How TDK Ventures Uses Currence to Explore and Invest in the Energy Transformation Landscape

TDK Ventures has an unusual remit: invest in new markets and new technologies that go beyond its parent company’s boundaries today into areas which may become important in the future. TDK Corporation is the Japanese electronics giant that older millennials may nostalgically associate with cassette tapes, but which has since built a >$15 billion business in batteries, sensors, and electronic components. Founded in 2019 – and currently with $500 million under management and more than 50 portfolio companies – TDK Ventures aims to help TDK see that future before it becomes obvious.

That mandate means the team is constantly exploring new territory, evaluating new and novel technologies in sectors where the difference between what's commercially real and what's still stuck in pilot purgatory is hard to parse from the outside.

Currence (formerly Sightline Climate) is an AI-native market intelligence platform for the teams that finance and build the energy system. It tracks more than 60,000 companies, 40,000 transactions, and 800 technologies across energy and the physical economy, with proprietary readiness scoring, project-level deployment data, and sector mapping built by domain experts. For TDK Ventures, Currence supports the competitive landscape, technology maturity, and deployment evidence the team needs each time it explores a new sector.

How TDK Ventures builds conviction through Deep Explorations

TDK Ventures operates a thesis-led approach to investing through "Deep Explorations": a deep dive on a single problem and opportunity space, learning from the full ecosystem of startups, customers, suppliers, and domain experts, to ultimately build an investment thesis. They've completed more than 85 of these explorations. 

"Currence is an amazing resource for us when we kick off a Deep Exploration, because it helps us paint an early picture of what the landscape looks like," said Sam Hill, an investor with TDK Ventures focused on energy transformation. "We can start connecting the dots on the various stakeholder groups in a particular market and identify the people we need to speak to."

The platform's competitive mapping shows startups and incumbents active in a given segment. Its technology profiles lay out the different approaches to solving a problem with readiness levels, cost and performance benchmarks, and the pros and cons of each. And its project database shows what's actually being built and deployed, which matters when investors evaluate companies in sectors where physical infrastructure is the proof point.

"When we're starting a Deep Exploration, we're always asking the question, what are the ways in which people are trying to solve a particular challenge?” Hill said. "Technology profiles help us to understand the pros and cons of the different approaches and their maturity levels, which we can match to what we hear is important to those in the market."

That readiness picture also shapes timing. If technology is still immature, the right investment might be a pre-seed bet with a long horizon. If the market is ready now, the window might be a Series B or C, where the opportunity to deploy is immediate. Currence can provide vital signals on market timing from across its Sector Readiness Curve framework.

“We think carefully about the question ‘why now?’ – our job is to invest in a space before it’s obvious, but where the signals show us the direction of travel and which will become obvious to customers, investors, and the wider world soon. Ideally, we invest 3 to 4 years before that point.”

How TDK Ventures builds an investment case

“Delivering Deep Insights” is the D in TDK Ventures' organizational CODE of conduct, the core principles by which their team operates. The deep insights TDK Ventures delivers derive from convictions generated through their Deep Explorations, ultimately ending in an investment thesis. This thesis includes specific KPIs that they look for to determine the future “King of the Hill” in a particular category. Currence supports that process. The team uses the platform's data to benchmark companies against competitors on the KPIs they identify and anchor the capital deployment sections of their Investment Committee memos.

"KPIs allow us to synthesize down our deep insights into what really matters for our investment thesis," Hill said. "Currence can help us benchmark companies against those key criteria."

David Delfassy, an Investment Director at TDK Ventures, pointed to investments like Spiritus, a carbon-removal company, a market that sits outside of TDK Corporation's core electronics business, as an example: “Once we've conducted research firsthand, we're better positioned to present a strategic case to our Investment Committee for investing in companies that sit further from TDK's current core business, but may prove strategically important in the future."

And the evidence matters on the other side of the table too. In deep tech, founders are selective about their investors. They want partners who understand the technology, the market, and the challenges of bringing physical technology to market, not just financial mechanics.

"In the deep tech world, people are looking for smart investors," Delfassy said. "They're looking for people that understand their technology, understand their market, and can help them be successful on their journey to deploying their product."

How Currence supports ongoing monitoring of past theses

Deep Explorations enable TDK Ventures to develop an investment thesis and conviction around ‘why now?’ for a given market. But markets move, and a thesis built two years ago may no longer hold. Currence can serve as the ongoing monitoring layer for past explorations.

"Our Deep Explorations are intensive and so we have to intentionally focus our time where we have conviction in order to build deep insights,” Hill said. “That means we can't continually refresh our insights on every topic we've explored in the past to the same level of depth. But Currence can help us keep up to date on the most important signals."

The platform's sector tagging, built for people who care about how the energy market is actually segmented rather than lumped into broad categories, lets the team track deals in any given area. The TDK Ventures team also uses Currence to see the rounds they're missing and whether they should revisit a thesis.

"One best practice that we have internally is tracking our anti-portfolio," Hill said. "What companies are we missing and what can those tell us about the theses we built in previous explorations?”

Outcomes

TDK Ventures was built to help a 90-year-old company find opportunities in new markets and technologies before they become obvious. That requires breaking new ground with confidence, building evidence-backed investment cases, and staying current across a growing portfolio of deep insights. Currence supports the TDK Ventures team in each of those steps, from the first week of a new Deep Exploration to the IC memo and the ongoing monitoring that follows.

• TDK Ventures uses Currence to accelerate the front end of its Deep Exploration process, which the team has run more than 85 times across the energy and digital transformation landscape
• Currence's technology profiles and readiness frameworks provide additional signals on technology maturity and market readiness that inform the team's investment analysis
• The platform's project data supports diligence in companies with physical deployment footprints
• Currence's sector tagging enables ongoing monitoring and anti-portfolio tracking across all past explorations
• Competitive mapping, KPI benchmarks, and market data from Currence support TDK Ventures due-diligence process