Investable Universe

When we spoke with Greenland’s Foreign Minister Pele Broberg on his country’s efforts to secure greater economic and political self-determination from Denmark, he was very excited about a book that had just been released in Denmark that he believed could really change the conversation around Greenland’s relationship with Denmark. Our guest on this episode is Anne Kirstine Hermann, the Danish journalist who wrote that book, Imperiets børn (Children of the Empire), on Denmark’s attempts to absorb the world’s largest island in the post-World War II, essentially colonizing it while denying that it was being colonized.

In the spring of 2021, a controversial rare earth metals mining project proposed in Greenland thrust the island’s “kitchen-table economic issues” to the very center of the geopolitical stage. A snap election was called over whether to mine critical metals at the site, called Kvanefjeld—an election that resulted in a clear “no” vote from the Greenlandic people and ended decades of rule by the dominant Siumut Party. It is fair to say that this was a “No” heard round the world, ushering in a new coalition government led by the Inuit Ataqatigiit and Naleraq parties, and a new approach to self-determination and natural resource management for Greenland as it asserts its newly strategic role in the Arctic—a cold region, hotly contested. 

This is Part 3 of a five-part series, Polar Futures, produced by Investable Universe in 2021. When discussing the emerging Arctic economy, the focus is often on extractable natural resources, and how those are protected, exploited, or sustainably harvested. But what might be the ultimate resource—what has elsewhere been called, not without good reason, “the new oil”—is data, the fuel of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our guest this episode is a pioneering innovator of that powerful resource. Leslie  Cannavera is the CEO of PolArctic, which develops artificial intelligence and machine learning models for companies working in the Arctic region. Specifically, the company has developed a customizable neural network algorithm (called Ice Cubed) based on historical data and trends that can forecast up to a year the future ice breakup and ice freeze patterns in the Arctic. 

This is Part 2 Investable Universe's five-part Polar Futures series produced in 2021. The next-phase of the Arctic region’s economic evolution will be data-driven—and that brings new focus, new demands, and new opportunities for investment in the region’s telecommunications infrastructure network. Digital real estate—whether above ground through data centers or cell towers or under the icy surface of the Arctic Ocean—will be key to powering almost every other industry in the region. For perspectives on the Arctic telecommunications challenge, our guest this episode is Mac McHale, Chief Revenue Officer of Anchorage Alaska’s Quintillion, the owner-operator of a submarine and terrestrial high-speed fiber optic cable system that already spans the Alaskan Arctic, and connects to the lower 48 U.S. states.

This is a special series produced by Investable Universe in 2021 as Polar Futures. For perspectives on the strategic challenges and opportunities in the new Arctic economy, our guest for Episode 1 was Ambassador Einar Gunnarsson, who served as one of the top Senior Arctic Officials during Iceland’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council from 2019-2021. He previously served as Iceland's Permanent Representative to the United Nations where he chaired the Third Committee of the General Assembly during its 72nd session. 

He has also served as Iceland’s Director of International Trade Negotiations, Director of Personnel, Deputy Permanent Representative to the International Organizations in Geneva, Counsellor at the Mission of Iceland to the EU in Brussels, Counsellor in the External Trade Department and Legal Advisor to the Foreign Ministry’s Defense Department.

By 2030, there will be over 15 million tons of lithium-ion batteries ready for recycling, containing over $18bn just in the battery element cobalt. But while recycling seems like a no-brainer, current chemical-based battery recycling methods can leave a damaging and corrosive environmental footprint, not unlike extractive industry. It's a problem--but one that this week's guest is ready to solve. She is Megan O’Connor, Co-Founder and CEO of nTh cycle, a Boston-area startup that has developed a modular, electric solution to sustainably recycle lithium-ion battery materials. She holds a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Duke University and is a graduate of the second cohort of the Innovation Crossroads program at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In this episode, she discusses nTh cycle's technology, the challenge of EV battery recycling, and what may soon be the emergence of an alternative, tradable commodity market for recycled battery materials. 

Recovery from the economic impacts of covid-19 has meant supply chain bottlenecks, worker shortages and rising building costs to major cities around the world. Are these short-term supply hiccups, or longer-term threats to economic health? In this episode, John Robbins, U.S. Managing Director and North America Head of Real Estate at Turner & Townsend, which provides consultancy services to the real estate, infrastructure and natural resource sectors) shares insights from the firm's newly released 2021 International Construction Market Survey (ICMS), which provides intel on construction costs in 90 global markets. He also offers key takeaways on potential market impacts of the Biden Infrastructure Plan, which was still being debated in the U.S. Senate when the episode was recorded. 

Entrepreneur-investor Will Zell has made a mark in technology, real estate and other sectors. In 2014, he co-founded manufacturing disruptor Nikola Labs, which was a spinout from Ohio State University that scaled with the aid of venture capital, where he remained as CEO from its establishment until the third quarter of 2020. Now having transitioned out of Nikola, Mr. Zell has set his sights on disrupting venture capital itself –his firm, Zell Capital, has created an SEC-registered investment vehicle called the Access Fund, aiming to open early-stage VC investment to non-accredited investors, a category that includes 87 percent of U.S. households. In this episode, he talks about Zell Capital's vision for the Access Fund, Nikola Labs, venture capital, the future of manufacturing...and why Ohio is the place to watch for disruptive innovation in industrial robotics. 

With tens billions of venture capital money being directed at agtech startups in recent years, how different will farming and agriculture look a decade from now? Our guest this episode is Mary Friedrichsen Tangen, Vice President of Agriculture Strategic Initiatives at DTN, the U.S. based firm that provides commodity market analysis, hyper-local weather forecasts, and agronomic insights for guiding planting, growing and harvesting operations.

Mary has more than 20 years of experience in SaaS and data businesses, and her executive role at DTN connects her to the company’s more than 2 million global customers across agriculture, energy, financial and weather-sensitive industries. In addition to her decades of data and precision ag expertise, she is herself a grower, operating a farm with her family in Northwest Iowa.

...If you thought (as we did) that space ridesharing (a la SpaceX or BlueOrigin) was the end-all, be-all of the emerging space transportation and infrastructure sector, think again. An even newer market is emerging in the field of small-rocket launches--which offer satellite clients greater discretion over time and location--a subsector of the new space economy whose rise may be accelerated by the adoption of Ford-style assembly line dynamics. An undisputed pioneer in the field, Jim Cantrell, is the Founder/CEO of Phantom Space, a privately held developer of small-rocket launch technology. Cantrell has been involved in space engineering for decades, as a veteran of the U.S. Department of Defense Space Dynamics Laboratory, the French national space agency CNES, and, not least, as the first VP of Business Development at SpaceX, where he shepherded a young Elon Musk on a trip to the former USSR to buy disused launch equipment. We hear more about that story--and about Phantom Space's big bet on small rockets--in this episode.