Tom Rounibos, managing director at Accenture Ventures, the consulting firm’s corporate venture capital arm, has made a number of investments in space technology startups.
The Space Shuttle orbits above Earth’s atmosphere. Photo by Nasa on Unsplash
Accenture Ventures, the venture capital arm of the world’s largest consulting firm by number of employees, is focusing much of its investment capital on low-orbit space technology, which it sees as a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
Tom Rounibos, a managing director at Accenture Ventures, said low-Earth-orbit space technology will accelerate advances in fields such as bioscience, materials science, cybersecurity, energy and data storage.
Low Earth orbit is an altitude of less than 1,000 km above the Earth’s surface. Every year, hundreds of satellites are launched into Earth orbit for a variety of purposes, from communications to environmental monitoring.
Space technology is a rapidly growing sector due to recent reductions in rocket launch costs and advances in electronics. The number of satellites launched into space is expected to increase tenfold to 100,000 over the next five years.
Tom Rounibos, Managing Director, Accenture Ventures
Space technology has applications in many different industries. Bioscience is a particularly interesting field because space provides unique environmental conditions for studying biology. “The laboratories of the future will be in low Earth orbit, where microgravity will allow us to observe biology in a more human-like way,” says Rounibos.
Scientists have found that microgravity, the very weak gravity found in space, can help mimic the way cells grow in the human body. For example, in cancer studies, scientists have found that cells outside the body maintain their three-dimensional shape in a microgravity environment. In a normal lab environment, cells grow flat and do not replicate the shape they normally form in the body.
SpaceTech is also helping solve one of the biggest challenges facing the Fortune 2000 companies that Accenture consults for: how to build resilient, sustainable supply chains. The venture arm invests in startups that develop imaging satellites to collect data that can help sectors like agriculture and forestry.
“The laboratory of the future will be located in low earth orbit.”
Tom Rounibos
One space-tech startup in the company’s portfolio, Planet Labs, collects data that agricultural companies and foresters can use for sustainable land management. The startup has developed a way to use satellite imagery to measure how much carbon is stored in forests and estimate how much of that carbon is lost to wildfires and agricultural clear-cutting.
Another similar startup it has invested in is the Indian company Pixxel, which uses highly detailed imaging satellites to transmit data that it claims can detect problems on Earth that current satellites cannot.
Cybersecurity is another area the venture group is focusing its investments on, one that overlaps with space technology, as the expansion of satellites requires technology to secure communications in space.
The company focuses on quantum security, which uses advances in computing technology to protect data. Quantum computing presents both a problem and a solution to cyber attacks. According to the World Economic Forum, the technology could be used to decrypt data, rendering the encryption technology most businesses rely on obsolete.
Accenture Ventures’ cybersecurity investments include SpiderOak, a company that uses encryption and distributed ledgers to secure space communications, and it has a strategic partnership with QuSecure, a startup developing software to protect data from the threats of quantum computing.
Investing in generative AI to solve labor shortages
Generative AI is a big area of interest for the venture arm, as well as many investors, with Accenture Ventures seeing the technology as helping to solve one of the biggest challenges facing its parent company’s clients: labor shortages.
For example, generative AI can solve the software developer shortage because the technology can speed up testing and documentation, freeing up labor for other software development tasks. Accenture Ventures recently invested in Writer.ai, a startup that uses generative AI to help companies create content for marketing, product sales, human resources, and other areas.
The value of AI for businesses comes when they can combine new data sets with existing data to generate new insights, Lounibos said. Today’s large-scale language models that underpin AI systems search open-source data that’s of little use to businesses that rely on precise, sensitive data. Anticipating this need, the venture sector has invested in data privacy startups such as TripleBlind and Inrupt.
A new way of working with startups
Rounibos joined Accenture Ventures in 2020 after a 43-year career as a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur. He founded six companies that were either acquired or went public through an IPO. After joining Accenture, Rounibos founded Project Spotlight, an investment program for early-stage emerging technology startups. Of the 56 investments in the venture division’s portfolio, half are early-stage investments.
The goal of the initiative is for the venture arm to connect Accenture experts with startup founders to come up with ways to develop products that fit the market. As a former entrepreneur, Rounibos says he’s in an ideal position to facilitate communication between founders and the parent company’s consultants to develop new products that meet industry needs.
Rounibos emphasizes that this approach is different from that of connecting founders with business development teams: “We’re not creating a sales agreement that a business development team would create that says, ‘Let’s find a deal together.’ We look at it as, ‘Let’s build a new product together,'” Rounibos says.
He says this approach can reduce the time it takes early-stage startups to find product-market fit, something that typically takes founders three to five years to achieve. “We’re still learning how to get it right, but I think it has accelerated innovation for startups and, more importantly, for our clients.”
