve its model, we need to understand and hear what a company’s needs are and work with our partners – VC, angel and private equity – to invest and develop. This means listening to each other’s pain points and working around these. We need to be flexible to change and not stick with one model for valuation and standardised term sheets.”

For such a “terrible but avid”, to use his own words, club-social tennis player as Kirton, it would be game, set and match.