In this presentation, Douglas Hansen Luke, Founder and Chairman of Future Planet Capital, outlines the firm’s mission to invest in growth‑stage technologies that tackle global challenges such as climate change, education, health, security, and sustainable growth. He frames the discussion around four pillars—inequality, opportunity, impact, and innovation—explaining how traditional venture investing often amplifies wealth among elite innovators in the Global North, leaving the poorest populations untouched. To address this, Future Planet seeks partnerships that can bridge the gap to the Global South, highlighting Empower as a key collaborator that combines profit motives with mission‑driven execution. Luke showcases concrete examples of portfolio technologies: a low‑cost RFID “sticky chip” from Pragmatic for provenance and food‑waste reduction; gene‑edited banana and rice solutions from Tropic Bioscience; and drone logistics platforms like Zipline. He also mentions advisory support from architect Norman Foster and Lord Wei. Throughout, he balances enthusiasm for impact‑driven profit with a cautious awareness of governance, logistics, and market challenges, arguing that serving the fastest‑growing economies can both generate returns and uplift the largest number of people.
Chapters
Yale, thank you. Ezi, Shai, Caleb, it's really good to be here and great to listen to all these speeches. Let me just check one thing before I begin. Am I the last speaker? No. Ah, okay. So we're definitely going to keep this to time. And there are 4 things I want to talk to you about: inequality, opportunity, impact, and innovation. And what we do at Future Planet, we're investing in the brightest minds coming out of the world's top centers of innovation with technologies and companies, growth companies, that are going to change the world, addressing global challenges like climate change, education, health, security, and sustainable growth. We're relatively new. We're a startup investing in growth-stage startups. We've been going on this project for 5 years. We've deployed $100 million. And we're doing it in companies that are making a real difference. That's great opportunity, but what we've found is that— and we heard this from Joe as well, talking about the situation in Sierra Leone— we're actually working with elites. You know, someone's already at Harvard, great company, they're going to do really well, they're really bright, and actually it's a brilliant idea to invest in them because they've already proved it, great proof of concept, it's going to make fintech or finance accessible to people in America. So what are you doing? You're making rich people slightly richer. It's important. It's going to address a challenge, or a challenge for climate change. It's going to reduce consumption. But again, the people doing it and the markets that we deploy it in first are always going to be in the developed world. So there's huge inequality there, which one of the— you know, we're very excited about what we do, but we're also worried that all we're doing is just keeping the same group of people happier and wealthier, making the world a better place at the same time, but doing that. So for a while we've been looking at how on earth do we actually work so that the greatest mass of people in the world, the ones who are living on less, are able to actually be impacted by what we do. We're also very aware, because we're profit first, that actually if you can work with the fastest growing economies,— both in terms of population, in terms of wealth and income, then you're actually going to make even more money. You know, we always say that actually if you're solving big problems, you're creating huge value, and if you're a smart venture capitalist or a smart entrepreneur, you'll capture that value. And we've said, 'Well, look, let's find a way where we can actually impact the largest number of people in the fastest growing countries, but how on earth can we do it?' Because our top universities and centers of innovation They're not in the Global South. And yet when we're trying to do something and work it through, we know where we want to be. So we need partners. And before I worked with Rubicon and Rabobank, we tried working in Africa and other places, and you've run into issues of governance, you run into difficulties with logistics, transportation, education, the lot. So we were delighted when we encountered Empower. You know, we were in the House of Lords today. We saw history. That's happened, but actually I think we're seeing history in the making because Empower, and I think their decision to work with Sierra Leone first, are truly very important. So for us, the ability for Empower to say this is not about working solely with government, but working with government and business to make money, but with a mission and a purpose behind it, that's something that resonated with us, and we thought actually here are people that can deliver and get the right people in the room to make it happen. And guess what? They want to make it happen, and they want to make a profit, so we can justify it. So for us, Empower are great partners. And then in terms of, well, what type of things can you do? I mean, Norman Foster, the architect, is chairman of our advisory board. Now, we've already heard that Sierra Leone's got great opportunity. I've also been told there's great opportunity to improve the airport and the transport infrastructure. So the first thing to do will be to talk to Norman Foster about how you can make a boat from the airport to the centre of town, really exciting, but maybe a little bit safer. We— and yeah, but still keep the excitement. We are working with Lord Wei, who you met, on education, and we want to take the best companies from around the world, from these centres of innovation, to really work hard. So a couple of examples— I've been carrying this so— I'm so nervous about this because I keep losing it. This is one of the world's smallest chips. It's from Cambridge. I call it a sticky chip. This chip's made by a company called Pragmatic. It costs just 1 cent. Now, when you attach an RFID antenna to it, it costs 10 cents. But you put this onto something like a high-value item, like diamonds, or you put it onto agricultural produce, like rice, bananas, whatever, you've suddenly got track and trace and provenance. Hugely important. Now, this is something that the British government's already investing money in to reduce food waste in Britain. Now, in the developing world, the Global South, you've got 30 to 40% of food wasted before it hits the market. Now, in Britain, we're trying to reduce food waste after it's hit the market at home, which is how they're doing it in Britain. But we would love to take a product like this to Sierra Leone. Tropic Bioscience, a company that's come out of a research establishment in the UK, run by an Israeli. It seems that the brightest entrepreneurs often have a connection to Israel. And they're doing work on bananas right now. They're solving Bananageddon with gene editing. And you may have heard about Bananageddon, but they're also— look, it's going into my pocket. It better not get lost. But with Bananageddon, That's the first cash crop, incredibly important, the production of bananas in emerging economies in Latin America. But in Sierra Leone, you've got rice, the number one product there, and their next product that they're working on, the next crop, will be rice and gene editing that to make it more resilient. And that's something that it doesn't matter how good or bad the farmers are, if they've got better stock, better seeds, then they'll do really well. So for us, Being able to look at a country where the government is excited, where Empower is willing to put the people together, and what you said, which is small enough. You know, we've all seen the success of Zipline in Rwanda. We've got 10, 15 drone companies, some from Harvard, some from MIT, even some from Cranfield, which just doesn't quite get it except for those people that know it, which I think really shows that there is something that can be done and would be very exciting. So for us, you know, I'd like to say thank you to Empower, because for us what was really important about impact and innovation is that it's there, that it works, but to make it work in the hardest places, you need partners who are willing to work hard. And I think with Empower, we're seeing that. So thank you for putting this together. Thank you for bringing us here. All right.
