Founder in Residence, Non-Transferrable Pesticides

Join as a Founder in Residence in Climate (Agriculture)

We're on the lookout for entrepreneurial individuals with technical and commercial domain expertise with keen interest in founding, and building a global scale, impact driven, high growth company from ground up.

We are seeking applications from experienced industry, startup and / or new science or engineering based technology development professionals from anywhere in the world to work with us on

You'll work closely with the DSV team, using our methodology, to spin-out a new company. During the programme, you'll work on all aspects related to venture creation in this opportunity area, including working out the optimal approach to solve for the desired outcome, building a team and building a viable business case. Once the new venture is incorporated with pre-seed investment from DSV, you and your co-founders will own the majority stake in the business and continue receiving support from the DSV team post-spinout.

The role is full-time, remote initially until venture incorporation and spin-out (circa summer / autumn 2026), location TBD.

About the Opportunity Area

Conventional pesticides-spanning from neonicotinoids to atrazine-are a double-edged sword. They shield crops from pests but can wreak havoc beyond their targets. Pollinators like bees and butterflies, vital to 75% of global food crops, are in freefall-some bee populations have declined by over 43% in high-insecticide regions due to lethal and sublethal exposures that impair navigation, immunity, and reproduction. Pest resistance to widely used small molecules such as glyphosate and azoles is also a growing phenomenon, straining our available toolkit for safeguarding yields. This threatens both global food security and biodiversity. Beyond ecosystems, these chemicals can also cause acute intoxication, cancer, neurodegeneration, infertility, and hormonal disruptions in humans, driven by oxidative stress, DNA damage, and systemic inflammation - a problem being increasingly recognised especially in exposed rural populations. The transferability of these pesticides-spreading through soil, water, and trophic chains-amplifies their devastation, making sustainable alternatives non-negotiable.

Non-transferable pest controls have already shown scientific and commercial traction at the proof of concept level. For example, pheromone and other semiochemical approaches have shown success in disrupting pest mating patterns, while precision detection of weeds combined with electricide technologies is demonstrating some positive early trial data. However, the ability of non-transferrable pesticides to disrupt the incumbent agrochemical market remains relatively limited. Among the most important constraints in scaling adoption are high costs, coverage limitations, efficacy without affecting non-target species, and the risk of evolutionary 'escape'. For example, Bacillus thuringiensis ('Bt') crops such as corn, cotton and soy - arguably the most prominent non-transferrable pesticide technology to date - have demonstrated a decline in efficacy after multiple growth seasons due to evolved resistance.

We imagine a future where we can protect crops without decimating ecosystems, collapsing food chains, or endangering human health. This is the vision driving our venture creation in this opportunity space : to halt ecological collapse and protect human health by reimagining pest control.

Our Approach

Our preliminary scoping of the area indicates high potential to develop approaches that meet our desired outcome : pest control that is scalable, durable, and effective without off-target effects. Emerging technologies, from RNAi silencing of pest genes through to engineered crop pheromone production, provide a set of promising tools that could provide the foundations for commercially viable propositions. However, each approach presents outstanding constraints that require solving. We believe that advances in diverse sectors, spanning from bioprocessing and genetic engineering through to GIS and precision agriculture tools, mean that it is the ideal time to tackle these barriers and we are looking for a Founder in Residence to take this on.