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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:04] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to Outer Orbit. It's one of our little short bonus episodes where we hijack one of our guests, and get them to talk a little bit more about a topic that we've been discussing in the main episode, and today we're back with Manjari Chandran-Ramesh, who's a partner at Amadeus Capital
and also a non-executive director here at the Satellite Applications Catapult. This is a recent thing just in the last couple of months or so.
[00:00:29] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Yes, hi. I'm incredibly excited to be joining the Satellite Applications Catapult as a non-exec. It's fair to say I've been tracking the space sector for a fair while now.
so Amadeus Capital is a global technology investor. We invest in Deep Tech It's been investing for the last 29 years, deployed 1.3 billion into 190 companies, and more importantly, we've exited a hundred of those.
We got on the cap table, we sat on the board, and we helped the founders build a big enough business so that it could either list on the stock exchange right as an IPO, 17 of those, or be acquired by a larger corporate.
[00:01:13] Dallas Campbell: Okay. Yeah.
[00:01:14] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Which then meant that money flowed back to the founders and us and other shareholders.
So going through the full lifecycle of a company
and we look at everything from, you know, sort of photonics and quantum and foundational AI and cybersecurity.
[00:01:31] Dallas Campbell: Tech seems to be one of those areas, it's like there's so much hot air, there's so much excitement and, but also presumably so much uncertainty. So everything is sort of new and by definition, new things you don't know quite how they're gonna turn out.
[00:01:43] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: But that's where, you know, sort of some of the key foundations come across. So I'm an engineer by background, did an electronics with a minor in computer science, and was lucky enough to come to the UK on a road scholarship to do my PhD in machine learning and driverless cars in Oxford, and that just means that, you know, I've been lucky enough to be able to read the research papers that a lot of the academics throw at me and understand a little bit, not the whole thing, but...
[00:02:13] Dallas Campbell: We're gonna have to totally stop this conversation now and change tack and talk about driverless cars.
[00:02:17] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Oh dear! It is exciting isn't it?
[00:02:22] Dallas Campbell: Because, I remember doing a thing, maybe 2008 when I was doing Bang Goes the Theory, which was a science programme. We did driverless cars and they were not really very good.
[00:02:30] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Yes, but my PhD was well before that.
[00:02:32] Dallas Campbell: Was it?
[00:02:33] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: I started my PhD in 2003. I worked as an intern at Google before they spun out Waymo. So yeah.
[00:02:39] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
They seem to be happening. Because I spend a lot of time going nah I will never have a driverless car.
[00:02:44] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: No, no, it's absolutely happening. Regulation needs to obviously catch up. The key thing is you know, human error, it's okay to have caused an accident. Machines can't cause an accident, can't even inadvertently cause the loss of life.
So, that needs to be sorted out from a regulation, insurance, all of that.
[00:03:06] Dallas Campbell: What an what, an incredible background you've had. So you've been in sort of, I suppose, deep tech as you would call it?
[00:03:11] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Yes. Yeah. So been investing in AI and robotics for the last 10, 11 years.
I was better suited definitely for looking at a number of different technologies and trying to work out what that, you know, sort of product market fit could be.
[00:03:28] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:03:29] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: And how do we actually build a business where a business didn't exist before. So that really attracted me.
[00:03:35] Dallas Campbell: And then these guys, these Satellite Application Catapult guys, they nabbed you
Oh, that's very kind of you to say so. Did they approach you?
[00:03:43] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Yes. I think they were running a process, to recruit, was it four or five, non-exec directors because they were having a turn of non-execs.
What does that actually mean? Non-exec, I mean, what's your, I suppose let's...
What's the role of a non-exec?
[00:03:58] Dallas Campbell: What, what is your job?
[00:03:59] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: The non-exec, in my view, is there to both support but also to challenge and to bring a different perspective to the exec team.
[00:04:09] Dallas Campbell: But do you shape direction as well? Do you say no, that we should be going in this direction?
[00:04:13] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Nothing is an absolute. So in my view, you know, the exec team are the ones who are closest to the strategy, closest to the problems that you know, that they could be facing, and they come up with a solution and it's the responsibility of a non-exec to genuinely work out that all aspects have been considered. Before then collectively agreeing that this is the way forward and then supporting the exec team to execute that
[00:04:42] Dallas Campbell: Or presumably you can say, actually no. You definitely don't want to do that.
[00:04:46] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Based on experience. Yes, that has happened before. Yes, in other boards.
[00:04:50] Dallas Campbell: So tell me for you, what excites you most about the space sector? what's floating your boat?
[00:04:55] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Yes. So based on my educational background, I started investing very much in the sort of AI and robotics space, and that's what I've been doing for a large part of my career. But then in 2017, I got the opportunity to understand more about the quantum sector.
And that just, you know, sort of happened due to circumstances because of an interest, and I've made investments in the quantum technology space, and I sit on the quantum strategic advisory board of the UK government. These are, you know, sort of different parts of the technology stack that I'm very interested in, and I was tracking the space sector looking at what the Applications Catapult had been doing for the last 10 years of its existence, and I think space is currently poised at quite a nice place where it's still nascent in its industry. But there's a lot of potential here.
[00:05:49] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, that's interesting. I suppose to the general public, we hear quite a lot about quantum, we hear a lot about AI at the moment. Space perhaps not so much?
[00:05:58] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: A
lot of things right now wouldn't work without the satellites up in orbit isn't it? Like a GPS.
[00:06:04] Dallas Campbell: Well, this is what I always, I have my Deliveroo model of how space works, which is okay, Deliveroo only works as a business model because we have GPS because
[00:06:17] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: and maps
[00:06:18] Dallas Campbell: because of Google Maps, and Google Maps only works because of GPS and GPS. Only works because we have satellites.
And satellites only works because you have rockets in order to get them up there.
We totally take for...
[00:06:31] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Or even payments, right? Even payments, like quite often your payment machine is speaking in some way to some communications
[00:06:40] Dallas Campbell: Exactly.
Is it so poised to become as, as big as these AI perhaps, or as a sector. Do you think it's going to?
[00:06:46] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: I think it has the potential to. I think the key question mark is what sort of timeframe will that happen in? I think that there's a lot of good things happening. I think, the various larger corporates coming into this Amazon, for example, coming into launching kind of, indicates that there, there is a lot of work happening.
But it's still a question mark. But that's what we like at Amadeus to look at and build a thesis around when's the right time for us to get involved as an investor, and when's the right time for us to be involved in terms of commercialization of all the exciting thing that's happening in research labs.
[00:07:30] Dallas Campbell: What sort of things are you looking forward to in your tenure here?
[00:07:33] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: For me particularly, the key thing was to really try and work with the space tech startups. In terms of what's going to be venture backable. What's the best way to fund these companies to become successful. Not all space tech companies will be venture backable, so that's fine. But I think it's useful for the founders of this space to understand where they fit in. Which is the best way for them to get capital in, for them to be successful. So I'm really looking forward to working with the team at the Satellite Applications Catapult because they do so much work with various startups in the space sector to really vitalize that a lot more than what's already happened, and get it to, you know, a landscape where it's thriving. It's making a huge difference. And dare I say, you know, sort of becoming as important as AI or quantum.
[00:08:30] Dallas Campbell: Do you think we're too risk averse in the UK? You know, you look to America and you know, the obvious examples of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They've always seemed to be quite wild west, pushing against the status quo, et cetera, et cetera.
Are we too risk averse in the UK? Should we be a little bit more?
[00:08:47] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: It's a mindset, isn't it? UK or Indeed, all of Europe. What I found is that the dollar, pound, euro goes a lot further. So, founders here get a lot more done with a lot less capital. I think there was even a piece of research which said, you know, the US spends 2.5 times more than what the UK spent for pretty much the same set of achievements. But the trade off then is the amount of time it picks. So I think the US tends to get there, especially startups, tend to get there faster because they do have a lot more money than UK or European startups. But, what they lose out in time. They've really used the money very carefully.
[00:09:30] Dallas Campbell: Right, got it.
[00:09:32] Manjari Chandran-Ramesh: Thank You very much indeed for coming.
Thank you. Thanks very much.
[00:09:34] Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes of In Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and head over to YouTube to watch the video versions of all of our discussions. And if you'd like to find out more about how Space is empowering your industry, visit the Catapult website or join them on social media.