Inside a venture builder model turning breakthrough research into 10x solutions for global markets.
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Show Notes:
On Mission Matters, Adam Torres interviews Nicolas Tabardel, Managing Partner, ATUM Ventures, about venture building in deep tech—sourcing IP from research institutes, validating with corporates, funding early milestones, and empowering founders to scale solutions in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, AI, and healthcare.
About ATUM Ventures
At ATUM Ventures, the mission is to support courageous founders who turn differentiating technology into world-changing companies that solve critical challenges in Energy, Medtech, and Advanced Manufacturing.
The firm brings capital, operational expertise, and strategic partners from academia, industry, venture capital, and government—partners who co-invest in every build.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest of the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. Alright, so today is a very special episode. This is part of our Asia Summit series where we bring you the best of those who attended, participated in the Asia Summit series, hosted by the Milken Institute over in.
Singapore, which we were fortunate enough to be covering. And it was, lemme tell you, it was my first year going to that. And it’s gonna be on my schedule every year. I absolutely had a great time and I met amazing people and we’ve been doing some great interviews. And speaking of great guest, I have my next one on the line.
So Nicolas Tabardel and he is a managing partner over at ATUM Ventures. Nicholas, welcome to the show. Hi Adam. Thanks for having me. All right, so I guess just to get us kicked off here as you just now heard the Asia summit, that was my first year out. Actually, this is my first time out to Singapore and I absolutely loved it.
It was a lot of. Fun great food, great meetings, great connections, great conference. And then F1 was there as you’re aware during the same time, which that was also a lot of fun. So, Nicholas let’s start here. Your connection to the conference. Had you been to one before?
Was this your first milking conference? Maybe let’s start. Yes, I’ve been connected to Milken for many years. I’ve attended lots of conferences. It’s, always super interesting to attend these conferences and, meet everyone in the same place the Singapore event, smaller than than the US one.
But it’s it’s always a good crowd. Yeah, I agree. And, the Global Conference in Beverly Hills, we’ve been covering that now maybe for like three or four years now. I can’t remember the exact amount, but let’s call it four years now. And so to go, this is my first time kind of going out to one of the, other events.
I’m like, oh, this is amazing. I’m curious, so you’ve been, obviously you’ve been connected to the institute, as you mentioned, for, for a long time. You’ve been to a lot of events. what keeps you coming back? What do you feel is so special about like this community that the conference brings? I think it’s a lot of interesting people from all over the world who do important important work and they’re the movers and shakers in the, in, in our industry, right?
So you hear the right ideas, you can make the. Right. Connections with mm-hmm. Partners, with customers, with investors. Mm-hmm. And it’s always a, a good occasion to take the temperature and see what people are talking about, you know, what the panels are about. Mm-hmm. and what people are not talking about.
Hmm. Yeah. Love it. and I agree with you by the way. Like I, that’s to me the global conference in, Beverly Hills. I always call that. I’m like, that’s my Super Bowl. That kind of sets up like, okay, what’s next for me, at least in my content and what’s gonna happen next? What kind of stories maybe I want to cover and things like that too.
You’re right, it does do that. I wanna switch it up a bit here. I do wanna get into, ATUM Ventures, which is a deep tech venture builder firm. But before we do that, maybe let’s go take it a step back maybe one or two steps and get a little bit into your background, like, like how’d you go into business and how’d you get into tech?
Yeah. So that’s a, it’s a long story, but I’ll, I’ll, I’ll try to. I sum up in a few minutes you can hear from my, accent. I’m originally from France. I grew up in a, small village near Bordeaux. I had no idea I was going to end up doing deep tech venture building in Singapore.
Mm-hmm. Originally I was pretty good at math. I thought I was going to be involved in, mathematics and research. So I, I, studied engineering and while I was studying engineering I actually discovered finance and option pricing. Mm. It was using the same equations that I was working on.
But it looked a lot more exciting than other applications. Mm-hmm. And so I went to work as a, as a quant and a trader in in London. So I, I did that for many years. I, I worked at Citibank and Deutsche Bank in London, trading inflation linked derivatives. And that was really exciting.
and I made some really good money mm-hmm. That, that. Got me independence, I think, you know, yeah. Not enough to do nothing, but enough to think really hard about what I wanted to do with my life. and during that time, I met my wife and my wife’s family runs a, a large company in Indonesia.
Hmm. And so at some point we decided that we would be better based in Singapore. We made the move. It’s a great place to, raise a family. Hmm. And so I you know, decided to, help my wife with setting up a family office Mm to manage family investments. And through that I got connected with Milken.
I also got connected with Iconic, and I started investing in in tech. And you know, I got lucky. I made some very good investments in the us in tech and healthcare. And I also wanted to become more hands-on, mm-hmm. And do something, yeah. I saw the, the switch to deep tech and I wanted to do something where I could be more operationally involved.
Mm. So that’s when we, we set up atom ventures which originally was called Singapore Deep Tech Alliance, and that mm-hmm. Was rebranded as Atom Ventures. Yeah. So, this is a. venture builder. We build companies from the ground up and we focus on, building companies in deep tech in Singapore for global markets.
Hmm. taking a step further, I don’t wanna, assume everybody understands what a venture builder is. So maybe compare, juxtapose, maybe kind of like your model to maybe some of the other routes You could have went like that. That’d probably be helpful. I. Yeah. So maybe you can, compare a venture builder to an incubator.
That would be the closest thing. Yeah. And to maybe everybody I think is familiar with Y Combinator. Yeah, for sure. Successful incubator of all time. Mm-hmm. And in an, incubator you find great people you pour a lot of coffee and they have to come up with ideas and you, you help them with that and you help you give them some funding and you make some introductions.
But it’s mostly, you know, up to these people to come up with some idea. Yeah. A venture builder on the, hand it’s a lot more hands-on and it’s a, bit more like being a repeat founder mm-hmm. In the sense that we go and look for problems to solve or technologies that we think have commercial potential.
So we work with research institutes and universities. And find good technologies. We do due diligence on the technology. We do commercial due diligence to see if they have potential. And then we also have corporate partners who we can ask if they will do a proof of concept of a product.
Mm. And so we, we build a business case. When we have a business case and we fund it and we bring in people mm-hmm. Who are going to be the founders of the company and they get the majority of the equity. and we continue working with them and helping them with their business plan and with raising money and mm-hmm.
This a success. Yeah, I’m a big fan of that model, by the way. and the reason is ’cause I feel like once you as you said, it’s like being a founder over and over and over again. But bringing in the people to, kind of do the execution side of it, because I feel like you get to leverage your, network.
You get to leverage maybe some processes and maybe even companies depending on how big the portfolio is. That will compliment each other for certain things and possibly even staff after, you know, depending am I off on that? I just wanna make sure my understanding’s correct. I, yeah, I think you are, you are spot on.
If you, if you, if you had an idea to start a company most likely you are going to straight up on your own. Right? Because I like how you say that and it’s true. Go, I’m sorry, but that’s, that’s reality. That is reality. Go ahead, please. And, and for, and for, for bad reasons. Mm-hmm. You know, there’s, there’s good reasons why some project would not work, right?
Mm-hmm. Sometimes you risky things and they don’t work out because the tech doesn’t work, or yeah, the market is not ready or, like these are okay reasons to fail, but there’s a million other things that yeah, you can get wrong. And that’s, how do I set up my company? You know, are my legal documents you know, properly, done.
Mm-hmm. how do I make a business plan? How do I go about raising money? What’s the difference between a safe, a convertible, an equity round like a lot of first time founders don’t know this and make, mm-hmm. Mistakes or waste a lot of time that they on product. and we take care of a lot of, these things because it’s the, 20 F company that, which started.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so there’s a lot of things that we know how to do efficiently and what’s right and wrong. I’ll just speak for my network. If there’s a founder out there that disagrees with this put it in the comments. But I feel like no founder’s like, oh, I want to go start a company so I can master legal documents and like I can master the legal, the accounting, and the supply chain, like or how to, raise capital like that.
Unless that’s what you wanted your business to be, then that is. I don’t wanna say a necessary evil. It’s a, it’s a lifeblood of the business, right? Capital. But I just mean but I mean, it’s not usually what you’re gonna get in entrepreneurship with. So I can learn how to be on this this rollercoaster of raising capital.
I don’t think that’s what they go into it for. At least I haven’t seen many. So if, if some of that can be, some of the weight of that, those items can be kind of the weight taken off the shoulders of the entrepreneur. Like you said, they get to focus on product, they get to focus on doing what they, what they actually wanted to do and growing the business.
So I think it’s wonderful. Nicholas, how do you, and I know this is gonna vary of course, but I’m just curious, even if you just wanna share kinda like your ideology, but how do you decide what, ideas you’re gonna move forward with?
Ah, that’s a good question. I know that’s a big one, and I don’t expect, I know it’s not a one size fit all, but maybe even if you can go through just the logic you go through when it comes to like, okay, this is ’cause the nature of I mean, if you think at. To me, when I think about most entrepreneurs, you got, you got a thousand ideas.
So, and you gotta, you gotta choose one eventually to start, you know, building a company. So in your case you can be presented with and have more than that, but you have to decide where you wanna allocate, you know, the next attention to go. ’cause there’s only so much attention. Right. how do you decide what to move forward with?
Yeah, I, I think we want to work on deep tech in so projects that are going to have a positive impact on the world. Mm-hmm. And solving complex challenges, right? The world doesn’t need another app to order a pizza at 3:00 AM mm-hmm. We need to tackle more important problems. And you know, so we focus on things like we need, clean, abandoned energy. Mm-hmm. We need advanced manufacturing, the to create an abundance of goods and services. We want to work on ai of course. And we want to work on, healthcare. So these things will, you know, there are big problems to solve in all these sectors. And if we create a lot of value by solving important problems, I think we will have financial success as well.
So solving an important problem is key. The solution needs to be not marginally higher, not not two times better. It needs to be 10 times better than what’s on. Mm-hmm. Right? It needs to be not too capital intensive. So, and that’s the difficulty. We want to do deep tech, but we don’t want to do the type of deep tech where you have to invest a hundred million and 15 years in r and d to see the outcome.
Mm. Projects where. With a few million, we can get a proof of concept de-risk the project and raise the next round and, see progress, right? Mm. Mm-hmm. But I would say I. The most important thing is going to be the people that we can find. Yeah. And do we want to work with these people and are they a type.
Are they, are they excellent? Are they driven? Are they smart? Are they hardworking? Are they honest? And you know, what’s, driving them? Because, you know, any way you do it, entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster. there’s going to be good times bad times.
There’s going to be excitement. Excitement, right? So you have to do it with people where you have good chemistry. Yeah, that’s great. What do you need to execute in your vision or to continue executing on your vision? Well you know what we need is to create an ecosystem that is already somewhat in place in Singapore.
We just need to make it better, right? And the ecosystem is composed of research institutes where we find good intellectual property ideas and so on. We need to connections to research institutes. And we have good connections in Singapore. We have some connections in Asia. Mm-hmm. We’re looking for more so in Europe, in the us yeah.
Anywhere where good research is done. we’d like to talk to these people. More founders and, you know yeah, excellent people who are going to run companies. Hmm. We also work with corporate partners. And corporate partners are can be members of our ecosystem and that allows them to submit projects or problems that they want to solve.
And we can go source the technology and build companies based on their requirements. And we need capital. So we need capital to invest in our directly in our portfolio companies. We also need capital for investing in Atom Ventures. And we’ve structured it in, in a way where investors can invest.
Directly in the venture builder in us as a company, or they can invest in our portfolio of companies. Hmm. To get a, you know, diversified portfolio of new ventures. that’s I think all the, all the pieces. Yeah. And the, you know, the most important piece is people, is finding good people, founders.
Mm-hmm. So, you know, if, i’m thinking of people who are in Europe and want to be entrepreneurs. Mm-hmm. And your you know, it is, very difficult to be an entrepreneur in Europe. I think the, you know, government and regulations will yeah. Make, make you crazy. there is a very funny X account, mm-hmm.
Making that. and I think, I think we have an ecosystem in Singapore where we actually have government agencies that are here to help you. Mm-hmm. And this changes the dynamic a lot, so mm-hmm. We have a, a really good environment for people who want to create things here. Yeah. Yeah, I’m, I’m excited to learn more about it in Singapore too.
So this is normally how we as a company, Nicholas, how we enter markets is, you know, we’re going in and we, and we do a series based on you know, conferences and some other things. We cover, you know, milk and conference of course, but then and, their properties, and then. Like FII and other things like that.
So we have, it’s fun to go into new markets like this and for over time we get to, and I, and I’m happy to bring this content to my audiences. They, also get to go into the new markets with us, so it’s a lot of fun. That being said though, Nicholas, how do people follow up? How do they connect with you?
You mentioned some of the things that you’re looking towards. How do people follow up? Well, you can check our upcoming website on atom ventures.com. So Atom is a TUM and atom is the Egyptian God of creation. We thought it would appropriate for Venture Builder. My email is Nicholas at ATUM ventures.com.
Nicholas no h. Wonderful for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put some links in the show notes. So you can, you can go ahead right on over and connect. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day are bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Nicholas, thanks again for coming on. Thanks. Appreciate the opportunity to talk to you, Adam.
