Hi there,

Most bus shelters have one job: keep you (mostly) dry while you wonder if the bus will ever arrive. In Bangkok, Swedish solar company Midsummer and Chulalongkorn University have unveiled what's believed to be the world's first carbon-negative solar-powered bus shelter, generating enough electricity to power lighting, fans, phone chargers and digital travel information. If a humble bus stop can double as a power station, it makes you wonder what other overlooked bits of infrastructure have been hiding in plain sight.

Before you dive into the rest of the news, one quick note from the team: we're taking an extended summer break, so this will be our last newsletter until September. Thanks for reading and supporting us this year, and we hope you have a fantastic summer.

Credit: Midsummer AB

In this week’s edition: 

🚗 Flease raised €13 million
🐝 Bees x intensive commercial farming
💧 Nvidia’s answer to water use in data centres

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Seqana

🏭 Berlin-based Seqana raised €3.2 million in a funding round led by Pymwymic with participation from HTGF, Counteract and Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank. It uses satellite imagery and machine learning to quantify soil health, and will use the funds to expand its soil carbon MRV tools and measure additional soil health indicators and carbon pools.

☕️ Israeli startup Brevel has partnered with coffee cell-culture specialist Coffeesai to use its illuminated fermentation platform to scale cultivated coffee production, supported by a $1 million grant from the Israel Innovation Authority to expand the technology into plant cell culture and adjacent industries.

🌱 Schouten Europe has acquired fellow Dutch plant-based producer Bobeldijk Food Group for an undisclosed sum, expanding its manufacturing capacity and private-label meat and fish alternatives business as it claims to become Europe’s largest family-owned meat alternatives producer.

🥔 Israeli molecular farming startup Finally Foods has completed its final pre-commercial field trial, confirming potatoes can express all four casein subunits in one plant as it targets dairy applications by 2027 or 2028.

🌳 The UK government announced plans to tighten food supply chain rules by requiring businesses trading forest-risk commodities such as soy, palm oil, cocoa and rubber to check they are not linked to illegal deforestation, aiming to improve traceability, protect rainforests and give consumers greater confidence in everyday products.

Biodiversity x Climate

Credit: BASF

🐝 BASF’s eight-year “Pollinators in Practice” study on a Northamptonshire arable farm found that intensive commercial farming can coexist with thriving pollinator populations when farmers protect hedgerows, rotate wildflower meadows and maintain diverse habitats that provide pollen and nectar across the season.

🪸 KAUST-led researchers produced one of the first global assessments of marine ecosystems during a year above 1.5°C warming, analysing 201 impact events and finding widespread coral bleaching, harmful algal blooms, species deaths and fisheries disruption linked mainly to unusually warm seas. 

Energy x Climate

Credit: VARM

🇩🇪 Berlin-based VARM, which trains and deploys insulation specialists to make home retrofits faster and more scalable, raised €17.5 million in a Series A funding round led by ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund and GET Fund, with participation from Aurum Impact, Emerge Partners, Pale Blue Dot, Emerge VC and noa, to expand its installer network across Germany and eventually Europe.

☀️ ARENA has committed an additional A$95.4 million to the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics to extend research into higher-efficiency, lower-cost solar cells and modules through to 2033.

🇦🇺 Australia’s Air Springs Supply is highlighting pneumatic air spring actuators as a lower-cost, low-maintenance way for solar panels to track the sun, potentially boosting output by 30–40% for industrial, rural and remote solar farms while withstanding harsh conditions. 

🌞 Researchers have developed a new manufacturing method for kesterite solar cells that improves how the material is formed, boosting energy conversion efficiency to a record certified 15.3% and bringing this low-cost, abundant-material solar technology closer to commercial use.

🔋 UK-based PowerUp Off-Grid Services has deployed its Battery Energy Distribution System in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, as part of the UK-backed ZEBRAS project, using renewable charging hubs, swappable lithium-ion batteries, electric delivery vehicles and AI monitoring to provide “endless” reliable clean power and reduce reliance on diesel generators.

🚌 Sweden’s Midsummer AB and its Thai subsidiary Midsummer Siam have partnered with Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok to launch a prototype carbon-negative solar bus shelter, using engineered wood and lightweight thin-film solar panels to power lighting, fans, phone charging and digital traffic systems while exploring climate-positive urban infrastructure. 

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Superlight

🚐 Commercial EV manufacturer Superlight, which is reimagining middle-mile logistics with aerospace design principles and software-centric vehicle architecture, closed an oversubscribed $21 million Series A funding round co-led by Engine Ventures and 2150 to scale its operations.

🚙 Flease, a reconditioned vehicle leasing platform for enterprise fleets, raised €13 million in a round led by Partech Impact to accelerate commercial deployment, strengthen operational and financial capacity, and scale its flexible, lower-emission fleet leasing service across France.

🐙 UK-based Octopus Energy and China’s CATL have formed a joint venture called Swaptopus to build a European battery-swapping network for electric lorries, with the first UK mega hubs due in 2027 and the partners aiming to support 300,000+ electric trucks, unlock over £30 billion in private investment and cut freight reliance on imported oil.

Water x Climate

Credit: Wayout International

🚰 Swedish startup Wayout International, which develops decentralised systems that turn local water sources into safe, purified and digitally monitored drinking water, raised a €2.42 million Series A extension to move from technology validation into commercial deployment.

💧 Ofwat’s Water Efficiency Lab awarded £5.2 million to seven UK projects, including 50 Liter Home, RHS-led garden water insights and MyWaterGPT, to help homes and businesses cut water use through smarter appliances, data-led advice, education, sensors and AI tools. 

🆒 Nvidia unveiled a warm-water, closed-loop cooling system that can dramatically cut on-site water use in AI data centres.

😎 Summer Break x Climate

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Hi there,

Critical Energy, founded by SpaceX alum Spencer Jackson, raised $22 million this week to turn rocket-engine know-how into modular turbines for geothermal power plants. 

The startup wants to factory-build the machinery that converts underground heat into electricity, rather than relying on huge bespoke turbines that can take months - or years - to assemble on site. First up: a 2.5MW project planned for 2027, followed by a larger 5MW module for next-gen geothermal players drilling deeper for more heat.

Geothermal has long been the hot ticket hiding beneath our feet: clean, constant, and massively underused. And if the world wants 24/7 power for data centres, industry, and increasingly electrified everything, we’ll need more than solar panels and good intentions.

Credit: TechCrunch

In this week’s edition: 

🇦🇺 Australia’s opened the world’s first carbon refinery
🍴 Foundation Alloy scored $22M for high-performance metals
💧 Is lab-grown aquatic moss the answer to freshwater methane emissions?

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Solar Foods

🏭 Solar Foods secured €77.8 million in grant and loan financing from Business Finland to scale Solein, its gas-fermented protein made from carbon dioxide and electricity, with the funding being used to construct, commission and ramp up its industrial-scale Factory 02 facility in Lappeenranta, Finland.

💶 Netherlands-based Vivici secured €12.5 million from the European Innovation Council Accelerator to scale production and commercialisation of its precision-fermented, animal-free whey protein ingredients.

🌾 Belgian agtech Rainbow Crops raised €9.7 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by LIFTT and LIFTT EuroInvest, with participation from AIF, PINC, VIB, Corteva, and Maia Ventures, to advance its AI-powered multiplex gene-editing platform that develops climate-resilient, high-performing crop varieties

✅ The Protein Brewery secured landmark EU Novel Food approval for Fermotein, its fungi-derived protein ingredient, making it the first whole-food mycelium ingredient authorised for sale in the EU.

🧫 Tufts University spinout Deco Labs is turning canola oil industry leftovers into cAlbumin, a plant-based albumin replacement that could dramatically cut cultivated meat media costs.

🧪 Faraday Earth is using AI-optimised plasma to make green ammonia without Haber-Bosch, aiming to turn air, water and renewable electricity into decentralised, lower-carbon fertiliser at a target cost of around $500/ton.

Biodiversity x Climate

Credit: Green Queen Media

📊 A new UN University report warns that AI’s climate impact is being underestimated because most assessments focus on model training emissions while overlooking the much larger energy, water, land and e-waste footprint of everyday AI use, especially image and video generation.

💧 Edinburgh Napier University is leading Mossthane, an ARIA-funded project to test whether lab-grown aquatic moss and methane-eating bacteria can be used as a nature-based biofilter to cut freshwater methane emissions, starting with fieldwork on Scotland’s River Tweed.

🏞️ A study led by the University of Surrey found that urban parks can cool and clean surrounding neighbourhoods well beyond their boundaries, with Stoke Park in Guildford cutting morning PM10 pollution by more than 11%, reducing temperatures by 6.5%, lowering noise by 5.41 dB, and improving thermal comfort by up to 8.5°C in shaded and grassland areas.

🌳 An Adelaide University and Flinders University study has found that street trees deliver up to $1.50 in benefits for every $1 invested, with urban planting programmes improving public health, cooling cities, cleaning air, lowering energy costs and lifting property values.

📉 Research from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology using 20 years of data from space observation has found that photosynthesis across UK ecosystems is declining as hotter, drier conditions disrupt plant productivity, raising concerns for carbon capture, biodiversity and climate resilience.

🇮🇩 A new satellite-data study has linked global plastic waste trade to worsening air pollution in Indonesia, finding that redirected imports after China’s 2018 waste ban increased PM2.5 levels near dump sites by an average of 3.3% as open burning rose.

Carbon x Climate

Credit: TechCrunch

🇮🇳 Bengaluru-based Alt Carbon has signed a three-year agreement for Microsoft to buy 36,920 metric tons of carbon removal credits from its enhanced rock weathering projects in India, using crushed basalt on farmland to lock away CO.

🤝🏼 US-based Anthropic has become the first AI startup to join the Frontier carbon removal coalition, committing to buy durable carbon removal credits as part of efforts to address the growing climate footprint of AI infrastructure and help scale early-stage carbon removal technologies.

Energy x Climate

Credit: TechCrunch

🌋 US startup Critical Energy raised $19 million seed funding in a round led by Susa Ventures and Upfront Ventures, plus $3 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank, with participation from MaC Venture Capital, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Humba Ventures, Scribble Ventures and Underground Ventures, to build modular turbine systems for geothermal power plants, with the funding being used to deliver its first 2.5 MW project by 2027 and scale toward larger geothermal modules.

🔋 UK-based Octopus Energy Generation and France’s ZE Energy have jointly invested in ZE Energy’s Sessa Aurunca battery storage project in Campania, Italy, a 98.5 MW / 895 MWh system designed to store excess renewable power and feed it back to the grid.

🪨 Europe’s HyCavern project, coordinated by SINTEF Industry and supported by the Clean Hydrogen Partnership, has launched a 15-partner consortium to develop mined, lined rock caverns for large-scale underground hydrogen storage, with the three-year programme focused on validating safer, scalable and more geographically flexible storage for Europe’s future hydrogen economy.

👀 The US Department of Justice has sided with Elon Musk’s xAI in an NAACP lawsuit seeking to stop its use of dozens of unpermitted natural gas turbines near its Memphis data centres, arguing the power supply is critical to AI innovation and military operations, while opponents say the turbines breach air pollution rules and harm nearby communities.

Materials x Climate

Credit: Foundation Alloy

🍴 US-based Foundation Alloy raised $22 million in a Series A round led by Voyager Ventures, with participation from Trust Ventures, Yamaha Motors, America’s Frontier Fund, Overlap Holdings, Material Impact, Engine Ventures, El Cap and Kanematsu Corporation. It will use the funds to scale its solid-state alloying technology and ramp up production of its high-performance metals for customers across automotive, aerospace, defense and manufacturing.

📦 Jealsa has partnered with Tetra Pak to launch the first carton packaging for shelf-stable tuna, replacing cans and jars with a lighter, recyclable carton format designed to improve convenience, reduce transport emissions and lower packaging impact.

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Kvasir Technologies

🛥️ Denmark’s Kvasir Technologies secured €10 million Series A funding from European Energy, EIFO, Mærsk Growth and Footprint Fund to commercialise its technology that converts agricultural and forestry residues into climate-neutral drop-in marine biofuel.

🪫 Finnish startup eMabler secured €5.5 million Series A funding in a round led by Greencode Ventures, with participation from Swiss Post Ventures and Rethink Ventures, to scale its API-based EV charging software platform and expand into Central Europe.

🚚 Australian electric trucking company New Energy Transport raised A$5 million from Melt Ventures and existing investors, to deploy electric trucks on Australian roads with the aim of accelerating the decarbonisation of heavy logistics.

🚛 Berlin-based NexDash secured €2.5 million from EIT Urban Mobility to scale its “Neo-Carrier” model for electrifying road freight, with the funding supporting its acquisition-led rollout of electric truck fleets, AI-powered logistics platform NexOS and zero-emission freight operations across Europe.

From the Community

🔥 On 22nd June, FoodHack and ClimateHack ambassadors are teaming up to host a free meetup in Istanbul.

🥵 Summer Weather x Climate

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Hi there,

Refill. Reuse. Recycle. Unless you're going to the World Cup.

Just days before the matches begin, FIFA has kicked reusable water bottles out of World Cup stadiums, reversing earlier guidance that had allowed them.

The official reason is safety. The unofficial result? Thousands, nay millions, of fans reaching for single-use plastic instead. For an organisation that talks a big game on sustainability, it's a decision that's hard to swallow. Turns out the road to a circular economy can still contain quite a few (plastic) bottle-necks.

Credit: Unsplash

In this week’s edition: 

💰 Endurance Energy scored $54M for offshore geothermal
🥶 MIT’s ‘Critical Cooling’ projects
☕️ Lavazza’s plastic-free espresso

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Innovafeed

🪳 Paris-based Innovafeed raised €51 million from historical shareholders including Creadev, QIA, Temasek, FFC, ABC Impact and ADM, plus banking partners, to scale its sustainable insect-based ingredients for animal nutrition, pet food and agriculture.

🌱 US startup Ayana Bio and Israel’s Brevel received a $1.25 million BIRD Foundation grant to combine plant cell culture with illuminated fermentation for sustainable bioactive ingredients, with funds used to scale the technology and accelerate commercialisation for food and wellness applications.

🚜 Cordon Technologies, based in the UK, secured £1 million in a funding round led by the British Design Fund to accelerate development and commercial rollout of its Loop precision spraying system, designed to help farmers cut pesticide and fertiliser use through real-time treatment adjustment.

☕️ Nestlé has developed six climate-resilient, high-yielding robusta coffee varieties with Côte d’Ivoire’s CNRA to nearly double yields, improve cup quality and support farmer livelihoods through its Nescafé Plan cooperatives.

🫏 Nestlé also filed a patent application for precision-fermented donkey beta-lactoglobulin, a lactose-free and potentially hypoallergenic whey protein designed for use in infant formula, dairy alternatives, sports nutrition and other functional foods.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands’ Biotechnology Fermentation Factory has opened as an open-access precision fermentation scale-up facility in Ede, to help startups, scale-ups and food producers develop proteins, enzymes and fats without building their own infrastructure.

Biodiversity x Climate

Credit: AgFunderNews

🌳 Finance Earth’s Big Nature Impact Fund secured £64.6 million to restore English landscapes through woodland creation, peatland restoration and habitat projects that generate revenues from verified carbon credits and biodiversity units.

🌦️ Helsinki-based Skyfora raised €6.5 million from investors including Eviny Ventures, Ugly Duckling Ventures, LUMO Labs, the European Innovation Council Fund and Business Finland, to turn telecom infrastructure into a real-time atmospheric sensing network for weather and AI forecasting

🥶 MIT researchers have completed four “Critical Cooling” projects exploring lower-energy, lower-emission ways to tackle extreme heat, including wearable personal cooling, subsurface heat-absorbing wells, rubber-based caloric cooling and greenhouse-gas-free refrigerants, with teams now seeking further development and funding for prototypes.

Energy x Climate

Credit: TechCrunch

🌊 Endurance Energy raised a $54 million Series A led by Founders Fund, with participation from 72 Ventures, Construct Capital, Felicis Ventures, First Round Capital, Riot Ventures and Voyager Ventures, to develop offshore geothermal power plants that could deliver large-scale, 24/7 renewable energy for AI data centres, EVs and heavy industry.

🇩🇪 German startup GALVANY Energy closed a €10 million seed round co-led by SET Ventures and AENU. It will use the funds to expand its end-to-end heat pump installation and energy management platform, particularly in the multi-family housing market.

🇧🇪 Ghent-based Companion.energy secured €7.8 million seed funding in a round led by Realyze Ventures and Pi Labs, with participation from Asterion Ventures and existing investors, to scale its AI-powered real-time energy management platform for large enterprises and expand across Europe.

🇩🇰 Denmark’s Topsoe secured a DKK 25 million grant (around $3.8 million) with Aarhus University and PlanEnergi for PowerFactor, a project to simplify and standardise grid access for Power-to-X plants by validating best practices for safe, reliable integration of electrolysis, electrified reforming and methanol production technologies.

🇫🇮 VTT spinout Granarium Technologies raised over €1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by BSV Ventures and Beamline, with participation from FiBAN, EstBAN and LatBAN, to industrialise its renewable nanocellulose-based supercapacitors for grid stabilisation and industrial power reliability.

🍺 Octopus Energy for Business is offering UK pubs five hours of free electricity on evenings England and Scotland play in the World Cup, through its ‘Watt a Save’ initiative designed to help hospitality businesses cut matchday energy costs.

🚗 General Motors is expanding into energy storage for data centres and the grid through a sodium-ion battery partnership with Peak Energy, LFP cell supply to LG Energy Solution, and second-life EV battery work with Redwood Materials, aiming to turn its battery manufacturing scale into a new revenue stream beyond electric vehicles.

🔥 US fusion startup Avalanche Energy says its five-inch “Jyn” desktop-scale reactor prototype has heated plasma to around 11 million°C.

Funds x Climate

Credit: Creator Fund

🇬🇧 UK-based Creator Fund closed a €48.6 million fund backed by investors including KfW Capital, EIFO, Equation Capital, Basecamp, JIMCO and Allocator One to support Europe’s scientific founders at the earliest stages of company creation, with the capital being deployed into deep-tech startups spanning AI, biotech, robotics, advanced materials and computing infrastructure before they reach the pitch-deck stage.

🌍 Holocene reached the final close of Holocene Ventures Fund I, Southern Africa’s first dedicated high-growth climate tech fund, to back early-stage African startups across areas including energy, mobility, agriculture and waste with both capital and hands-on operational support.

💰 UK climate tech venture builder Carbon13 has launched its tenth SEIS fund to invest in startups created through its Cambridge programme across energy, AI, materials, food security and supply chain resilience.

Materials x Climate

Credit: Resand

🏖️ Finland’s Resand has expanded its Norion Bank loan facility to €25 million to scale its near-100%-efficient foundry sand regeneration and recycling technology.

🇪🇸 GR3N raised €15.5 million Series B funding in a round led by 360 Capital, with participation from VP Textile, to commercialise its microwave-assisted PET and polyester recycling technology and build the world’s first industrial-scale plant of its kind in Spain, capable of processing 40,000 tonnes of plastic waste annually.

☕️ Italian coffee giant Lavazza launched Tablì in the US, a single-serve espresso system using compressed 100% coffee tabs with no plastic, aluminium, wrappers or coatings.

Mobility x Climate

Credit: EvoTrex

🚍 EvoTrex secured $30 million to accelerate development of its off-grid electric RV, which combines battery storage, solar power and smart energy management to enable extended travel without reliance on charging infrastructure or campsite hookups.

🚙 Budapest-based Volteum raised €2.5 million in a funding round led by Movens Capital, with participation from WakeUp Capital, Aidiom, Day One Capital, Techstars and Nesprit, to expand its EV and mixed-fleet management platform across the UK, Benelux and DACH regions.

🚘 Enera raised $2 million in a round led by Lakehouse Ventures, with participation from Divergent Capital, Masia and angel investors, to expand its AI-powered EV charging support platform, accelerate UK charge point operator pilots, and support wider European expansion.

🔋 UK clean energy technology company UrbanChain has extended its renewable energy agreement with EV charge point operator Believ for three years, using its private energy market to power Believ’s national charging rollout with traceable, locally matched renewable electricity.

From the Community

🔥 On June 22, FoodHack and ClimateHack ambassadors are teaming up to host a free meetup in Istanbul

🎤 Hugo Rauch, host of New Wave podcast shared a new episode recorded at the of HackSummit with our speaker Assia Kasdi.

Diving In x Climate

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In news that sounds suspiciously like it belongs in an Austin Powers script, fusion startup Xcimer Energy has switched on the world's largest privately owned laser. 

The 38-metre-long system, Phoenix, is a major milestone in the race to commercialise nuclear fusion. Xcimer hopes its laser technology can eventually compress fusion fuel with enough force to generate abundant, carbon-free electricity, bringing fusion one step closer from scientific breakthrough to commercial reality.

And unlike Dr Evil's laser, this one might actually help save the world.

Credit: Xcimer Energy Corporation

In this week’s edition: 

💰 Gigascale raised a $250M fund
📱 Smartphone makers are in for a surprise
🐦‍⬛ Kiwibit launched an AI-powered bird feeder

The Digest

💧 Dutch startup SolarDew raised €800,000 from Connect the Drops and Oost NL to scale production of its solar-powered, low-maintenance desalination technology, which uses sunlight and gravity to turn polluted or salty water into clean drinking water for remote and water-stressed communities.

🧪 Swiss biotech startup hephaistos.bio secured €161,000 from Venture Kick to advance its custom enzyme platform for more sustainable pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing.

🐦‍⬛ Kiwibit launched its AI-powered Bird Feeder Pro, a smart backyard feeder with a 4K camera, solar charging and an app that identifies 10,000+ bird species, tracks visits and recordings, and lets users enjoy nature like a real-life Pokémon collection.

📱 Smartphones beware: the EU’s incoming 2027 repairability rules will require phone makers to make batteries easier for users to remove and replace, though not necessarily fully pop-out.

🔬 The future of climate isn't built in spreadsheets. Meet the Netherlands' most ambitious deeptech founders at our next ClimateHack Meetup - June 10, Amsterdam.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Solar Foods

♻️ The Proscale project secured €8.5 million in funding, including €6.9 million from the EU-backed Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking, to scale production of sustainable single-cell proteins for food and feed applications from food industry waste streams using microbial fermentation.

🇫🇮 Finnish food company Raisio secured €1.8 million from Business Finland for a €4.5 million four-year project to develop functional fibre ingredients from grain-processing side streams, with Raisio contributing the remaining €2.7 million to fund pilot-scale R&D, application validation and new commercial opportunities in areas such as dairy-free products, sports nutrition and food fortification. 

💰 Purdue University’s DIAL Ventures announced the first close of its Fund II to build and de-risk AI-driven agrifood startups through its venture studio model, with the next programme set to focus on AI tools, reduced farm inputs and stronger food supply chains.

✅ Berlin-based Formo has obtained self-affirmed GRAS status in the US for its precision-fermented cow-free casein protein, enabling it to sell to food manufacturers via a new US subsidiary and commercialisation partnership with RxFood Ingredients, as it shifts focus from its discontinued Frischhain consumer cheese brand to B2B speciality protein ingredients. 

👨🏻‍🌾 RespectFarms has opened the world’s first cultivated meat farm on dairy farmer Corné van Leeuwen’s working farm in South Holland, to show how farmers can add cell-cultured meat production as a new income stream alongside traditional agriculture.

Energy x Climate

Credit: Helion

💰 US-based Helion raised a $465 million Series G led by Thrive Capital, valuing the fusion startup at $15.5 billion, to help complete Orion, its first fusion power plant, under its deal to supply power to Microsoft as early as 2028. 

🇩🇪 Germany’s Focused Energy closed an oversubscribed $240 million Series A led by RWE, with participation from SPRIND, Prime Movers Lab and the European Innovation Council Fund. It will use the funds to advance its laser-powered inertial-confinement fusion technology and build its first demonstration system, Lighthouse, at a former RWE nuclear site. 

🇬🇧 UK startup Gigaton secured $26 million in a Series A funding round led by Plural, with participation from 2150, Semapa Next and existing investors, to scale its autonomous AI platform that continuously learns from plant data to optimise industrial operations in real time, helping energy-intensive sectors such as cement, steel, glass and chemicals reduce energy use, cut emissions and improve efficiency without requiring major hardware upgrades.

🔋 Munich-based encosa raised €25 million seed funding in a round led by Realyze Ventures, with participation from Verve Ventures, Blum Ventures, Kopa Ventures, Bayern Kapital, existing investors and business angels, to scale its battery energy storage systems for German SMEs and industrial customers.

💷 Fuse Energy, based in London, secured a €25 million Series B extension, backed by investors including Collaborative Fund, 20VC, Lowercarbon Capital, Balderton Capital, Accel, Lakestar, Creandum, Ribbit Capital and Latitude, to scale its vertically integrated renewable energy platform.

🚙 Australian renewable energy retailer Amber received A$13.6 million from ARENA to expand its vehicle-to-grid programme from a 50-charger BYD trial to 1,000 homes, helping EV owners use their cars to power their homes and sell energy back to the grid.

⚛️ Pacific Fusion unveiled a subscale pulser prototype that released 440 gigawatts in an 80-nanosecond burst, paving the way for construction of its demonstration fusion facility this summer.

⚡️US-based Xcimer Energy has switched on Phoenix, which it says is the world’s largest privately owned laser, using the krypton-fluoride system as a stepping stone toward a 2028 fusion prototype and, ultimately, commercial laser-powered fusion plants in the mid-2030s.

🚕 Waymo has partnered with B2U Storage Solutions to give retired robotaxi batteries a second life as grid-scale energy storage in California and Texas, helping store solar power, support the grid during peak demand and reduce battery waste. 

Funds x Climate

Credit: Gigascale Capital

💰 Gigascale, the US venture firm led by former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer, raised a $250 million fund to back climate-tech founders “rebuilding the physical economy,” with a focus on energy, grid infrastructure, critical minerals and physical AI.

💵 Enduring Planet raised $12 million for its second climate fund, providing founder-friendly, non-dilutive working capital loans to climate startups and SMBs, with the capital used to back companies scaling climate solutions.

Materials x Climate

Credit: DEScycle

🇬🇧 London-based DEScycle, which uses low-toxicity deep eutectic solvents to recover critical and precious metals from e-waste and other secondary feedstocks, secured over €10 million in non-dilutive grant funding from EU Horizon, SPRIND, the EIC Accelerator, Innovate UK Investor Partnerships and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to extend its operations.

🧱 UK startup Circular11 raised €2.7 million in a funding round co-led by Vectr7 Investment Partners and The FSE Group, alongside The FSE Investor Network, Oxford Innovation Network, private investors and an Innovate UK grant, to bring its manufacturing technology which turns low-grade plastic waste into low-carbon building materials and home products to market, with the aim of recycling 10,000 tonnes of low-quality plastic over the next two years.

🌳 Dutch deep tech startup New Dawn Bio secured €2.1 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round led by CapitalT, with participation from Norrsken Evolve, Ontdekkers Group and angel investors, to advance its cell-culture technology for growing real wood from tree cells in bioreactors.

🤖 Oscorp Energy, based in Sydney, raised A$1.3 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Atlas’s AI VB fund, with support from Antler and Antipodean Capital, to build AI-powered vision and robotic systems that identify, classify and remove materials from fast-moving waste streams, initially targeting lithium-ion batteries to help prevent fires in trucks, recycling sites and material recovery facilities.

A Circular Economy Business Model x Climate

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Hi there,

New research from Adelaide University suggests ocean acidification isn’t just bleaching coral and warming seas; it’s scrambling the social behaviours fish rely on to survive. In other words: the oceans are getting so acidic, even the fish are feeling a little salty.

But oceans run on teamwork. Fish depend on social cues to find food, avoid predators, reproduce, and keep entire marine ecosystems in balance. If those behaviours start to break down, the ripple effects could travel all the way up the food chain, impacting biodiversity, fisheries, and the health of the oceans that regulate our climate and support millions of livelihoods.

From confused clownfish to schools that simply can’t keep it together, scientists are discovering that climate change isn’t just altering habitats, it’s changing behaviour itself. And that’s a pretty deep problem.

Credit: Unsplash

In this week’s edition: 

🛣️ REPS bagged $23.6M for its “road power plant”
💄 Lipstick made with palmless oil
🌞 Elon Musk has given up on solar

The Digest

📊 Interesting: Michael Jackson shares why coal doesn’t make sense any more.

🥤 Brussels-based Borro raised €1.3 million from Seeder Fund, imec.istart, bluesnipe, PMV and butterfly & elephant to expand its digital deposit system for reusable cups into the Netherlands, Germany and France.

🐠 Researchers at Adelaide University have found that ocean acidification reduces reef habitat complexity, causing reef fish to form smaller shoals that weaken social protection and could undermine survival even when individual fish appear behaviourally resilient.

🎧 Hugo Rauch hosted of New Wave podcast, released the two first episodes recorded at the HackSummit 2026 with our speaker Renaud Visage and Patrick Möller. 

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Phytolon

🐮 Phytolon raised $23.6 million Series B funding in a round led by an undisclosed strategic investor, with Millennium Foodtech, NextGen Nutrition, Colorcon Ventures and Yossi Ackerman participating, to commercialise its yeast-fermented natural food colours, starting with FDA-approved beetroot red dye.

🇮🇳 India’s StrainX Bioworks secured $13 million from Prime Venture Partners, Leo Capital, Good Startup, Sparrow Capital, Sun Icon Ventures, Dholakia Ventures and WindT Angels to further develop its precision fermentation platform for high-value nutritional and flavour ingredients.

🍗 Germany’s Pacifico Biolabs raised €7 million Series A funding from Stray Dog Capital, TFGS, Sprout & About Ventures, Simon Capital, FoodLabs and a regional brewery partner to scale its beer-tank fermentation platform for whole-cut mycelium chicken alternatives, with the aim of securing commercial partnerships across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Nordics by late 2026.

🇪🇺 The European Commission has opened public consultation on its proposed Biotech Act II, expected in Q4 2026, with fermentation, cultivated biomass and biomanufacturing companies urging clearer, harmonised EU regulation to support novel proteins, precision fermentation and industrial biotech scale-up.

Chemicals x Climate

Credit: D-CRBN

🇧🇪 Belgian startup D-CRBN secured €17.5 million Series A funding in a round led by Astaia, with participation from SFPIM and the EIC Fund, to scale its electrified plasma technology that converts industrial CO₂ and hydrocarbons into circular carbon molecules.

🧪 Connecticut-based P2 Science raised $23 million in an oversubscribed round led by Sofinnova Partners, with participation from Emerald Technology Ventures, GS Futures, Lewis & Clark Partners, dsm-firmenich ventures, Connecticut Innovations, Elm Street Ventures, Chanel, BASF and Safer Made, to expand its renewable green chemistry ingredients platform across beauty, personal care, aroma technologies, polymers, home care, coatings and crop care.

🇦🇺 Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia have developed a modular electrochemical generator that uses captured CO₂, water and electricity to produce formate for formic acid.

Energy x Climate

Credit: Thea Energy

⚛️ US fusion startup Thea Energy closed an oversubscribed $100 million Series B led by U.S. Innovative Technology Fund, with investors including General Innovation Capital Partners, Linse Capital and Climate Capital, to scale its software-controlled stellarator fusion technology, expand magnet manufacturing and begin building its Eos demonstration reactor.

🛣️ REPS raised $23.6 million in equity financing to scale its Road Energy Production System, a patented “road power plant” that converts vehicle traffic into clean electricity, targeting ports, logistics hubs, cities and industrial sites. 

🇳🇱 Utrecht-based Eddy Grid raised €7.5 million from existing investors including Graduate Ventures and Volve Capital to scale its real-time optimisation algorithms for solar, wind and battery assets and support expansion into Germany.

🌊 Oxford University spinout Caudal Energy secured £4.3 million from Oxford Science Enterprises, Empirical Ventures, Zero Carbon Capital and Creator Fund to advance its modular fin-based tidal power system, with funding supporting full-scale testing in Northern Ireland ahead of planned commercial deployment by 2028. 

😬 The Trump administration has selected five US nuclear startups - Oklo, Standard Nuclear, Shine Technologies, Flibe Energy and Exodys Energy - for talks to use surplus Cold War-era weapons-grade plutonium as reactor fuel, aiming to help dispose of 34 tonnes of plutonium and support next-generation nuclear power, despite concerns over security and proliferation. 

☀️ Mumbai-based SolarSquare is in advanced talks to raise $55–$60 million in Series C funding co-led by B Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Elevation Capital expected to participate, to expand its full-stack rooftop solar platform for homes, housing societies and enterprises across India. 

🐟 A new global study suggests fishery-photovoltaic integration could generate solar power alongside fish and shrimp farming, with elevated panels over ponds and tidal flats potentially delivering 856GW of capacity, 1,266.5TWh of annual electricity and nearly 580 million tonnes of CO₂ reductions.

🌞 Interesting: TechCrunch argues that Elon Musk has given up on solar power. On Earth, anyway.

Materials x Climate

Credit: Jon Brown

💰 The Bezos Earth Fund awarded $34 million in grants to Columbia University, Clemson University, UC Berkeley and The Cotton Foundation to develop sustainable, plastic-free textile fibres including bacteria-grown rayon-like material, gene-edited cotton and biodegradable silk alternatives for lower-impact fashion.

🧱 UK-based Mykor raised £4 million from Clean Growth Fund, the South West Investment Fund, British Business Bank and Innovate UK to scale its biofabrication technology, which turns industrial and agricultural waste into low-carbon construction materials such as prefab walls and insulation.

💄 California-based Tower 28 Beauty launched a ShineOn Plumping Lip Jelly using New York-based C16 Biosciences’ precision-fermented Palmless Torula Oil, a deforestation-free palm oil alternative.

🇪🇸 Spain’s AIMPLAS-led SOUL project has developed 11 biodegradable-in-soil agricultural and cosmetic packaging solutions made with more than 95% renewable content, aiming to reduce fossil-based plastic use and environmental impact through scalable bio-based materials and circular production methods.

ESG x Climate

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Hi there,

NASA is testing a rechargeable fuel cell designed to eventually help humans survive on the Moon, which means we are officially one step closer to hearing someone say “the Wi-Fi’s down” in space.

The system stores energy using hydrogen and oxygen, kind of like a giant cosmic power bank, except this one has to survive freezing temperatures, radiation, and two-week-long lunar nights. 

And space tech has a funny habit of coming back down to Earth. The same fuel cell breakthroughs being designed for Moon bases could also help solve one of clean energy’s biggest headaches here at home: how to store renewable power when the sun is not shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

In other words, the race to live on the Moon might help us keep the lights on in Europe.

Credit: AZO Cleantech

In this week’s edition: 

🇩🇪 Germany’s got a new biotech roadmap
😬 AI’s power bill enters beast mode
👜 Mushroom leather gets its luxury glow-up

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The Digest

☁️ UK startup Greenpixie raised £4.7 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by VERBUND X Ventures, with participation from Octopus Ventures, Armajaro Holdings and Green Angel Ventures, to expand its FinOps and GreenOps tools that help enterprises cut cloud and AI infrastructure cost, carbon and water waste. 

🔥 Zurich-based AVIAN raised €2.2 million pre-seed funding in a round led by Founderful to expand its always-on AI thermal monitoring platform for industrial fire prevention, scaling engineering and deployments beyond wood products into recycling, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime.

🤝🏼 Microsoft has signed a deal to buy 650,000 metric tons of carbon-removal credits from BioCirc’s biogas projects, signalling it is recalibrating rather than abandoning carbon-removal purchases as AI-driven energy demand strains its 2030 carbon-negative target. 

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Triple Bio

🐮 Netherlands-based Triple Bio emerged from stealth with €1.5 million from Nucleus Capital, Positron Ventures and Climate Club to develop lipid-based cattle feed additives that boost milk yields and reduce methane.

💵 Big Idea Ventures has invested $200,000 each in five food biotech startups - Saku Biosciences, RheaPlant, XiA’H, BioClé and CryoVera - to help scale technologies in fermentation, plant cell biomanufacturing, enzyme extraction, bioactive delivery and frozen-food preservation. 

🤖 US startup Capra Biosciences is working with Boston University on wireless “chickpea-sized” biosensors that could cut biomanufacturing costs by monitoring fermentation in real time, helping optimise production of ingredients like retinol and salicylic acid.

🇩🇪 Germany’s federal government unveiled a biotechnology roadmap to open a national alternative-protein innovation hub in 2027 and push EU novel food regulatory sandboxes, aiming to commercialise cultivated meat and precision-fermented foods, lower production costs and strengthen its agrifood biotech sector.

Energy x Climate

Credit: Feldwerke

☀️ Munich-based Feldwerke secured a €12 million revolving credit facility from a French renewable-energy debt fund to build around 100MW of agri-PV systems over the next 18 months, helping farmers combine crop production with solar power generation.

🥶 German startup Qurie raised €2.2 million seed funding from HTGF, TT49 and Aepikur to further develop electrocaloric refrigeration systems without compressors or refrigerants, targeting industrial enclosure cooling before expanding into commercial, medical, electronics and automotive uses.

🌛 NASA Glenn Research Center is testing a regenerative hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell that works like a rechargeable battery, aiming to store solar power, survive the Moon’s two-week lunar night and support future Artemis lunar habitats while also advancing hydrogen energy storage for Earth.

⚡️ The US’ biggest grid operator, PJM Interconnection, just saw wholesale electricity prices jump 76% to $136.53/MWh, with watchdog Monitoring Analytics blaming surging data centre demand and warning that consumers may bear the costs unless tech companies pay more directly for their own power needs.

Funds x Climate

Credit: Convective Capital

🔥 US-based Convective Capital raised an $85 million fund backed largely by institutions including insurers and asset managers to invest in early-stage disaster-resilience startups spanning wildfire, utilities, insurance, infrastructure and physical-world risk management.

💰 London’s Lansdowne Partners launched a VC fund with a £112 million first close backed by British Business Bank, Aviva Investors, Lloyds Banking Group and Lansdowne investors, to support high-potential UK university spinouts and startups in sectors including healthcare data, quantum, advanced materials, semiconductors and defence tech.

Materials x Climate

Credit: QuberTech

🌼 UK-based QuberTech raised £3.4 million in combined grant funding and equity investment from UKI2S and Sustainable Ventures to further develop sustainable natural rubber from engineered dandelions.

🪸 Swedish startup Salt & Fiber launched a €45,000 crowdfunding campaign alongside a €300,000 pre-seed round to scale its beach-cast seagrass textile yarns, fund pilot production and move toward commercialisation in 2027–2028.

💻 Dunia Innovations unveiled a €280 million Berlin GigaLab, backed by Siemens, ABB Robotics, NVIDIA and AWS, to industrialise its AI- and robotics-driven advanced materials discovery platform for catalysts, batteries and semiconductors.

🪵 Estonian biotech ÄIO secured COSMOS certification for three yeast-fermentation-derived cosmetic oils and lipid ingredients made from wood and agricultural side-streams.

👜 Italy’s SQIM launched Ephea Uma, a low-impact mycelium-based material now entering a global luxury accessories collection, marking its move from one-off fashion pieces into commercial luxury applications.

🇺🇸 US-based Sortera and AMP are using AI-powered sensors, cameras and robotics to recover and sort aluminum from scrap and waste streams more accurately, helping boost domestic supply and profitability as aluminum prices rise.

Water x Climate

Credit: Suntory Group

💧Japan’s Suntory Group launched a Brisbane River catchment water replenishment initiative in Queensland, Australia, to restore waterways, improve water sustainability and support future water management strategies.

🇬🇧 UK water regulator Ofwat has awarded £58 million to 19 Water Breakthrough Challenge projects across England and Wales, funding innovations including mushroom-based water filters, AI river-health monitoring, 3D-printed wastewater infrastructure and wastewater superbug tracking to help cut pollution, protect ecosystems and improve water resilience.

Photoshop x Climate

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Hi there,

Nuclear is back in the climate conversation, but its waste problem has never gone away.

Now, University of Nottingham researchers are exploring whether “applied smouldering” could help shrink the UK’s nuclear graphite waste challenge. The process uses flameless combustion to turn contaminated graphite bricks into ash, reducing volume while tapping the energy stored in the material.

With around 100,000 tonnes of irradiated graphite to manage in the UK (and plenty more elsewhere), it is a reminder that climate tech is not always about building what comes next. Sometimes it is about cleaning up what came before…without getting burned.

Credit: University of Nottingham

In this week’s edition: 

🧬 Former Perfect Day execs raise $2M for ultra-pure melanin
🌾 Resurrect Bio is giving crops AI powers
💰 Mantle8 scored $31M to drill for hydrogen

The Digest

💰 S2G Investments raised $1 billion for its S2G Solutions Fund I, with the capital targeting “missing middle” growth-stage businesses that improve supply-chain resilience and energy and food security, including investments such as XOcean, Echandia, Exacto and Urbint.

💵 Arãya Ventures and Sie Ventures launched the Arãya Sie Fund with a £7.5 million first close to back up to 40 female-founded pre-seed and seed-stage startups across AI, deeptech, fintech, healthcare and sustainability in the UK and Europe.

🇬🇧 A new Cleantech for UK report found that the UK led Europe in clean tech investment in 2025 with £7.2 billion raised, although the research warned that early-stage funding for hardware-heavy climate startups has fallen to a five-year low.

🪫 PJM Interconnection, the largest US power-grid operator, is under mounting pressure as AI and cloud data-centre demand strains capacity, renewables and batteries disrupt its old planning model, project interconnection backlogs slow new supply, and its proposed reforms risk angering utilities, politicians, businesses and households already frustrated by rising power prices. Nobody’s happy, basically.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Oishii

🍓 US vertical farming company Oishii closed the first tranche of a $150 million Series C round led by Sparx Asset Management, with participation from Nomura Real Estate Development, Misumi, Mizuho Bank and others, to scale its Smart Farm model which grows pesticide-free, non-GMO strawberries year-round.

🌾 Resurrect Bio, a University of Norwich spinout developing AI-powered technology designed to restore crops’ natural genetic defences against diseases and pests, expanded its Series A to $10.3 million in a round led by Corteva Catalyst with participation from Calculus Capital, Pymwymic, Future Planet Capital, SynBioVen and AgFunder.

🧫 Israel’s SuperMeat secured $6 million in the first close of a targeted $10 million Series A4 round led by Agronomics and New Agrarian Company, with participation from Milk & Honey Ventures and other existing backers, to support its planned Switzerland launch for its cultivated chicken.

🌿 Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a greener water-based nanotechnology pesticide formulation using modified cellulose nanocrystals that helps droplets stick to hydrophobic plant leaves rather than bouncing, drifting or washing off, reducing pesticide waste and runoff while achieving better pest control.

Energy x Climate

Credit: Mantle8

🇫🇷 French startup Mantle8 secured €31 million in a Series A funding round led by Sandwater, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Ecotechnologies 2, IP Group, Wind Capital and Calderion, to fund a two-year global exploration and drilling campaign to identify, rank and drill its most promising natural hydrogen sites using its proprietary subsurface modelling technology.

🧊 Iceotope Group, a provider of precision liquid cooling for data centres and AI infrastructure, raised $26 million Series B funding led by Two Seas Capital and Barclays Climate Ventures, with participation from Edinv, ABC Impact, Northern Gritstone and British Patient Capital, to bring its energy- and water-saving cooling technology to market.

🇩🇰 Copenhagen-based Reel raised €15 million Series A funding in a round led by Future Energy Ventures, with participation from UVC Partners, Transition, The Footprint Firm and angel investors. It helps businesses secure predictable renewable electricity costs while improving returns for energy producers through PPAs, data-driven trading, flexibility and battery-storage tools, and will use the funds to expand its portfolio.

⚡️ Durham University spinout H2CHP secured £1.5 million from Innovate UK, Blackfinch Ventures and Northstar Ventures’ North East Spinout Inspire Fund to develop and demonstrate its fuel-flexible free-piston linear generator technology, which can run on hydrogen, ammonia, biofuels and e-fuels to provide cleaner, resilient local power for data centres, microgrids, EV charging and ports.

🏡 Stockholm-based Elvy, which offers fully integrated home energy subscriptions covering solar panels, heat pumps, batteries, installation, maintenance and electricity needs, raised €5.9 million in a funding round led by Essential Capital and Daft Capital, with participation from Mathias Kamprad and other angels, to accelerate its model across Europe. 

☀️ Researchers in Germany have demonstrated a compact solar-powered hydrogen module in Freiburg that achieved a record 31.3% solar-to-hydrogen efficiency under real outdoor conditions.

🌞 UK property developer Zunikh has partnered with solar company Gryd to install fully funded rooftop solar on a new-build apartment block in Enfield, using a UK-first model that allocates solar generation directly to nine individual flats.

Materials x Climate

Credit: Melazyme

🧬 US precision fermentation startup Melazyme, founded by former Perfect Day executives Perumal Gandhi and Bonney Oommen, raised $2 million seed funding in a round led by SeaX Ventures with participation from Stellaris Venture Partners and Plug and Play Ventures to advance and scale its platform for high-value biomolecules including ultra-pure melanin for cosmetics, coatings, filtration and environmental applications, plus sweet proteins such as brazzein.

🔥 Engineers at the University of Nottingham secured funding for a new research project exploring smouldering, or flameless combustion, as a more sustainable and energy-efficient way to reduce contaminated nuclear graphite waste bricks to ash.

The Met Gala x Climate

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Hi there,

Refrigerators have somehow escaped innovation for over a century. AI is rewriting the internet, rockets land themselves, yet the thing keeping your oat milk cold still relies on the same basic technology from the 1920s.

But Cambridge startup Barocal just raised $10 million to commercialise a cooling system that uses solid materials instead of climate-warming refrigerant gases. No leaking HFCs, no traditional compressors… just materials that heat up when squeezed and cool down when pressure is released. Essentially, refrigeration via an extremely sophisticated stress ball.

It sounds quirky, but cooling is becoming one of climate tech’s hottest sectors (sorry). Air conditioning and refrigeration already consume around 10% of global electricity, while leaked refrigerants can warm the planet thousands of times more than CO2. If this tech can scale, this could cut both emissions and energy demand at the same time. Pretty cool! (sorry again)

Credit: TechCrunch

In this week’s edition: 

💡 ENVIOTECH scored €1M to make streetlights intelligent
🧪 Amazon bets on Nobel Prize-winning chemistry
🌳 Eucalyptus bark could clean air and water

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Meatly

🧫 UK-based Meatly raised £10 million Series A funding from existing backers such as Agronomics, and first-time investors Oyster Bay Venture Capital, Clean Growth Fund, and JamJar Investments, to build Europe’s largest cultivated meat facility in London.

🪖 US biotech Biosphere secured $9 million from the US Department of Defense and US Army DEVCOM Soldier Center to develop portable bioreactors that turn gases into protein for military rations, with the funding supporting the creation of field-deployable food production systems for remote and logistically challenging environments.

🫒 Israeli startup PhenOlives secured a $270,000 investment from OurCrowd to scale its patented process that converts olive pomace into sustainable olive flour and polyphenol ingredients, with the funds also supporting further R&D into blackwater-derived ingredients.

🦀 Denmark’s Decameal closed an undisclosed seed round from Delphinus Venture Capital, Rockstart and strategic co-investor Aller Aqua to scale its patent-pending process that converts invasive shore crabs into sustainable protein and lipid feed ingredients.

Energy x Climate

Credit: Moment Energy

🇨🇦 Canada’s Moment Energy secured $40 million Series B funding in a round led by Evok Innovations, with backing from Liberty Mutual Investments, W23 Global Fund, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and In-Q-Tel, to scale its business repurposing used EV batteries into energy storage systems for data centres, utilities and industrial sites.

🧊 UK-based Barocal raised a $10 million seed round from investors including World Fund, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures and IP Group to commercialise its solid-state cooling and heating technology that replaces conventional refrigerant gases with pressure-responsive materials (think squeezing plastic crystals to create a cooling effect).

💡 German smart city startup ENVIOTECH secured €1 million pre-seed funding in a round led by former Deutsche Bank co-CEO Jürgen Fitschen, with backing from Joachim Drees and other investors, to scale its retrofit technology that upgrades existing streetlights with intelligent monitoring and dimming systems.

🌋 US geothermal energy startup Fervo Energy is seeking to raise up to $1.3 billion in a Nasdaq IPO that could value the company at around $6.5 billion, with the funds expected to support expansion of its enhanced geothermal power projects that provide round-the-clock carbon-free electricity.

✅ Amazon has signed a multi-year deal with US startup Transaera to deploy energy-efficient dehumidification systems based on Nobel Prize-winning materials chemistry that remove moisture from air more efficiently than traditional HVAC systems, helping cut cooling-related energy use across its buildings.

☀️ Researchers in China have developed an AI-optimised solar-hydrogen energy system for hospitals that combines solar panels, hydrogen storage and fuel cells to provide continuous low-carbon power while also producing medical oxygen, potentially cutting grid reliance and reducing CO2 emissions by around 2,000 tons annually.

🌬️ PepsiCo signed a 10-year renewable energy agreement with Norway’s Statkraft to source wind power from a project in Spain that is expected to cut around 32,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions annually across its European operations and supply chain.

🌞 UK kitchen retailer Wren is investing in what it says will be the UK’s largest single-roof solar installation, with more than 13,000 solar panels set to cover its Barton-upon-Humber manufacturing plant and supply over 35% of the factory’s electricity demand.

Materials x Climate

Credit: Lithosquare

🇫🇷 French startup Lithosquare raised €21.4 million to accelerate the discovery of critical minerals by using AI to analyse geological and geophysical data, with the funding aimed at scaling its exploration platform and speeding up identification of deposits needed for the energy transition. 

👗 Amsterdam-based VNYX secured over €1 million from investors including Baltic Business Angels, Squads Fund, Stichting DOEN, Earthstar, RVO and Spark Design & Innovation to scale its AI-powered resale automation technology that helps fashion brands process and resell returned, overstock and second-hand garments more profitably than dumping or burning them.

🌳 Researchers at Australia’s RMIT University have developed a way to turn discarded eucalyptus bark into a highly porous carbon material that could help clean polluted water, filter dirty air and capture carbon dioxide.

🔋 A UK consortium including UKBIC, Watercycle Technologies, Recyclus Group and Polaron secured government funding through the Battery Innovation Programme to develop a lithium-ion battery recycling process that converts battery waste into cathode materials for new batteries domestically.

Water x Climate

Credit: Enaxiom

💦 Sydney-based Enaxiom raised $1.8 million seed funding in a round led by Epic Angels, with support from BlackNova and Antler, to commercialise its Hydrocool system that reduces water use in AI data centre cooling by using non-potable water and recovering reusable water as a by-product.

🍅 The EU-funded RAINS project unveiled new irrigation technologies and water management strategies designed to help Mediterranean agriculture grow more food with less water as climate change intensifies drought and water scarcity across the region. 

📱 Popular Culture x Climate

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

Can you turn science into something that runs reliably at scale?

That question powered last week’s HackSummit, and one idea kept bubbling up: innovation isn’t the issue, industrialisation is.

From hardware financing to resilient supply chains to computational design, the challenge (and opportunity) is turning breakthroughs into systems that actually run at scale. That means tighter partnerships, smarter capital, and ecosystems built to deliver, not just invent.

The good news? Europe already has all the pieces of the puzzle. What’s changing now is the coordination, and the urgency to deliver.

In this week’s edition: 

🤑 X-Energy’s billion-dollar IPO
🚲 Forest bags £40M for e-bikes
💰 BMW i Venture’s new $300M fund

The Digest

🇪🇺 A coalition of European investors, corporates and startups, led by Norrsken, is urging EU policymakers to commit to making Europe the world’s first “electro-continent”, targeting 50% of final energy consumption from clean, domestically produced electricity by 2040 to cut fossil fuel dependence, reduce energy price shocks and boost industrial competitiveness.

💪🏼 Good Read: Chainreactor shared thoughts on why Europe is Deep Tech’s new frontier, inspired by the HackSummit.

🇨🇭 Interesting: Hugo Rauch, VC at Climate Club, shared a snapshot of Switzerland’s best-funded climate startups.

👀 Interesting: TIME unveiled its list of the ten most influential sustainability companies of 2026.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Primogene

👶🏻 Primogene, based in Germany, raised €4.1 million seed funding in a round led by High-Tech Gründerfonds, with participation from Technologiegründerfonds Sachsen, Better Ventures, Sächsische Beteiligungsgesellschaft, Golzern Holding, FS Life Science Investment and C-LEcta founder Marc Struhalla, to further develop enzymatically produced, nature-identical bioactive molecules such as human milk oligosaccharides for infant nutrition.

🥛 Canada’s Opalia closed around CAD$2 million from investors including Hoogwegt Group, Ahimsa Foundation, Box One Ventures, Cycle Momentum, Kale United, Investissement Québec and Natural Products Canada. It will use the funds to scale its cell-based dairy and work towards regulatory approval in North America.

💡 US startup Fermeate secured $2 million in a seed funding round led by Newfund Capital, with participation from SOSV and Ajinomoto Group Ventures, to further develop its optogenetics platform that uses light to control microbial gene expression and boost precision fermentation output. 

🏭 Solar Foods secured €350,000 in EU funding through the BalticSeaH2 hydrogen valley project to scale production of its air-based protein Solein, with the funds aimed at expanding capacity at its Factory 01 facility and demonstrating hydrogen-powered food production as part of a broader clean energy ecosystem.

Biodiversity x Climate

Credit: Living Carbon

🌳 US-based Living Carbon secured a $500 million project financing from Octopus Energy Generation to scale reforestation across North America, targeting 250,000 acres, to remove CO₂ and produce sustainable forest products, supported by carbon offtake deals with Google, Meta and McKinsey & Company.

Energy x Climate

Credit: TechCrunch

💰 US startup X-energy raised around $1 billion in an upsized IPO, selling shares at $23 each to fund the development and deployment of its small modular nuclear reactors, with the stock jumping 27% on its Nasdaq debut.

☀️ UK-based Enviromena secured an £825 million financing package from lenders including BBVA, Intesa Sanpaolo, Lloyds, NatWest and Société Générale to develop and operate large-scale renewable energy projects, aiming to accelerate delivery of a 1GW UK solar pipeline and scale its platform to support the country’s energy transition and net-zero goals.

🌀 Spiral Hydrogen raised €2.7 million pre-seed funding to further develop its high-efficiency electrolyser technology, and will use the funds to build a green hydrogen pilot in Rotterdam to demonstrate lower-cost, scalable production for industrial decarbonisation.

♻️ Researchers at the University of Adelaide have demonstrated that solar-powered “photoreforming” can convert waste plastics into hydrogen, syngas and other valuable chemicals.

⚛️ US-based Zap Energy is expanding beyond fusion by adding nuclear fission to its roadmap, developing small modular reactors to deliver near-term power and generate revenue faster, driven by surging electricity demand from AI and data centres.

📈 AI-driven data center electricity demand is pushing a shift toward natural gas power, with construction costs for gas plants rising 66% over the past two years, according to data from Wood Mackenzie.

👀 Useful: SET Ventures released its market report exploring why process heat is one of the “largest and most underexplored opportunities” for industrial decarbonisation. 

Materials x Climate

Credit: Foamlab

🦠 Netherlands-based Foamlab raised €3 million in a funding round led by ICOS Capital, with participation from Value Factory Ventures, DOEN Ventures, Capricorn Industrial Biotech Fund and TTT Green Tech, to build a pilot plant for its compostable, bacterial cellulose-based foams as alternatives to fossil plastics.

⏩️ Earth AI is vertically integrating its AI-powered critical minerals discovery platform by building in-house labs to analyse drilling samples, cutting turnaround times from months to days, in order to speed up exploration, reduce costs and improve decision-making in the search for deposits like copper and palladium.

🤑 Fashion resale platform Vinted has reached an €8 billion valuation following an €880 million secondary sale led by EQT Group, with TVG, Schroders Capital and BlackRock.

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Forest

🚲 London-based Forest raised £40 million Series B funding, including backing from OKAI, B8 Venture Partners, Fen Ventures, Güil Mobility Ventures and Fintex Capital, to expand its shared e-bike platform across the city.

🚕 Rocsys raised $13 million in a Series A extension led by Capricorn Partners with participation from Scania Invest, Forward.One, SEB Greentech and Graduate Ventures. It will use the funds to launch its M1 system, the world’s first multi-bay, hands-free EV charging solution for robotaxi fleets. 

🚙 Australia’s ReadySteadyPlug secured $1.51 million from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to expand its EV Charging-as-a-Service platform for apartment buildings, with the funds aimed at accelerating installation of affordable, scalable charging infrastructure nationwide to support growing electric vehicle adoption.

💰 BMW i Ventures launched a new $300 million fund to invest in early-stage startups across AI, robotics and industrial tech, with a focus on “agentic” and physical AI to transform automotive, manufacturing and supply chains.

🚤 Semantics x Climate

We have to stop using anti-transport language:

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Hi there,

Europe’s industrial renaissance took centre stage at HackSummit’s climate-focused day this Wednesday, and what a day it was.

Europe has a chance to lean into its strengths: deep engineering talent, advanced manufacturing heritage, and a growing appetite for long-term, infrastructure-scale innovation. And, as Beau-Anne Chilla, partner at FORWARD.one, put it: energy itself is fast becoming a form of currency, reshaping how we think about value creation in the climate economy.

There were startups galore, spanning advanced materials, greenhouse tech, biosecurity and beyond, showcasing a future that’s cleaner, more resilient, and built to last.

And we all learned a new word from Stefano Bernardi, General Partner at Unruly Capital: entelechy.

In this week’s edition: 

⚡️ The startup using century-old grid tech
⚛️ Blue Energy scored $380M for modular nuclear power plants
💎 The focus on critical minerals and why they're, well, critical

The Digest

🌊 Pacific island nations including Tuvalu, Fiji and Vanuatu have jointly launched the “Tassiriki Call for a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific”, a landmark regional declaration advocating for a global Fossil Fuel Treaty and a rapid, coordinated phase-out of coal, oil and gas.

🤖 US-based Sygaldry raised $139 million across seed and Series A rounds, led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Initialized Capital with participation from Earth Venture Capital and others, to develop quantum-accelerated AI servers that improve the speed and energy efficiency of AI workloads.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: COSAIC

💶 Planetary, based in Switzerland, raised $28 million in a funding round led by Radikal Capital and Oetker Ventures with participation from Royal Cosun, Arc Investors, Green Generation Fund, AgriFoodTech Venture Alliance, Astanor Ventures and XAnge. It will use the funds to build and license its industrial fermentation platform that converts agricultural byproducts into mycoprotein and other ingredients. 

🐜 French agtech Agriodor secured €15 million Series A funding in a round led by the Environmental and Solidarity Revolution Fund, with participation from Région Sud Investissement, CAAP Création, Capagro, CapHorn and SWEN Capital Partners. It will use the funds to scale its scent-based crop protection technology that uses natural plant-emitted odours to influence insect behaviour.

🇨🇭 Swiss biotech Cosaic raised $6 million in a seed extension round led by DSM-Firmenich Ventures, with participation from Kickfund, a Swiss family office, Navus Ventures and Zürcher Kantonalbank, to scale its yeast fermentation-derived emulsifier that replaces multiple additives in food.

🇨🇦 Toronto-based AuX Labs closed $4 million in a round led by NYA Ventures and Nàdarra Ventures, with participation from Verdex Capital, Builders VC, Bluestein Ventures and Congruent Ventures, to scale production of animal-free cheese using precision-fermented casein.

Biodiversity x Climate

Credit: Ulysses

🌊 Ocean technology startup Ulysses raised $46 million in combined seed and Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Booz Allen Ventures and Harpoon Ventures, to develop autonomous underwater and surface vehicles that support ocean restoration, infrastructure and defence applications.

Inside HackSummit

On Wednesday, we brought together the Founders, Investors and Operators moving the needle in Climate Deep Tech to accelerate Europe's reindustrialisation.

From scaling orbit on demand to building verification and trust in Climate and the role of HardTech vs Saas in Europe's industrial it was a day filled with optimism, realism and hope for a stronger, more resilient Europe. Here’s how the day unfolded.

With Europe’s boldest and bravest, including: Voltfang, Unruly Capital, Tomorrow Visionaries, Paebbl, Contrarian Ventures, Altrove, World Fund, NordicNinja VC, SlateVC, Pave Space, Milvus Advanced, Hypercube, Marble and many more.

Energy x Climate

Credit: Rivan

⚛️ US-based nuclear startup Blue Energy raised $380 million to build modular nuclear power plants manufactured in shipyards, with the funding aimed at scaling construction of its reactor-agnostic systems to deliver faster, lower-cost clean energy for industrial and data centre demand. 

🇬🇧 UK startup Rivan raised €28.7 million in a funding round led by Platinum Equity with participation from Planet A Ventures and Zero Carbon Capital to scale its modular production plants which produce low-cost synthetic fuels from captured CO₂ and renewable electricity.

⚡️ Ayr Energy, based in the US, secured $25 million from investors including Energy Impact Partners. It will use the funds to support the manufacture of modular iron-core transformers using century-old grid technology.

🚚 Paris-based Decade Energy raised €22 million from Eiffel Investment Group and SET Ventures, with participation from Ananda Impact Ventures and Contrarian Ventures, to scale its integrated depot power solutions, which combine storage, charging, solar and software for electric truck fleets.

🔥 Exergy3, a spinout from the University of Edinburgh, raised £10 million seed funding from undisclosed investors to scale its ultra-high temperature thermal energy storage systems that convert surplus renewable electricity into industrial heat.

🇫🇮 TheStorage, based in Finland, secured €3.6 million in a seed round led by Voima Ventures with participation from Superhero Capital, 2C Ventures, and Momentum, to scale its sand-based thermal energy storage technology that helps industrial companies decarbonise heat processes.

☀️ Berlin-based VREY raised €3.3 million from Rubio Impact Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Kopa Ventures to epand its software platform that enables landlords to generate and distribute rooftop solar power to tenants in multi-family buildings.

🗺️ Plume raised €3.3 million in a funding round led by AENU, with participation from Y Combinator, Kima Ventures, Raise Phiture, Better Angle and Collab Fund, to help renewable energy developers accelerate site selection and permitting using geospatial AI.

🇺🇸 US-based NOC Energy secured $2.7 million seed funding in a round led by 360 Capital, with participation from SOSV and Desai VC, to develop hybrid industrial heating systems that combine electric and fossil fuel heat for cement and glass plants.

😎 Swiss startup LightSeeds secured €162,000 from Venture Kick to further develop and roll out its ultra-light, glass-free vertical solar systems that turn unused infrastructure surfaces into energy assets.

⚛️ US-based nuclear startup X-Energy has filed to raise up to $800 million in an IPO to scale its small modular reactor and nuclear fuel technology, with proceeds expected to support commercialisation and deployment of its clean energy systems.

🔌 Merino Energy, a San Francisco-based startup founded by a former Apple AirPods engineer, is developing a simplified, plug-in heat pump system that combines indoor and outdoor components into one unit to cut installation time and costs, aiming to make home electrification more accessible and scalable.

✅ Kinetic 7 has developed a breakthrough “hydrogen-on-demand” system that generates hydrogen from aluminium and water for use in fuel cells, aiming to provide a safer, transportable alternative to compressed hydrogen.

🤝🏼 California-based fusion energy startup Inertia is partnering with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to commercialise laser-based inertial confinement fusion technology that compresses fuel pellets to generate clean energy, with the aim of building grid-scale fusion power plants. 

Funds x Climate

Credit: Eka Ventures

💶 Eka Ventures closed a $107 million Fund II, backed by investors including the British Business Bank, Better Society Capital, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation and The Health Foundation, to invest in pre-seed and seed-stage startups focused on health, wellbeing and sustainability.

🇩🇰 Copenhagen-based VC firm Unconventional Ventures announced the second close of its Fund II with backing from investors including Wire Group, Investinor, FÆRCH OG DØTRE and Merete Lundbye Møller, to continue investing in underrepresented founders building scalable, impact-driven companies.

🇬🇧 The UK government launched a £50 million fund to accelerate the deployment of AI, robotics and nature-based agri-tech solutions, with the investment aimed at turning up to 12 innovations into practical on-farm tools that boost productivity while reducing labour, energy and fertiliser use.

Materials x Climate

Credit: pH7 Technologies

🇸🇪 Swedish low-carbon steel startup Stegra secured a €1.4 billion rescue funding package led by the Wallenberg Investments consortium with backing from investors including Temasek and IMAS Foundation, to complete construction of its hydrogen-based steel plant in northern Sweden. 

🇨🇦 Canada’s pH7 Technologies closed an oversubscribed Series B of around $32 million, led by Fine Structure Ventures with participation from BHP Ventures, Energy & Environment Investment, Siteground, Gaingels, Calm Venture and existing investors including TDK Ventures, Pangaea Ventures and BASF Venture Capital. It will use the funds to scale its electrochemical technology that extracts critical minerals from low-grade ores and waste, with the aim of deploying the system across global mining operations. 

🔋 Altilium secured £18.5 million in grant funding from the UK government’s DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund to scale its EV battery recycling technology, with the funds set to build its ACT3 facility in Plymouth and accelerate domestic recovery of critical battery materials.

♻️ Australian battery recycling startup Renewable Metals raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, with participation from Neglected Climate Opportunities, European Metal Recycling, Investible and Climate Tech Partners, to scale its hydrometallurgical process that recovers critical minerals from lithium-ion batteries.

🪵 Croatia-based Fasal Bio raised €7 million from BlackPeak Capital to scale its wood-based renewable composite platform designed to replace conventional plastics.

🇬🇧 Naturbeads, based in the UK, secured €4.1 million from the European Structural Fund to scale its biodegradable cellulose microbeads that replace plastic microbeads, with the investment used to support its new production plant in Italy.

🇺🇸 US startup Radify raised just under $3 million from Overture, Founders Inc., Mana Ventures and Acequia Capital to develop compact plasma reactors that convert metal oxides into pure metals for rare earth supply chains, with the aim of reducing reliance on Chinese supply.

🪸 Uluu, based in Australia, secured $2.1 million in grant funding from the Australian Government’s Industry Growth Program to scale its seaweed-based biodegradable materials.

🧱 Netherlands-based MAECONOMY raised €1.5 million from LUMO Labs and LIOF to build a platform that turns building materials into auditable, tradable circular assets using digital material passports and financial infrastructure.

🔮 Then v Now

The things we’d never have believed just a few years ago…

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

This week we asked 8 leading European investors working across materials, manufacturing, and industrial systems a simple question: which startups are accelerating Europe’s reindustrialisation?

Here’s who they told us 👇

From AI-designed supply chains and robotic maintenance to carbon-negative materials and bio-based production, these 24 startups were top of mind for investors.

Next up, all these investors, some of the startups mentioned and all these leading companies will be at the HackSummit next week.

If you haven’t already, it’s time to block your schedule, book your travel and come and join us before the chance to join the event slips a-w-a-y…

That’s why this week’s edition is packed with HackSummit highlights and happenings (and we’ll be back after the event with your usual roundup of industry milestones).

Let’s dive right in.

🎤 Who’s On Stage

How do we rebuild Europe's industrial base?

Europe's manufacturing, energy and materials infrastructure were designed for a world that no longer exists.

April 22 is for those rebuilding it across physics, chemistry, and engineering.

Expect candid discussions, small group workshops and actionable lessons on what it takes to build across critical minerals (Hades Mining, Milvus Advanced, DEScycle), energy infrastructure (Voltfang, CorPower, EPYR, Enerdrape), advanced materials (Modern Meadow, Seprify), AI in manufacturing (Altrove, Cloover), in-space production (Pave Space) and frontier resources (Phlair, Hypercube).

🎯 The Ones to Meet at the Startup Fair

At this year’s HackSummit Startup Fair, 30 climate startups are building solutions with industrial relevance, from eDNA biodiversity monitoring and nature-based remediation, to hydrogen-powered maritime fleets, foldable PV systems for commercial rooftops, and micromobility battery reconditioning and recycling.

The lineup reflects the breadth of climate innovation including startups turning CO₂ and water into sustainable fuels, upcycling biogenic CO₂ side-streams into valuable products, developing custom synthetic proteins that bind metals, and reinventing supply chains with competitive circular materials.

The HackSummit Startup Fair is one of the best places to meet founders early and see the technologies shaping the next wave of climate and industrial transformation.

👩‍💻 Hackathon Builder Challenge

5 years in, and we’re finally going back to our roots by hosting a Hackathon.

We’re bringing together engineers, scientists, builders, and creatives for an 18-hour challenge to build solutions that actually matter, focused on the future of industrial renaissance and sovereignty.

On April 22, teams tackle real-world challenges with SICPA.

Through the PROVE track, builders turn the invisible into tamper-resistant proof, using AI, sensing, and authentication tech to verify claims across critical minerals, natural resources, and circular supply chains.

We’ll invite the top teams back to pitch live on the HackSummit main stage on April 23.

⚒️ Meet the teams behind the challenge, become a mentor and see what can happen when you give smart people 18 hours and no off switch.

🪅 Come for the Summit, Stay for the Side Events

Beyond the HackSummit programme, make the most of your trip by joining in the Side Events taking place across the city. 

👩‍💻 Hackathon, April 22

18 hours to build something real. This hackathon brings together the brightest minds from leading technical and business universities to build the future of European Manufacturing.

📈 Hack Pilot Day, April 24

Connect with SMEs facing real operational challenges, and explore where your solution could be relevant, with companies matched to your use cases in advance. The Hack Pilot Day opens new opportunities for startups working on industrial efficiency, built environment performance and food resilience. 

🎊 17 Side Events, April 21-24

Whether you’re up for a HackRun outdoors, unwinding with breathwork, starting the day with breakfast, catching up over beers at the AfterPartys or taking a site visit to Voltiris, Enerdrape, Windworks, CompPair and Sunaxer, there’s something for everyone.

The Hack Week is just around the corner, if you’re ready to join us use code FINALCALL for 15% off your pass.

And yes, we’ll be back in your inbox after the HackSummit with your weekly dose of ClimateTech milestones and funding rounds each Friday, as usual.

Hope to see you in Lausanne next week.

Laura at Hack

Hi there,

Venture capital is playing an increasingly decisive role in shaping the future of climate, deep tech, and industrial transformation.

Over the past decade, capital flowing into climate tech alone has grown from a niche category into a multi-billion-euro opportunity, with Europe emerging as one of the most active regions globally.

Our list of 180 must-know VC partners highlights the General Partners behind Europe’s most active VCs.

Their thesis-driven capital targets hard problems with long timelines, like decarbonising supply chains, reinventing materials, and rebuilding how we produce food at scale.

In this week’s edition: 

🚀 Starcloud raises $170M to build solar-powered data centres in space
🌊 PuriFire’s tech that turns wastewater into green fuels
🔋 tozero opens Europe’s first industrial-scale battery recycling plant

The Digest

Credit: Sifted

🇪🇺 Good Read: Ahead of HackSummit, April 22-23, we caught up with Sifted to share how Europe’s deeptech edge could become a global advantage if the region can better translate innovation into scalable, commercial success. 

🚀 US-based Starcloud raised $170 million, in a Series A funding round led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, to build space-based data centres powered by continuous solar energy.

🇯🇵 Japan-based TODA Advanced Materials is shutting its pCAM plant in Sarnia, Ontario - one of the only large-scale facilities in the West producing a key battery material - highlighting a major gap in local supply chains and the difficulty of building a fully circular battery industry without this step.

🌍 EarthScale is a free, UK-wide 12-month programme helping IP-rich climate tech ventures to scale, navigate manufacturing and raise Series A funding. Apply here before 13th April.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Studio Lazareff

🇫🇷 French precision fermentation company Standing Ovation raised €30 million in a Series B funding round backed by investors including Bpifrance, Crédit Mutuel Innovation, Bel Group, Danone Ventures and Astanor. It will use the funds to scale commercial rollout of its animal-free casein and expand into global markets.

🇳🇱 The Dutch Research Council awarded €4.1 million to three cellular agriculture projects under the National Growth Fund programme to advance cultivated meat and precision fermentation technologies, with the funding aimed at scaling production and reducing costs.

🥕 Austrian startup Afreshed has acquired German rival Etepetete to consolidate the “ugly produce” food waste market in the DACH region, alongside securing a mid-seven-figure investment from Raiffeisen-Holding Niederösterreich-Wien to fund its expansion into Germany and further develop its tech-driven logistics and route-optimisation platform.

🥛 Mississippi has passed legislation banning the sale of lab-grown dairy products, including cell-cultured milk, becoming the first US state to extend cultivated meat restrictions to dairy.

Construction x Climate

Credit: ecoworks

🏡 Germany’s ecoworks secured €23 million to deploy its AI-powered serial renovation technology to modernise residential buildings at scale, with the funding supporting the rollout of Germany’s largest neighbourhood-scale retrofit project and accelerating climate-neutral housing upgrades. 

🧱 Swedish startup Enkei closed a pre-seed funding round backed by investors including Anders Lendager, Christina Åqvist, Ulf Mattsson, Fabian Månsson and RadCap to scale its circular materials platform that converts construction waste into design-grade materials.

The HackSummit Stage is Set

The HackSummit stages are where stories and secrets are shared to give you a head start on building, funding and scaling.

What’s no secret is that we’ve invited some of the industry’s most ambitious and bullish investors to give their uncensored opinions on scaling Climate HardTech.

Expect unfiltered insights on what they’re really looking for right now, how the funding landscape is shifting, and where the biggest opportunities lie over the next 12–24 months.

Hear first hand from the investors deciding where capital flows next: NordicNinja VC, FORWARDone, Contrarian Ventures, FLORA Ventures, Planet A Ventures, Nucleus Capital, Visionaries Tomorrow, Synthesis Capital, Ordway Selections, Eurazeo, World Fund, SlateVC, Astanor, Unruly Capital, Kost Capital, Omni Ventures, FoodLabs, 2100 Ventures

See all 30+ Speakers

Energy x Climate

Credit: TerraSpark

👽 TerraSpark, based in Belgium, raised over €5 million pre-seed funding from investors including Daphni, better ventures, the Hans(wo)men Group and strategic angels to develop space-based solar power systems, starting with radio frequency wireless energy transmission on Earth before scaling to orbital infrastructure.

🔥 Switzerland-based SolidWatts raised €1.9 million seed funding from investors including Evercurious VC, Kickfund, Axel Carbon Capital, Uni.Fund and Loggerhead Ventures to scale its solid-state RF industrial heating platform, which uses high-efficiency dielectric heating to replace fossil fuel systems.

🚢 UK startup PuriFire Energys unveiled its proprietary hydrothermal gasification technology that converts wastewater and carbon waste into green hydrogen and bio-methanol for maritime fuel.

🗺️ Interesting: Victor Angot shared this European ecosystem map of critical raw materials.

Funds x Climate

Credit: Your Story

🇸🇬 Singapore-based Circulate Capital raised $220 million at the first close of its Asia Fund II from investors including The Coca-Cola Company, Danone, Dow and Procter & Gamble to back circular economy businesses, with the fund set to scale recycling and circular supply chains across South and Southeast Asia.

👩🏻‍🔬 UK startup Empirical Ventures secured a £10 million commitment from the British Business Bank to invest in “venture scientists” building deeptech and life science startups, with the funding aimed at enabling larger early-stage investments and helping scientists commercialise breakthrough research into scalable companies.

Looking for your first / next pilot partner?

We’re hosting the first Hack Pilot Day: a curated matchmaking day designed to connect startups with established companies to build pilots.

You'll be matched with curated SMEs looking to collaborate with pilot-ready startups.

The goal is simple: create the right conditions to explore collaborations that can actually move forward.

If you're looking for new partners to scale up in Food Resilience, Industrial Efficiency or Built Environment Performance, the Pilot Day is for you.

Apply Today

Materials x Climate

Credit: tozero

🔋Germany’s tozero opened Europe’s first industrial-scale battery recycling plant using its proprietary hydrometallurgical process to recover high-purity lithium and graphite from lithium-ion batteries, designed to reduce reliance on imported critical materials.

🇫🇮 Finland-based Sensmet secured €1.5 million from EIT RawMaterials to scale its µDOES (Micro-Discharge Optical Emission Spectroscopy) technology for real-time, multi-metal monitoring in liquid processes, with the funding set to expand deployment across battery metals production, recycling and other critical raw material value chains.

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Metafuels

✈️ Switzerland-based Metafuels secured a €1.92 million grant from the Dutch government to advance its Rotterdam e-SAF project, which uses proprietary methanol-to-jet “aerobrew” technology to produce scalable sustainable aviation fuel.

🔋 April Fool x Climate

Introducing the WOMBATTERY.

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

If you still picture factories as smokestacks and assembly lines, let’s bring you up to speed.

A new generation of “factories” is emerging powered by by biology, waste streams, and entirely new production logics.

Think microbes instead of petrochemicals. Waste as feedstock. Precision fermentation and synbio turning raw materials into programmable platforms.

It’s already happening across Europe’s industrial base, as founders scale technologies designed to decarbonise materials, localise supply chains, these 320 startups are redefining what manufacturing looks like. 

In this week’s edition: 

🧵 Renasens is spinning CO₂ into textiles
🚀 Arbor Energy scores a billion-dollar order
⚡ Entrix raises €43M to tame the grid

The Digest

Credit: Startup Daily

🤝🏼 A new EU–Australia trade agreement could unlock access to Horizon Europe, a $155 billion research and innovation fund, giving Australian startups and institutions opportunities to collaborate and secure funding across areas like advanced computing, clean tech and health. 

🧊 Interesting: A study of an Alpine glacier ice core has revealed that human-caused pollution dates back to the Roman era, long before industrialisation, highlighting early impacts from activities like metal production and biomass burning.

😎 Dealroom shared its list of the 30 most influential people shaping Europe’s deep tech system right now. Are you on it?

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Miraterra

👩🏻‍💻 Canadian startup Miraterra closed a $16 million seed extension led by At One Ventures with participation from S2G Investments, Sitka Foundation, iSelect and new investor Farm Credit Canada. It is developing advanced soil measurement technology that combines chemical and biological analysis, and will use the funds to further expand its platform.

🇦🇺 Australia’s Cauldron Ferm raised $13.25 million in a Series A2 funding round led by Main Sequence Ventures with participation from Horizons Ventures, SOSV and NGS Super to scale its continuous “hyper-fermentation” platform for producing bio-based ingredients more efficiently.

🐮 Australian agtech Rumin8, which is developing methane-reducing feed additives for cattle, raised $4.3 million from New Zealand’s AgriZeroNZ to advance trials ahead of commercial rollout. 

🐄 Swedish startup Volta Greentech secured €1.7 million in a round led by Axel Johnson to support the market launch and further development of its methane-reducing product Lome, designed to help cut cattle emissions.

Carbon x Climate

Credit: Zevero

🤖 UK-based Zevero, a carbon management platform that uses AI to automate emissions data collection and support ESG decision-making, raised $7 million. The round was led by Spiral Capital with participation from Gazelle Capital and Deep 30, and it will use the funds to support its expansion across Europe and Asia-Pacific.

⭐️ Applications are now open for Frontier’s 2026 Innovation Program, supporting breakthrough carbon removal solutions tackling key scaling and measurement challenges. Find out more and apply here.

Investors Heading to HackSummit

Extantia, SET Ventures, SpeedInvest, Astanor at HackSummit

Investors at the HackSummit represent one of the most influential concentrations of climate and hard tech capital in Europe looking to fund tomorrow’s manufacturers.

You’ll meet the funders writing checks at global banks, CVCs, LPs, VCs and accelerators who are all actively backing the next generation of industrial innovation.

In the room includes:

• VCs: Astanor, Unruly, Visionaries Tomorrow, Contrarian Ventures, Planet A Ventures, Kompas, Vorwerk Ventures, Underground Ventures, Lightrock

• Banks: Rabobank, UBS, Rentenbank, Julius Bar, Decalia, BPI France

• CVCs: Roche, Aramco Ventures, PINC, Swisscom Ventures, Fortescue

• Accelerators: Carbon13, Biotope, Food Founders Studio, Brainforest

Whether you’re raising capital, exploring partnerships, or building relationships for your next round, it’s time to meet them face to face in Lausanne on 22-23 April.

Tip: The networking app goes live next month so you can schedule 1-1 meetings with potential and existing investors.

Join them in Lausanne

Energy x Climate

Credit: Entrix

🔋 German startup Entrix raised €43 million in a funding round led by Junction Growth Investors and Korys, with participation from BNP Paribas, Allianz, AENU, Enpal, Abacon and Arvantis Group, to scale its AI-driven platform that is designed to optimise battery storage, support grid stability and accelerate renewable energy integration across Europe. 

🆕 Lace Lithography raised $40 million in a round led by Atomico with participation from M12 and Vsquared Ventures to develop a novel atom-based chip manufacturing method that could surpass traditional photolithography.

🔥 Switzerland’s SolidWatts, which is developing high-efficiency electric industrial heating using RF technology, secured €1.9 million seed funding from investors including Evercurious VC, Kickfund, and Axel Carbon Capital to advance its platform.

⚡️ US-based Arbor Energy, which is developing rocket-derived modular turbines, secured a multi-billion-dollar order from GridMarket to deploy up to 5GW of power capacity using its 3D-printed Halcyon systems, aiming to deliver faster, flexible and lower-emission electricity for data centres and industrial users.

Funds x Climate

Credit: 360 Capital

🇮🇹 Italy’s 360 Capital closed €85 million for its Poli360 2 deeptech fund, backed by investors including the European Investment Fund, CDP Venture Capital SGR, and industrial players Brembo, MBDA and Lucchini RS, to invest in early-stage university spinouts across industry automation and sustainability.

🇵🇱 Warsaw-based Montis VC secured €50 million at the first close of its new fund, backed by the European Investment Fund and other institutional investors, to invest in early-stage European startups across energy, industrial tech and AI.

👭🏻 Female-led VC firm VitaminºC reached a first close of its €18 million debut climate fund to invest in early-stage startups across energy, food and agriculture, and carbon removal and adaptation.

🇪🇺 The European Investment Fund launched a €1.5 billion fund of funds to back around 100 growth-stage VC firms, aiming to strengthen Europe’s late-stage funding ecosystem and support the scaling of homegrown tech champions.

🎤 Founders of Tomorrow’s Factories at HackSummit

12 Founders pioneering the future of manufacturing join us on the HackSummit stage.

Across clean industrial heat, biomaterials, modern mining extraction, carbon-storing SCM, in-space manufacturing and sustainable protein, they’ll share their vision, recent milestones and ambitious plans to launch pilots and open factories to upend current systems.

We’ll be joined by: Paebbl, Space Forge, Hades Mining, Altrove, Milvus Advanced, Voltfang, MicroHarvest, EPYR, Modern Synthesis, Phlair, Solar Foods, Notpla

See all Speakers

Materials x Climate

Credit: Epoch Biodesign

🇬🇧 UK-based Epoch Biodesign raised €10.3 million from Extantia Capital, Inditex, Lowercarbon Capital, Happiness Capital, Kibo Invest and Day One Ventures to scale its biorecycling technology, which uses AI-designed enzymes to recycle plastic and textile waste.

🧵 Swedish startup Renasens, which is developing CO₂-based textile recycling technology, secured €10 million seed funding in a round led by Extantia with participation from Course Corrected VC and Norrsken Launcher. 

🔪 Allday Goods, based in the UK, raised €883,000 from FIGR Ventures with participation from Anotherway Ventures, Machroes Holdings and angel investors, to turn plastic waste into premium knives and kitchen tools. 

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Arkadia Space

☄️ Spain’s Arkadia Space, a spacetech startup developing green propulsion systems to replace toxic satellite fuels, secured €14.5 million from the European Innovation Council to scale and commercialise its hydrogen peroxide-based technology.

🚑 US-based Harbinger is expanding into emergency services through a partnership with Frazer to build hybrid ambulances and mobile healthcare vehicles on its flexible electric chassis platform.

🚙 Good read: Dale Vince reflects on building the UK’s first electric car and charging network 15 years ago.

Water x Climate

Credit: blue activity

💧 Germany’s blue activity raised €8.5 million seed funding in a round co-led by Wind Capital and Venture Stars, with participation from Angel Invest, to scale its biocide-free cooling water treatment technology, designed to cut costs and reduce chemical use.

💡 Cool: This handheld device is capable of detecting harmful “forever chemicals” (PFAS) in water within minutes.

🐾 Footsteps x Climate

Are the solutions right under our feet?

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Hi there,

For years, climate tech rode on urgency. Now, LPs are backing something far more pragmatic.

Insights from General Partners at Atlantic, Climentum Capital, FoodLabs, Nucleus Capital, Oyster Bay Ventures and World Fund show a clear shift: climate hard tech is no longer framed as impact-first; it’s about energy security, industrial resilience, and economic advantage.

The narrative is changing fast. 2026 is all about reindustrialisation as an opportunity. Here’s where LP capital is really heading.

In this week’s edition: 

🧬 Rubi Laboratories is spinning waste carbon into textiles
🚤 Arc secures $50M to scale electric boats
🔌 GridBeyond taps Samsung for AI-powered grid scaling

The Digest

Credit: Earth Blox

⚖️ Edinburgh-based climate analytics startup Earth Blox raised €6.9 million in a funding round led by PXN Ventures, with support from Scottish Enterprise, Archangels and the European Space Agency, to scale its AI-powered platform that helps businesses assess nature and climate risks.

💻 GridBeyond attracted backing from Samsung Ventures to scale its AI-driven platform that manages electricity grids by coordinating distributed energy sources like batteries, renewables, and demand, aiming to improve grid stability and efficiency as power systems become more complex.

📉 Maersk is winding down its corporate venture capital arm Maersk Growth as it refocuses on its core business, halting new startup investments and scaling back the unit to manage its existing portfolio. 

🚀 Applications are open for Carbon13's European Venture Accelerator: 12 months one on one support with €150-250k funding opportunity. Designed for startups looking to raise €1-3 million in the next 12-18 months.

🎙️ Podcast Opportunity: Hugo Rauch of New Wave joins the HackSummit to sit down with investors and startups. Attending HackSummit? Book a slot by signing up here.

👀 Next Impact Europe has opened nominations for a new initiative spotlighting the next generation of diverse-led impact startups emerging across Europe. The initiative will publish a curated list of 50 companies to watch, nominate a startup here. 

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Built in Montreal

💩 Solugen, based in Canada, secured a $50 million equity round led by Idealist Capital with participation from Canada Growth Fund. It will use the funds to scale production of its circular, manure-derived nitrogen fertiliser Azogen to meet rising demand for low-carbon farming solutions.

🚜 US-based AgZen raised a $10 million Series B led by DCVC Bio with participation from Material Impact and Astanor, plus a strategic investment from Syngenta Group Ventures. It will use the funds to scale its AI-powered smart spraying system that enables farmers to reduce chemical use by up to 50% without impacting yields.

🥃 Supercritical has successfully produced the world’s first direct-fired hydrogen-distilled whisky through the WhiskHy project, in collaboration with Suntory Global Spirits and the Manufacturing Technology Centre and backed by the UK government’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, while also scaling its membrane-free electrolyser to an industrial-ready TRL 5 system.

🏭 Danish sustainable protein company Unibio is partnering with Saudi Industrial Investment Group to build the world’s largest single-cell protein plant in Saudi Arabia, using gas fermentation technology to produce alternative protein for animal feed.

Carbon x Climate

Credit: LinkedIn

🐜 Researchers have discovered that the ant species Sericomyrmex amabilis, found in Central and South America, can capture carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into mineralised dolomite within its exoskeleton.

😎 How it started vs how it’s going: Check out Parallel Carbon’s Malachite facility. 

Get Found, Get Funded at HackSummit

Snapshot of investors confirmed to join HackSummit

A powerhouse lineup of renowned investors take the stage at HackSummit on April 22-23.

Together with the Founders they’ve backed, they’ll reveal why they invested in breakout startups, where they’re deploying capital next, and what it really takes for founders to get on their radar.

Listen out for actionable insights, real investment frameworks, and the signals they look for before writing a cheque. Plus, schedule 1-1 meetings with them at the Summit.

With: Contrarian Ventures, FORWARD.one, Unruly Capital, Visionaries Tomorrow, Flora Ventures, Kost Capital, Slate VC, Eurazeo, Decalia, Planet A Ventures, Nucleus Capital, Synthesis Capital, Solvable Syndicate and Ordway Selections.

Join them in Lausanne

Construction x Climate

Credit: Cocoon

🧱 UK-based Cocoon raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by 2150, with participation from Brick & Mortar Ventures and The Venture Collective alongside existing investors, to scale its low-cost, low-carbon cementitious materials.

🏗️ Austria’s Sequestra secured €3 million in a seed funding round led by VSE Beteiligungs-GmbH with support from Dr. Rudolf Fries Familien-Privatstiftung to scale its CO₂ mineralisation technology, designed to turn emissions and waste into stable, reusable materials. 

Funds x Climate

Credit: Partech

🇫🇷 Paris-based Partech closed a €300 million impact fund backed by global institutional investors to support European industrial and climate tech scaleups, targeting revenue-generating B2B companies. 

🇳🇱 Rabobank launched the €102 million Rabo Impact Foundation to invest in high-impact, early-stage projects in the Netherlands, aiming to drive systemic change in key societal areas while targeting growth to €1 billion.

🇪🇸 Spanish investment firm GVC Gaesco Alternative Investments launched a €70 million Resilient Infratech Ventures fund to back startups building energy, industrial, and digital infrastructure technologies.

How Hades Reinvents Access to the Deep Underground

Hades Mining

Energy and critical minerals are access problems.

A huge share of what we need already exists, geothermal energy, high-value mineral deposits, but sits kilometres below ground, beyond what current drilling systems can reach economically.

That’s where Hades Mining comes in

They’re building for a future where access to the subsurface becomes a core capability to reshape energy, industrial capacity, and geopolitical resilience.

At the center of this is IPL Cerberus:
→ a laser-based drilling system
→ designed to operate at extreme depths
→ with the ambition of becoming the fastest drill on the planet

If it works, it could change the equation entirely.

And they have recently raised €15 million to get there faster. The round was co-led by HV Capital and Headline, with participation from Project A and Visionaries Tomorrow, Founders Factory, Viessmann Generations Group, Interface Capital, and FounderLake.

Next up, Co-Founder and CEO Max Werner joins Thong Le Hoang at Visionaries Tomorrow for a fireside chat at the HackSummit to discuss Hades' and Europe's role in sustainable mining.

We caught up with Max before he joins us at the summit to get the inside track on what they're building and how they're scaling from prototype to industrial scale.

Read the Interview

Materials x Climate

Credit: WeSort.AI

🇩🇪 Germany’s WeSort.AI secured €10 million from investors including Infinity Recycling, Green Generation Fund, Vent.io and SPRIND to scale its AI-powered sorting technology that recovers critical raw materials like lithium and cobalt from waste.

👗 Rubi Laboratories, based in the US, secured $7.5 million in new funding alongside $60 million in offtake agreements from investors including AP Ventures, FH One, Talis Capital and H&M Group, to scale its cell-free biocatalysis platform that uses engineered enzymes to convert waste carbon into materials, with the goal of creating more sustainable fibres that can be spun into materials like viscose and lyocell.

🧪 German startup Level Nine raised €4 million in a seed round led by Visionaries Tomorrow to develop next-generation catalysts that convert biomass and waste into sustainable chemical feedstocks.

🇫🇮 Finland’s Elea & Lili raised €2.5 million in a seed funding round led by Lifeline Ventures to scale its cellulose-based, fossil-free absorbent materials that replace plastic-based superabsorbents, with the funds aimed at pilot production, industrial validation, and early commercial launches in Europe and the US. 

🔋 US-based critical metals refining company Nth Cycle has signed a landmark $1.1 billion long-term offtake agreement with Trafigura to supply nickel and lithium from recycled battery materials. 

💡 A growing list of Europe’s manufacturers of tomorrow. Who get’s your vote?

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Arc

🚤 LA-based Arc secured $50 million from Eclipse, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Necessary Ventures, and Offline Ventures to expand beyond consumer boats into commercial and defense markets, aiming to scale its electric propulsion technology across the broader marine industry.

⛴️ Candela, a Stockholm-based electric ferry startup, raised €30 million from the World Bank’s IFC alongside existing investors including EQT Ventures, SEB Private Equity, KanDela and Ocean Zero, to scale production of its energy-efficient hydrofoil vessels and build a new factory to support its global expansion.

🫣 Packaging Fails x Climate

A painfully relatable mashup of packaging fails, where great design meets real-world chaos.

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

The energy transition runs on metals.

Lithium, copper, rare earths… these are the building blocks of batteries, EVs and wind turbines. Yet Europe still imports most of the critical minerals it depends on.

We talked to 10 founders, investors and operators across the ecosystem, and mapped 60 ways Europe could rebuild its mineral and metals supply chain.

From AI-driven exploration to circular metals systems, the climate deep tech opportunity is bigger than most people realise. 

In this week’s edition: 

💧 €100M fund launches to tackle water scarcity and pollution
🌋 Telura raises €4M to drill for geothermal energy
⚡ Renewables are getting AI “virtual engineers” 

The Digest

Credit: Extantia

🗺️ Interesting: Extantia has mapped part of the European robotics ecosystem to get a sense of the landscape.

🛰️ AIRMO, a Berlin- and Luxembourg-based space-tech startup developing airborne and satellite systems to monitor greenhouse-gas emissions, raised €5 million in a seed funding round led by Ananda Impact Ventures to launch its first methane-detecting satellite in 2027

♻️ UK-based COOloop raised £150,000 seed funding from Carbon13 Ventures to commercialise its catalytic process that converts captured CO₂ and renewable hydrogen into carbon-negative acetic acid.

🏅 The BEAM Circular Accelerator announced its second cohort of startups working to scale technologies that convert agricultural and organic waste into valuable products.

🇫🇷 Join us in Paris on 19th March for the next ClimateHack Meetup. Free to attend.

👩🏻‍🔬 SPRIND and Builders Vision are partnering with Deep Science Ventures to fully fund 5 PhDs for researchers developing novel solutions to critical climate and health issues.

🧪 Anima is launching the 2nd edition of the Out of the Lab Challenge: €50,000 to accelerate your transition from lab to market. Apply today.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Tropic

🍌 UK agri-biotech Tropic raised $105 million Series C funding in a round co-led by Forbion’s Bioeconomy Fund and Corteva, with backing from Just Climate, IQ Capital, ABN Amro, Invest International and existing investors including Temasek and Five Seasons Ventures, to scale commercial production of its gene-edited bananas and rice and expand its pipeline of climate-resilient crops.

🤠 Dutch startup Those Vegan Cowboys raised €12.25 million from crowd investors via Invesdor, a privately owned impact fund, and earlier investors including dairy farmers and cheesemakers, to prepare for industrial-scale manufacturing of its precision-fermented casein proteins.

🌾 UK-based Cytotrait raised £3 million seed funding in a round led by Northern Gritstone, with participation from the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund and the Northern Universities Ventures Fund, to advance its MOSS gene-editing platform and expand crop research programmes in wheat, maize, potato and canola aimed at improving yield, resilience and sustainability.

🍼 Australian precision-fermentation startup All G received a A$1.1 million grant from the New South Wales government’s Biosciences Fund to scale up production of its human beta-casein protein and advance proof-of-concept manufacturing and regulatory preparation for use in infant formula.

Biodiversity x Climate

Credit: City Detect

🤖 City Detect, a US startup using computer vision to help municipalities monitor urban issues like graffiti, illegal dumping and building decay, secured $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Prudence Venture Capital to expand its AI system that analyses images captured from cameras mounted on public vehicles such as garbage trucks and street sweepers.

🌎 Austrian AI startup Another Earth raised €3.5 million to scale its data and simulation platform that generates synthetic Earth-observation data, designed for applications such as climate analysis, energy planning, urban development and disaster management.

📈 New research published in the journal Communications Biology shows that microbial necromass (the remains of dead soil microbes) plays a major role in boosting stored carbon and nitrogen in restored soils, particularly in semi-arid regions undergoing afforestation.

🐞 Good Read: Trump may have killed the first-ever National Nature Assessment, but it’s now been released independently

👀 Good watch: Elena Doms shares what’s new in Natural Capital in one minute. 

🌧️ Interesting: Google is using old news reports and AI to predict flash floods.

Get Found, Get Funded at HackSummit

Snapshot of investors confirmed to join HackSummit

We’re just one month away from Europe’s leading Founders and Funders converging at the HackSummit on April 22-23.

Where you’ll connect with investors from leading banks, asset managers, VCs and angel syndicates looking for their next opportunity.

Last year, over 4,000 meetings took place via the 1-1 networking app alone plus 1,000s more spontaneous meetings and connections happened across the 2 days.

It’s time to broaden your investment network, explore new partnerships, and spark new conversations.

Ready to join us? Reserve your place today before the ticket prices increase on Monday.

Join them in Lausanne

Energy x Climate

Credit: MGA Thermal

🇦🇺 MGA Thermal raised $17 million in a funding round led by IP Group Australia with support from Main Sequence to scale its long-duration thermal energy storage technology that converts renewable electricity into industrial heat

⚡️ Zurich-based energy hardware startup Hyperscale Power, which is developing solid-state transformers for AI data centres, EV charging and renewable infrastructure, raised €5 million in a seed funding round co-led by World Fund and Vsquared Ventures to expand its operations.

🌋 Telura, a Munich-based startup developing electric impulse drilling technology for geothermal energy, came out of stealth with €4 million pre-seed funding from Nucleus Capital, Possible Ventures and First Momentum to accelerate development and prepare for market entry in 2026.

👷‍♀️ Barcelona-based Delfos Energy raised a €3 million seed extension from investors including Vox Capital/COPEL, Headline, Contrarian Ventures, DOMO VC and EDP Ventures to further develop its AI “virtual engineer” platform for renewable energy operations.

🇫🇷 French startup Mantle8 secured a €2.06 million grant from the EU’s Just Transition Fund to advance its geoscience-driven platform for identifying underground natural hydrogen resources.

☁️ Pure Data Centres has partnered with AVK to deploy Europe’s first large-scale 110MW on-site microgrid at its Dublin data centre campus, providing independent power generation and battery storage to support AI and cloud infrastructure while easing pressure on the national electricity grid. 

⚛️ TerraPower has received approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a next-generation 345-MW sodium-cooled Natrium nuclear reactor in Wyoming, marking the first US permit for a commercial reactor in nearly a decade.

🔋 Google and Tesla have joined companies including Carrier and Span to launch the Utilize coalition, arguing the power grid is often underused and pushing for policies that better deploy tools like batteries, demand response and virtual power plants to tap unused capacity.

🤝🏼 Studsvik has acquired Swedish nuclear project developer Kärnfull Next, marking the first exit for climate tech investor Climentum Capital’s Fund I.

Funds x Climate

Credit: Emerald Technology Ventures

💧 Emerald Technology Ventures raised €100 million for its Global Water Fund II, backing startups developing technologies for water treatment, reuse, monitoring and infrastructure resilience as demand grows for solutions addressing water scarcity and contamination. 

💰 Breakout Ventures launched a $114 million Fund III backed by investors including Cortes Capital, S-Cubed Capital, The Kraft Group, Pinegrove Venture Partners, JIMCO and Korea Omega Investment Corporation to support early-stage startups commercialising scientific breakthroughs across areas like AI-driven biology, chemistry and advanced materials.

🦸‍♀️ Companies including Amazon, Google, Salesforce and JPMorgan Chase have launched the Superpollutant Action Initiative, committing $100 million by 2030 to cut high-impact warming gases such as methane, refrigerants, black carbon and nitrous oxide.

🌍 Persistent launched the Persistent Africa Climate Venture Builder Fund, targeting $70 million to back early-stage climate startups across Africa in energy, agriculture and resource transitions, with anchor investors including African Development Bank Group, Nordic Development Fund and FSD Africa Investments.

Stand out from the Crowd

2025 HackSummit Startup Fair

Position your startup as a leading European HardTech for Climate

Filling up fast: It’s time to secure one of the last remaining spots in the HackSummit Startup Fair.

The Startup Fair is central to the HackSummit and it is where up-and-coming Founders demo their technology, attract investors and potential partners and get the word out about their solution.

Apply today if you’re building in climate, industrial, food, energy, materials, or deep tech, and showcase your solution to a highly targeted audience.

Showcase your Startup

Materials x Climate

Credit: Seprify

🇨🇭 Swiss biomaterials startup Seprify raised €13.4 million in a Series A funding round backed by Inter IKEA Group alongside Una Terra Early Growth Fund, Zürcher Kantonalbank, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures and Kickfund. It will use the funds to scale its cellulose-based materials platform that replaces titanium dioxide in applications such as food, cosmetics and coatings.

🧱 CURA, which is developing an electrochemical process to produce low-carbon cement, has partnered with Grand Forks Concrete Ltd. to build a 100-tonne-per-year pilot plant and a 30,000-tonne-per-year commercial facility in Taber, Alberta, converting agricultural spent lime waste into decarbonized cement and captured CO₂.

🪸 noriware launched norifresh™, a seaweed-based, 100% plastic-free packaging film that can run on standard top-seal lines and heat-seal directly to cardboard trays without coatings or adhesives, enabling fresh produce packs that can be recycled entirely in the paper stream.

👀 Interesting: According to International Union for Conservation of Nature research, synthetic textiles (35%) and tyre wear (28%) are the largest sources of microplastics, while plastic packaging and personal care products account for only about 6%.

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Group14 Technologies

🏭 Group14 Technologies has opened a new BAM-3 factory in South Korea to produce silicon anode battery materials that enable flash-charging electric vehicles, with the facility capable of producing 2,000 metric tons annually, enough for about 100,000 long-range EVs.

🚕 Electric air taxis developed by companies such as Archer Aviation, Joby Aviation, Beta Technologies and Wisk Aero are set to begin large-scale testing across 26 US states this summer under a new three-year FAA pilot program.

👏🏼 10 and 11 Year Olds x Climate

A 10-year-old designer just debuted his collection made from recycled materials at Paris Fashion Week!

And 11-year old Wynter tells Donald Trump her fears and hopes with conviction

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

With International Women’s Day this Sunday, we’re zooming in on some of the women reshaping Europe’s industrial landscape.

Across climate tech, energy, advanced materials and manufacturing, founders, scientists and investors are rebuilding the systems that power our economy, accelerating what many are calling Europe’s industrial renaissance.

Here are 101 women driving the shift.

If you’re a woman Founder working in Climate, we’d love to see (and celebrate you) at HackSummit, April 22-23, you can save 40% with code WOMENINCLIMATE

Happy International Women’s Day 💜 

In this week’s edition: 

🔥 RIFT fires up €113M to scale iron fuel for industrial heat
🧬 CO₂-based chemicals land at L’Oréal
🪨 Litherm is electrifying lime and cement production

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Guoke Xinglian Technology Co

👶🏻 China’s Guoke Xinglian Technology Co, a precision-fermentation biotech developing human-identical milk proteins, raised ¥100 million ($14.6 million) in a Series A+ funding round led by Shanghai Zhuiguang Julian, Lenovo Capital, and a fund under Changjin Holdings to scale industrial production, starting with lactoferrin.

🌾 Belgian agtech startup Rainbow Crops has been awarded a $7 million grant from the Gates Foundation to advance its AI- and genome-editing-powered platform for developing climate-resilient crops, initially focusing on improving heat- and drought-tolerant varieties of corn, sorghum and rice for smallholder farmers.

🍇 Amatera, based in France, raised €6 million seed funding in a round co-led by Demea Sustainable Investment and Oyster Bay Venture Capital with participation from PINC, Mudcake and Exceptional Ventures. It will use the funds to scale its AI-driven plant cell biology platform to accelerate breeding of climate-resilient crops, starting with coffee and wine grapes.

⏩️ The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is urging governments to streamline and clarify regulatory frameworks for cultivated meat and precision-fermented foods, recommending clearer authority oversight, updated food safety and labelling rules, and coordinated international standards to support safe market entry and global trade.

Carbon x Climate

Credit: Carbonfuture

✅ US aerospace company Boeing has signed a multi-year agreement with Carbonfuture to purchase at least 40,000 tonnes of durable carbon dioxide removal credits from biochar projects.

🏖️ A new study has identified several US coastal hubs as the most promising locations for scaling electrochemical marine carbon dioxide removal, highlighting how existing seawater-intake infrastructure, energy availability and industrial emissions could support large-scale ocean-based carbon removal.

Chemicals x Climate

Credit: PlasmaLeap Technologies

🇦🇺 Australia’s PlasmaLeap Technologies, a University of Sydney spinout developing zero-emissions modular reactors to produce green ammonia and nitrate for fertiliser and fuels, secured $20 million Series A funding in a round co-led by the Gates Foundation, Investible and Yara Growth Ventures with support from Twynam, GrainCorp Ventures, Uniseed/UniSuper, Artesian, SVG Ventures and Agnition Ventures.

🚜 UK-based agtech startup Bindbridge secured $3.8 million from Speedinvest and Nucleus Capital. Its AI-driven BRIDGE platform designs molecular glues for next-generation herbicides and crop protection, and it will use the funds to advance crop-resilience solutions and accelerate discovery of new agricultural molecules.

🥔 DTU spin-out Mycoverse raised €2.4 million in a pre-seed funding round co-led by Future Food Fund and High-Tech Gründerfonds with participation from PINC. It is developing AI-driven fungal biological crop protection to replace chemical pesticides, and will use the funds to advance its first solution targeting potato late blight.

🧪 French startup Dioxycle has partnered with L'Oréal Groupe to deploy its sustainable “drop-in” chemicals produced from captured CO₂, electricity and water.

Construction x Climate

Credit: ISAAC antisismica

🫨 Italy’s ISAAC antisismica raised €14 million from CDP Venture Capital, 360 Capital Partners, Axon Partners Group, Gruppo Azimut, Ring Capital and NovaCapital. It develops non-invasive active mass damper systems to protect existing buildings from earthquakes, and will use the funds to expand its seismic resilience technology and accelerate deployment across the construction sector.

🏗️ German startup Litherm Technologies GmbH secured €6.5 million seed funding from investors including bmp Ventures, Graymont, SkreenHouse Ventures, Kalkfabrik Netstal AG, Zeitinger Invest, the Breakthrough Energy Foundation and UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators to industrialise its fully electric calcination technology for CO₂-free lime and cement production.

Women on Stage at the HackSummit

The HackSummit lineup is brimming with talent as Founders and Partners join us on stage to share their stories, strategies and grit to scale the future of Hard Tech.

A snapshot of female talents include:

🧱 Marta Sjögren, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Paebbl, turning captured CO₂ into carbon-storing materials that can be used in concrete and construction.

🔬 Katelijne Bekers, CEO and Co-Founder at MicroHarvest, using microorganisms, nature’s most efficient protein factories, to scale tasty, healthy, sustainable protein.

🏭  Léa Dardenne, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Epyr, turning renewable power into high-temperature heat with thermal energy storage.

💶 Alice Besomi, Managing Director at Eurazeo, backing talented entrepreneurs with a focus on fast-growing companies building solutions for sustainable cities.

💰 Bodil Siden, General Partner at Kost Capital, champion visionary entrepreneurs leading the nutrition transition across Europe.

💸 Beau-Anne Chilla, Partner at FORWARD.one, investing in the people building the automation, quantum, and energy infrastructure Europe needs in the next decade.

Ready to join them? Female Founders in Climate save 40% on their HackSummit pass with code WOMENINCLIMATE.

Yes - Sign me up

Energy x Climate

Credit: RIFT

🔥 Netherlands-based RIFT, which is developing iron fuel technology to decarbonise industrial heat, secured €113.8 million in combined Series B and EU Innovation Fund financing led by PGGM with participation from Invest-NL, Oost NL, Rubio Impact Ventures, BOM and Energietransitiefonds Rotterdam to move toward commercial deployment and build its first production facility capable of delivering 340 GWh of CO₂-free industrial heat annually.

🇸🇰 GA Drilling, based in Slovakia, raised $44.1 million in a round led by TomEnterprise AB with participation from Underground Ventures and strategic investor Nabors Industries to accelerate commercial deployment of its NexTitan drilling technology for deep geothermal energy projects. 

🔋Germany-based battery manufacturer UniverCell secured €30 million in a Series B funding round co-led by the DeepTech & Climate Fonds, IKA and WIKA with support from the European Innovation Council Fund to scale production capacity and advance its dry-coating lithium-ion battery technology.

☀️ Norwegian energy storage scaleup Photoncycle raised €15 million Series A funding in a round led by NordicNinja and Voima Ventures, with participation from Lifeline Ventures, Eviny Ventures, Luminar Ventures and Momentum, to commercialise its solid-state hydrogen systems that allow households to store surplus summer solar energy for winter heating and electricity.

🌬️ Offshore wind developer Aikido plans to deploy a submerged 100-kW demonstration data center inside the pods of a floating offshore wind turbine off the Norwegian coast, aiming to test ocean-based, wind-powered computing infrastructure that could scale to multi-megawatt AI data centers by 2028. 

💡 Researchers at the University of Queensland have developed ultra-thin, high-strength ion-transport membranes using a nanoconfinement polymerisation technique to improve the durability and performance of fuel cells, batteries and electrolysers, with next steps focused on scaling the fabrication method for commercial clean-energy applications.

🔥 60+ startups on the Geothermal Market Map by Mountauk Climate

Materials x Climate

Credit: Shellworks

🛢️ UK-based biomaterials startup Shellworks raised $15 million, in a Series A funding round led by alter equity with participation from JamJar, Founder Collective, LocalGlobe, Third Sphere and Nat Friedman, to scale production of its microbially fermented plastic alternative Vivomer, made from waste feedstocks like used cooking oil. 

🪸 Waiākea Hawaiian Volcanic Beverages launched the world’s first commercial product labels printed with algae-based ink, developed in partnership with Living Ink Technologies, Actega and NextGen Label Group.

🔝 H&M Foundation reveals the 20 top finalists for this year’s Global Challenge Award. 

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Zeno

🏍️ Electric mobility startup Zeno raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Congruent Ventures, with participation from Active Impact and Lowercarbon Ventures plus debt from Camber Road and Trifecta Capital, to scale production of its Emara electric motorcycles and expand its battery-swap network across East Africa.

🔋 China’s BYD unveiled its Blade Battery 2.0 system, capable of charging an EV from 10% to 70% in about five minutes when paired with the company’s new 1.5-MW Flash Charging stations. 

Water x Climate

Credit: @engineeringfacts

🚰 US-based Atoco, founded by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Omar Yaghi, is developing off-grid devices that use metal-organic frameworks to capture water from air and produce up to 1,000 litres of drinking water per day using solar heat, targeting deployment in drought-prone regions, disaster zones and remote communities.

💧 France’s Ilion Water Technologies raised €3.8 million pre-seed funding from Demea Sustainable Investment and Critical Path Ventures to scale its patented low-voltage, pressure-free membrane technology for energy-efficient water purification.

 😫 Reality x Climate

True. Story.

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

Space is no longer just the final frontier, it’s fast becoming critical climate infrastructure.

This week we’re zooming out (literally) to look at the new wave of spacetech quietly being built above our heads, where microgravity manufacturing and orbital platforms could unlock breakthroughs that are difficult - or impossible - to achieve on Earth.

From next-gen materials to cleaner, more efficient production systems, the implications for climate and deep tech are bigger than most people realise.

If you’re curious where climate innovation goes once Earth gets too crowded, this one’s for you.

And if you want the inside track, don’t miss Joshua Western from Space Forge speaking live at the HackSummit 🚀

In this week’s edition: 

🦌 Flox Intelligence raises €2.5M to steer wildlife off roads
🌳 An MIT study maps the global tree shade inequality gap
🧵 CLIMATEX scales fully recyclable textiles

The Digest

Credit: Ark Climate

💰 Milkywire’s 2026 Climate Transformation Fund is now open, backing high-impact projects in nature restoration, decarbonisation and climate innovation. Find out more here.

💡 Good read: The Climate Hub shares three inconvenient truths for climate tech marketers in 2026.

💰 Munich-based GovTech startup Ark Climate raised €2.1 million in a pre-seed round led by Satgana, with backing from another.VC, Voyagers Climate Fund, the German Federal Ministry of Research and angels, to expand its AI-powered platform helping municipalities plan and deliver climate action.

🇨🇭Join us. Become a ClimateHack Ambassador in Zurich to host local Meetups in the city and foster the ClimateTech community.

🎟️ HackSummit early-bird tickets sell out today. Get yours and look forward to joining this April.

🏆 Calling all climatetech founders: applications for the 10th Urban Future Prize Competition are now open.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: Verley

🇫🇷 French startup Verley raised €32 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Alven with participation from Blast, Bpifrance, Sofinnova, Sparkfood, Captech and Founders Future to scale production and commercialise its precision-fermented, cow-free whey proteins in the US.

💻 German AI foodtech startup Foodforecast raised €8 million in a Series A funding round co-led by SHIFT Invest and ECBF to scale its AI forecasting platform that helps ultra-fresh food businesses reduce waste and optimise production. 

♻️ Copenhagen-based Reduced raised €4 million Series A funding in a round led by Delphinus Venture Capital with participation from Novo Holdings, ECBF and EIFO to scale industrial production and expand global partnerships for its fermentation-derived, upcycled savoury flavour enhancers.

🤠 Dutch precision fermentation company Those Vegan Cowboys raised €2.5 million from over 600 new shareholders ahead of its crowdfunding launch to accelerate development and testing of its animal-free casein and cheese products.

🍇 New Zealand cellular horticulture startup Forever Harvest secured NZ$1.2 million pre-seed funding in a round led by Sprout Agritech, with support from the Bioeconomy Science Institute and Callaghan Innovation’s Deep Tech Incubator, to accelerate development, pilot production and commercialisation of its lab-grown fruit and nut ingredients.

Biodiversity x Climate

Credit: Flox Intelligence

🦌 Swedish startup Flox Intelligence raised €2.5 million in a seed+ round led by Tilia Impact Ventures, with support from Satgana, GENIUS NY, J.O.S.S., Unconventional Ventures and Almi Invest, to expand its AI system that safely guides wildlife away from roads, railways and other dangerous infrastructure.

🌳 An MIT-led study published in Nature Communications finds that wealthier neighbourhoods consistently have more tree shade than poorer areas across global cities, highlighting urban heat inequality and the need to prioritise tree planting along pedestrian and transit routes.

🐦 Renewable energy consultancy Natural Power has updated the free OCcAM Excel tool, originally developed by SSE Renewables and now hosted by OWIC, to help offshore wind developers quickly assess potential seabird mortality risks during early project planning.

💧Interesting: Forget having a pool installed; try a natural swimming pond instead!

🌈 Cool: A rainbow nudibranch off the UK coast uses recycled toxins, not a shell, for its brilliant defence.

Energy x Climate

Credit: Hybrid Greentech

☁️ Copenhagen-based Hybrid Greentech raised over €15 million from Nordic Alpha Partners to expand its cloud-based virtual power plant platform across Europe, supporting deeper integration of renewable and battery assets into energy markets.

🇩🇪 German energy startup Einklang secured €2.2 million in a funding round led by Vireo Ventures, with backing from SI Ventures, Saxovent, Angel Invest, Heimatboost and DnA Ventures. It will use the funds to scale its battery-optimised electricity tariff platform that helps German SMEs cut power costs and improve energy flexibility.

🏡 London-based energy optimisation and home automation startup Tewke raised £1.5 million in its second funding round from JamJar Investments, Cur8 Capital, Energy Mix Ventures, Project Ventures and angel Vlad Yatsenko to scale its Tap smart home platform and advance AI-powered residential energy management.

⚛️ Proxima Fusion has signed an MoU with the Free State of Bavaria, RWE and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics to develop Europe’s first commercial stellarator fusion power pathway, beginning with the Alpha demonstrator in the 2030s and targeting the Stellaris grid-connected plant.

🌊 A study published in Nature Communications reports a polymeric carbon nitride photocatalyst that enables efficient sunlight-driven hydrogen production directly from seawater at ambient pressure, advancing scalable and decentralised green hydrogen generation without freshwater or vacuum requirements.

🔋 Google plans to build its first Minnesota data center powered by 1.9GW of clean energy, including a 300MW, 100-hour iron-air battery from Form Energy, to enable longer-duration renewable power use and advance its low-carbon infrastructure strategy.

📈 According to GlobalData, global low-carbon hydrogen production reached 0.84 mtpa in 2024 and could grow to 42–65.3 mtpa by 2030, with green hydrogen projected to dominate supply at nearly 89%.

🌀 Interesting: Caie Kelly at Lowercarbon Capital explains her layered supercycle theory.

2026 Summit Speakers

Ambitious builders and backers in European Deep Tech will join the HackSummit to share their journey so far, bold vision to scale up and navigating the roadblocks to get there faster.

Hear from Founders turning breakthrough science into real-world impact:

🧱 Future-proof materials made of CO2 - Paebbl
⛏️ Technology-first modern deep tech mining - Hades Mining
🚜 Autonomous, electric tractor platform designed for agriculture - Voltrac
🔬 Better protein production through natural fermentation - MicroHarvest
🏜️ Making 10-10000 hectare microclimates up to 15ºC cooler - AtmoCooling
🧬 Manufacturing tangible alternatives for critical materials with AI - altrove
⚡️ Decentralising the grid with smart, sustainable storage systems - Voltfang
🪐 Space-derived crystal seeds for semiconductor substrates on Earth - Space Forge

And joining them on stage are the Partners shaping what gets funded next:

💰 Funding and scaling Europe's best innovations - FORWARD.one
💶 Investing in the crazy, before it becomes normal - Unruly Capital
💸 €100m early-stage industrial deep tech fund - Visionaries Tomorrow
📈 Backing the boldest Climate Tech Founders at the earliest stages - Contrarian Ventures

See all Speakers

Funds x Climate

Credit: Syndicate One

🇧🇪 Brussels-based VC Syndicate One reached a €22 million first close for its second fund, backed by Sofina, Finhouse, COI, PMV, SFPIM, Finance&Invest Brussels and Wallonie Entreprendre, to invest in and support early-stage technology startups founded by Belgian entrepreneurs.

Materials x Climate

Credit: Tech.EU

👚 Swiss textile technology company CLIMATEX AG raised €3.5 million in a round led by the Collateral Good Textile & Fashion Innovation Fund, with support from existing investors, to scale sales and market adoption of its patented circular, fully recyclable textile technologies.

🚗 EU-funded project Fabulose, coordinated by Germany’s DITF and backed by the CBE JU, is developing scalable, recyclable leather-like fabrics using fermentation-derived bacterial cellulose, cyanophycin and pigments to replace animal and plastic-based materials in automotive, fashion and furniture.

💡 Interesting: What it takes to make a killer novel permanent magnet.

Looking for your first / next pilot partner?

We’re hosting the first Hack Pilot Day: a curated matchmaking day designed to connect startups with established companies to build pilots.

You'll be matched with curated SMEs looking to collaborate with pilot-ready startups.

The goal is simple: create the right conditions to explore collaborations that can actually move forward.

If you're looking for new partners to scale up in Food Resilience, Industrial Efficiency or Built Environment Performance, the Pilot Day is for you.

Apply Today

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Einride

🇸🇪 Swedish electric and autonomous freight startup Einride has raised $113 million from investors including EQT Ventures ahead of its planned New York SPAC listing to support technology development and global expansion of its digital logistics platform.

🚙 UK-based autonomous driving startup Wayve secured a £25 million investment from the British Business Bank as part of its $1.2 billion Series D to advance its AI foundation models that enable vehicles to learn and navigate real-world environments.

✈️ Swiss sustainable fuels company Metafuels raised $24 million, in a funding round led by UVC Partners with support from Energy Impact Partners, RockCreek, Verve Ventures and Fortescue, to scale production of its methanol-to-jet sustainable aviation fuel and advance commercial deployment from Rotterdam.

🚲 Sparqle, based in Amsterdam, raised €1.5 million to expand its emission-free e-commerce delivery network across Europe using e-cargo bikes, electric vehicles and proprietary logistics software.

⛴️ Norwegian tourism and technology company Brim Explorer has signed contracts to build two battery-powered high-speed trimaran passenger vessels, to enable zero-emission sightseeing cruises.

 💅🏻 Manicure x Climate

This Founder mapped the copper oxidation pathway on her nails

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

In climate tech, the lab is the easy(ish) part. Scale is where the heat really kicks in.

Founders are nailing the chemistry, the biology, and the hardware. But commercial reality still runs through procurement teams, industrial timelines, and corporate balance sheets.

When breakthroughs are achieved, next comes the bureaucracy. 

Corporate venture capital is often where that leap to real-world deployment begins. So we built a fresh map of 88 European CVCs operating right at this critical interface.

See who’s shaping what actually scales.

In this week’s edition: 

⚡ Heron Power and DG Matrix raise big for next-gen grid hardware
🌊 Gigablue secures $20M to scale ocean carbon removal
🌡️ Helion’s fusion power casually hits 150 million °C

The Digest

Credit: Cocoon

💡 Interesting: Eliot Brooks at Cocoon shares the three things that helped as they were scaling their tech.

💧 US-based PolyGone Systems Inc, which develops technologies to monitor and remove microplastics from water systems, closed its oversubscribed seed round with $4 million to fund large-scale commercial deployments. The round was led by FYRFLY Venture Partners, with participation from Tech Council Ventures, Interstate Fusion Ventures, Golden Seeds and angel investors, plus matching support from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

🌳 European nature intelligence startup refinq raised a €2.2 million seed round led by aws Gründungsfonds with participation from SymbiaVC, Fund F and angel Olivier Schwab, plus support from FFG, to scale its platform which translates geospatial and climate data into financial nature-risk insights for industry. 

🇰🇪 🇳🇱 Here’s what went on at ClimateHack Nairobi and ClimateHack Amsterdam.

🌍 If you are building a science-driven climate venture in Southern Africa, the Kinjani Lab may be for you.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: NANDO

🤖 Italy’s NANDO secured €3.3 million in a funding round led by MAIA Ventures and CDP Venture Capital with participation from the Piemonte Next Fund, Club degli Investitori, La4G and EMBA Capital Partners. It will use the funds to expand its AI-powered waste and food-waste monitoring and optimisation solutions.

🐮 New Zealand-based agri-biotech startup Ruminant BioTech has launched a CAD$7.6 million research programme in Canada, supported by a CAD$2.8 million Alberta government grant plus industry co-funding and company capital, to validate and commercialise its slow-release methane-reduction bolus for pasture-raised cattle.

☕️ Belgian startup Koppie, which makes a single-ingredient coffee alternative from fermented and roasted peas that can be brewed like coffee, secured follow-on funding from DOEN Ventures to support scaling and commercialisation with its first launch partners.

🍫 Cargill has partnered with Israeli startup Kokomodo, which develops cell-based cocoa ingredients, in a collaboration supported by funding from EIT Food to validate, test and scale cell-based chocolate applications in industrial settings and accelerate their path to market.

🚜 US-based precision agriculture company TerraClear launched TerraScout, a fully autonomous field robot that captures high-resolution images to map rocks and identify weeds in broad-acre row crops, enabling real-time planning to improve farm efficiency and input use.

Energy x Climate

Credit: TechCrunch

🇺🇸 US-based Heron Power raised $140 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism Fund and Breakthrough Energy Ventures with participation from Capricorn Investment Group, Energy Impact Partners, Gigascale Capital and Valor Atreides AI Fund to build large-scale manufacturing capacity for its more efficient solid-state transformers supporting data centers, renewable energy and grid applications.

💵 Another US solid-state transformer startup, DG Matrix, secured $60 million Series A funding in a round led by Engine Ventures with participation from ABB, Cerberus Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, Clean Energy Ventures, Fine Structure Ventures, Helios Climate Ventures, MCJ and Piedmont Capital. It will use the funds to scale deployment of its more energy-efficient Interport power-routing technology for data centers and other electrification applications, designed to support more sustainable power infrastructure.

🇩🇪 Munich-based nuuEnergy, which builds and operates digitally enabled regional heat-pump installation businesses, raised €4.3 million in a seed funding round led by amberra with participation from EnjoyVenture and existing investors HTGF, Vireo Ventures, better ventures and Bynd Venture Capital to expand its operations.

🥵 Fusion energy startup Helion announced that its Polaris prototype reactor has reached plasma temperatures of 150 million °C using deuterium–tritium fuel, as it advances toward commercial fusion power.

ESG x Climate

Credit: UK Tech News

🟢 A new report commissioned by environmental groups including Friends of the Earth US and Green Web Foundation finds that 74% of Big Tech claims about AI delivering climate benefits are unproven and may amount to greenwashing, warning that the technology’s growing energy, water and land demands risk outweighing its environmental gains.

🤝🏼 London-based supply chain impact analytics company Mondra has merged with Austrian sustainability intelligence platform inoqo to form a unified global entity under the Mondra brand, aiming to expand capabilities and accelerate food system decarbonisation worldwide.

Stand out from the Crowd

2025 HackSummit Startup Fair

Are you ready to position your startup as one of Europe’s most promising HardTechs?

Then it’s time to secure your spot in the HackSummit Startup Fair.

The Startup Fair is central to the HackSummit and it is where up-and-coming Founders demo their technology, attract investors and potential partners and get the word out about their solution.

Apply today if you’re building in climate, industrial, food, energy, materials, or deep tech, and showcase your solution to a highly targeted audience.

Showcase your Startup

Funds x Climate

Credit: TechCrunch

🗻 US venture firm Climactic launched the $11 million Material Scale, a hybrid debt-equity financing platform initially backed by Ralph Lauren and Structure Climate, to help climate materials startups overcome scale-up barriers.

🇦🇺 The Australian federal government has awarded $12.7 million under its Critical Technologies Challenge Program to eight projects, including one with NEXTDC and Fujitsu developing AI and quantum tools to cool data centres more efficiently and cut carbon emissions, to advance prototype development across energy, healthcare and resources.

🐙 Octopus Energy announced it is investing just under $1 billion through its Octopus Energy Generation arm into the Californian clean tech sector, backing two carbon-removal companies focused on grassland restoration and reforestation and acquiring a solar-plus-battery project.

Materials x Climate

Credit: Everydye

👕 French textile tech startup Everdye has developed a room-temperature dyeing process that could cut energy use by up to 90% and significantly reduce wastewater pollution while achieving cost parity with conventional petrochemical dyes, aiming to help fashion brands decarbonise one of the industry’s most resource-intensive steps.

🌈 Good watch: Women in Mexico creating a beautiful ‘woven sky’.

Looking for your first / next pilot partner?

We’re hosting the first Hack Pilot Day: a curated matchmaking day designed to connect startups with established companies to build pilots.

By joining, you'll be matched with curated SMEs looking to collaborate with pilot-ready startups.

The goal is simple: create the right conditions to explore collaborations that can actually move forward.

If you're looking for new partners to scaleup in Food Resilience, Industrial Efficiency or Built Environment Performance, the Pilot Day is for you.

Apply Today

Mobility x Climate

Credit: HeyCharge

🚗 Munich-based EV charging technology company HeyCharge secured a €2.5 million grant from the European Innovation Council Accelerator to advance and pilot its SecureCharge FLEX platform across Europe.

🚙 Schneider Electric launched the EVlink Pro DC 720, a next-generation high-power EV charging system able to deliver up to 720 kW and charge up to 12 vehicles simultaneously for commercial, fleet and public charging sites.

💡 Interesting: TechCrunch shares what the Epstein files reveal about EV startups and Silicon Valley.

 🎿 Winter Olympics x Climate

🤦‍♀️ Getting disqualified for PFAS:

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

Clean energy and critical minerals both depend on one hard truth: you still have to get underground.

This week, Munich-based Hades Mining raised €15 million to scale high-power laser drilling designed to unlock deep geothermal and critical minerals faster, cheaper and with far lower environmental impact than conventional methods.

If it works at industrial scale, it could rewrite the economics of subsurface extraction in Europe.

Plus get the inside track on their scaleup plans on April 22 when Founder and CEO Max Werner joins Thong Le Hoang, Founding Partner of Visionairies Tomorrow on the HackSummit Stage.

In this week’s edition: 

💥 Fusion startup Inertia lands $450M to ultra-high-power laser systems
👕 The EU’s banned destruction of unsold apparel and footwear
✈️ HAMR Energy raises $10M to turn forestry waste into low-carbon methanol and SAF

The Digest

Volunteer at the HackSummit

🇨🇭Join us. Become a ClimateHack Ambassador in Zurich to host local Meetups in the city and foster the ClimateTech community. Or become a volunteer at the HackSummit.

👎🏼 The Trump administration’s EPA plans to repeal the 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health, in a move that could weaken climate regulations, spark lawsuits, and widen the policy gap with other major economies.

👀 Good read: USA TODAY’s bestselling Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures helps founders build climate and energy startups using MIT’s proven frameworks.

🇳🇱 ClimateHack returns to Amsterdam on February 18th, join us to hear 2030 predictions from 5 VCs. Book your free place here.

🎯 600+ Startup Accelerators in Europe - Mapped and organised for 2026.

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: MicroHarvest

🏭 Germany’s MicroHarvest received a €5.5 million government grant to build its first industrial-scale microbial protein plant in Leuna, which will convert agricultural waste into up to 15,000 tonnes of protein annually for pet food, aquaculture and human nutrition.

🌱 The Bland Company, based in the UK, raised $2.67 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Initialized Capital with backing from Entrepreneur First, Transpose Platform, Behind Genius Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Vento to scale its technology that converts agricultural side streams into highly functional, soluble plant proteins, which are designed to replace eggs across multiple food applications.

🍌 Chiquita has completed the Yelloway banana pan-genome with partner KeyGene to map the full genetic diversity of Musa acuminata and accelerate breeding of disease-resistant, climate-resilient bananas, and is opening up the dataset to researchers to speed up industry-wide innovation.

🍬 Israel’s Amai Proteins received a US FDA“no questions” letter for its precision-fermented sweet protein Sweelin, clearing it for use as a general food and beverage sweetener and enabling commercial rollout.

Carbon x Climate

Credit: pHathom Technologies

🇨🇦 Canadian startup pHathom Technologies raised $4 million seed funding, in a round led by Propeller Ventures with backing from NBIF, Invest Nova Scotia and Carmeuse Ventures, to scale its carbon capture and durable storage platform.

🪨 Google- and Microsoft-backed US carbon removal startup Terradot has acquired smaller rival Eion to scale its enhanced rock weathering operations, as large institutional buyers push for bigger providers able to deliver high-volume carbon removal contracts.

🚢 UK-based Seabound has completed full-scale testing of its modular “Seabound Container” onboard carbon capture systems for ships, with results meeting or exceeding projections.

Energy x Climate

Credit: TechCrunch

⚛️ Fusion startup Inertia Enterprises raised $450 million in a Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with backing from GV and others to build ultra-high-power laser systems based on National Ignition Facility technology, with plans to begin constructing a grid-scale facility around 2030.

🦄 Australian AI-powered digital twin infrastructure platform Neara secured $90 million in a Series D led by TCV with backing from Partners Group, EQT, Square Peg and Skip Capital, valuing the company at over $1 billion, to expand its physics-based grid modelling technology globally and accelerate machine learning development for energy network resilience and capacity planning.

🇬🇧 London-based energy scaleup tem raised £55 million Series B funding in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with backing from Hitachi Ventures, Voyager Ventures, Schroders Capital, Allianz, AlbionVC, Atomico and Revent. It will use the funds to scale its AI-native energy transaction infrastructure, designed to modernise and streamline energy pricing and trading.

🇩🇪 Germany’s metiundo raised €40 million in a funding round led by Octopus Energy Generation to scale its integrated smart metering systems and software platform that digitises energy and water data for buildings.

🔋 Munich-based battery software firm TWAICE secured a €24 million venture debt financing from the European Investment Bank to scale its predictive battery analytics platform for energy storage and electric mobility operations.

💻 Finnish energy software startup Capalo AI secured €11 million Series A funding, in a round led by Heartcore Capital, with participation from Tesi and existing investors including VentureFriends, PROfounders, Inventure and Innovestor, to scale its AI-powered virtual power plant platform that optimises and trades battery energy storage systems.

🇪🇸 Barcelona-based Waste to Energy Advanced Solutions raised €10 million in a funding round led by SC Net Zero Ventures, with participation from Shell Ventures and Cemex Ventures. It will use the funds to scale its gasification systems that convert waste and biomass into syngas and low-carbon fuels.

🏘️ xWatts, based in London, raised £1.6 million seed funding in a round led by Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, with backing from Cambridge Angels, Parkwalk and R42, to scale its AI-powered energy management platform that actively optimises energy systems across complex real estate portfolios.

🇸🇪 Swedish data infrastructure startup Vesiro, a spinout from Chalmers University, secured €1.6 million in seed funding from investors including Chalmers Ventures and Industrifonden to scale its Elasticsearch performance plug-in that reduces server needs and energy consumption for large-scale data search and analytics.

☀️ UK-based solar thermal company Naked Energy launched VirtuMAX, a high-density, ground-mounted evacuated tube solar thermal system with integrated reflectors designed to deliver renewable heat for industrial and district heating projects.

ESG x Climate

Credit: Dcycle

💪🏼 Sustainability data platform Dcycle has acquired AI-powered ESG reporting software firm ESG-X to strengthen its integrated sustainability data and CSRD-aligned reporting capabilities, amid growing consolidation and tighter regulatory demands in the ESG software market.

Looking for your first / next pilot partner?

We’re hosting the first Hack Pilot Day: a curated matchmaking day designed to connect startups with established companies to build pilots.

By joining, you'll be matched with curated SMEs looking to collaborate with pilot-ready startups.

The goal is simple: create the right conditions to explore collaborations that can actually move forward.

If you're looking for new partners to scaleup in Food Resilience, Industrial Efficiency or Built Environment Performance, the Pilot Day is for you.

Apply Today

Materials x Climate

Credit: Hades Mining

💥 Munich-based deeptech mining startup Hades raised €15 million, in a seed funding round co-led by HV Capital and Headline, to further develop its laser-based drilling technology for faster, cheaper access to critical minerals and geothermal energy.

👗 The European Commission has adopted new rules under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation banning the destruction of unsold apparel, accessories and footwear, with large companies required to comply from July 2026.

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Ever

🚗 EV marketplace startup Ever secured $31 million Series A funding in a round led by Eclipse with backing from Ibex Investors, Lifeline Ventures and JIMCO to scale its AI-native, full-stack platform for buying and selling used electric vehicles.

✈️ Australian low-carbon fuels startup HAMR Energy raised $10 million in a Series A round backed by Airbus, Qantas and Thyssenkrupp Uhde to scale projects that convert plantation forestry residues into low-carbon methanol and sustainable aviation fuel for shipping and aviation.

 👀 Resilience x Climate

⛈️ What storm-proof adaptation looks like:

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Editorial and curation by Nicola

Hi there,

Climate tech is back in the funding game.

The first few weeks of 2026 have already delivered a mini-surge of 15 new climate and sustainability funds. While it’s not back to the frenzy years, it’s sharper, more selective, and more thesis-driven, with a clear pulse of cautious optimism running through the capital stack. 

Fresh vehicles are forming, mandates are tightening, and investors are gearing up for the next wave of deployable climate solutions.

The capital isn’t flooding, but it’s definitely flowing again.

In this week’s edition: 

⚛️ Avalanche Fusion plugs in $29M to fire up compact fusion reactors
♻️ Recupere Metals is turning scrap copper into high-performance wire
🎨 Sparxell lands €4.2M to replace toxic dyes with plant-powered colour tech

The Digest

ClimateHack Nairobi

👋 Here’s what happened at this week’s ClimateHack Nairobi Meetup. Join us next at a ClimateHack Meetup in Nairobi and Amsterdam.

🔎 5-point checklist to hire the right founding teams.

🇨🇭Join us. Become a ClimateHack Ambassador in Zurich to host local Meetups in the city and foster the ClimateTech community.

🛰️ Space4Good has been selected as an External Service Provider under the European FIERCE programme. European SMEs can apply for vouchers of up to €50k to work on assessing, testing or developing solutions using satellite Earth Observation

AgriFood x Climate

Credit: UBEES

🐝 French regenerative agriculture startup UBEES raised €8 million Series A funding in a round co-led by Starquest and Capagro with participation from Newtree Impact. It will use the funds to further develop its technology-enabled beekeeping and pollination programmes, designed to improve crop yields and biodiversity.

​​🇧🇷 Brazil-focused agtech VC firm SP Ventures secured an $8 million commitment from the Soros Economic Development Fund for its AgVentures III Climate Investment Fund, with which it will back Global South agtech startups developing climate-resilient, regenerative and low-emissions agricultural technologies and inclusive rural financial systems.

🥩 US cultivated meat startup Evergreen Connect (formerly Omeat) secured $6 million from investors including S2G Investments, BOLD Capital Partners and Good Startup to support the commercial launch of its blended beef products in the US and Singapore.

♻️ Amsterdam-based Proba, which turns fertiliser-related emission reductions into certified Scope 3 results for agri-food supply chains, raised €1.25 million from existing backers including Future Food Fund, Yield Lab Europe and Value Factory Ventures to expand into the US and Brazil.

Carbon x Climate

Credit: Varaha

🇮🇳 India’s Varaha raised $20 million Series B funding in a round led by WestBridge Capital with participation from RTP Global and Omnivore. It will use the funds to scale low-cost carbon removal projects across the Global South, including regenerative agriculture, biochar and enhanced rock weathering, and expand into new Asian markets.

🇪🇺 The European Commission has adopted its first voluntary EU standards to certify permanent carbon removal projects, designed to create clear rules for measurement and permanence, enable project certification, and support investment while reducing greenwashing risk.

Energy x Climate

Credit: Lunar Energy

🔋 US residential battery and virtual power plant startup Lunar Energy raised a $130 million Series C led by Activate Capital and a $102 million Series D led by B Capital and Prelude Ventures to scale home battery manufacturing and expand grid-supporting stationary storage systems.

☀️ Alight secured a £34 million financing facility from SEB to build and operate over 50 MW of behind-the-meter solar projects for UK commercial and industrial customers under long-term PPAs.

⚛️ Compact nuclear fusion startup Avalanche Fusion raised an additional $29 million in a funding round led by RA Capital Management with backing from Toyota Ventures, Founders Fund and Lowercarbon Capital to further develop its desktop-sized high-voltage fusion reactors. See the infrastructure up close.

🇨🇭 Swiss startup enshift secured €18.5 million Series A funding in a round led by Swiss Solar Group. It delivers integrated energy transition solutions, and will use the funds to scale across Europe amid new Swiss and EU energy regulations driving demand. 

💻 New York-based data center optimisation startup Lucend raised $3.3 million seed funding, in a round led by Remarkable Ventures Climate with investors including Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Fund, New Climate Ventures, Avesta, Stepchange and 4impact Capital, to scale software that uses existing sensor data to cut energy, water use and operating costs without new hardware.

🪨 Vema Hydrogen has signed a deal to supply California data centers using underground hydrogen produced from iron-rich rock formations, aiming to deliver low-cost, low-carbon hydrogen for industrial and power applications.

🥵 New York-based HVAC startup Gradient launched its Nexus software platform to network and manage its window-mounted heat pumps across multifamily buildings, helping landlords retrofit older properties with low-cost electric heating and cooling while reducing energy use and easing grid demand.

Funds x Climate

Credit: Kembara

🇪🇸 Spain-based VC firm Mundi Ventures completed a €750 million first close for its deeptech and climate-focused Kembara Fund I, backed by a €350 million European Investment Fund commitment, to invest in European Series B and C scaleups with large tickets and blended equity and non-dilutive financing to bridge the growth capital gap.

💰 Slate Venture Capital secured €132 million at the first close of its inaugural growth fund, backed by investors including the European Investment Fund, Bpifrance, FNVI and BNP Paribas to invest in European B2B companies scaling energy transition, low-carbon industrial and circular economy technologies.

🇩🇰 Denmark’s BioInnovation Institute secured up to €25 million from the Novo Nordisk Foundation to launch its “Upscalator” initiative supporting early-stage European biosolutions startups with facilities, expertise and capital to accelerate their market readiness and green transition impact.

🇩🇪 Munich-based deeptech investor Vanagon Ventures closed its first fund with €20 million in private capital to back pre-seed and seed-stage European B2B deeptech startups in sectors such as manufacturing, materials, AI and natural capital.

💶 Eurazeo launched a €500 million target Future Industries Fund to invest €10-30 million tickets in late-stage and early-growth European climate and industrial tech companies, focusing on capital-intensive sectors such as energy, buildings, infrastructure and resource supply chains.

🇦🇺 The Australian government has finalised the design of a A$5 billion Net Zero Fund that will lend to heavy industry on highly concessional terms to help firms decarbonise and adopt clean technologies.

Get In Front of Hundreds of Decision Makers

2025 HackSummit Startup Fair

Are you ready to position your startup as one of Europe’s most promising HardTechs?

Good news, we’ve opened applications to join the HackSummit Startup Fair.

The Startup Fair is central to the HackSummit and it is where up-and-coming Founders demo their technology, attract investors and potential partners and get the word out about their solution.

Apply today if you’re building in climate, industrial, food, energy, materials, or deep tech, and want to showcase your solution to a highly targeted audience.

Confirm your place

Materials x Climate

Credit: R3 Robotics

🤖 Germany’s R3 Robotics raised €20 million in combined Series A funding and grants from investors including HG Ventures, Suma Capital and the EIC Fund to scale its AI and computer-vision-driven robotic systems for automated disassembly of EV batteries and other electrified vehicle components.

📝 London-based AI materials design startup Polaron raised $8 million seed funding in a round led by Racine², with participation from Speedinvest and Futurepresent, to expand its AI platform that predicts and optimises advanced material performance from microscopy data across sectors such as EV batteries and manufacturing. 

♻️ Biomaterials startup Dionymer, based in France, secured €7 million in a seed funding round led by UI Investissement, with participation from BNP Paribas Développement, Bpifrance, NACO and existing backers including AFI Ventures, IRDI Capital Investissement, AQUITI Gestion and ResiliAnce.io, to scale industrial production and commercial deployment of its biodegradable PHA polymers made from biowaste.

🇫🇷 French copper recycling startup Recupere Metals raised a €5 million seed round from investors including SISTAFUND, Norrsken Evolve, Endgame Capital, Ring Capital, Triple Impact Ventures, Ventures Together, Earth Venture Capital and Sake Bosch to scale its mechanical upgrading technology that turns scrap copper into high-conductivity wire without smelting or virgin metal.

🎨 Cambridge University spin-out Sparxell secured €4.2 million in pre-Series A funding led by SWEN Capital Partners with participation from Alpha Star Capital and Cambridge Enterprise. It will use the funds to scale manufacturing and commercialise its plant-based, biodegradable structural colour technology as a replacement for toxic synthetic dyes and pigments.

🧖‍♀️ US-based Savor, which makes agriculture-free fats from captured carbon and green hydrogen, launched a beauty and personal care division with low-emissions lipid ingredients to replace palm and other tropical oils in cosmetics and skincare products.

🔥 Good Read: Jonathan Healy at Cathay Innovation says that mining is hot for a reason.

Mobility x Climate

Credit: Additive Drives

🚙 German startup Additive Drives raised over €25 million from Nordic Alpha Partners and existing investor AM Ventures to scale global production and deployment of its 3D-printed, lightweight, magnet-free electric motors aimed at cutting energy consumption and accelerating electrification across the industrial and mobility sectors.

🛻 A driverless shuttle trial will launch in Kirkwall, Orkney, led by Urban Foresight using autonomous Auto-Pod vehicles from UK company Aurrigo, to study the feasibility and emissions benefits of zero-emission self-driving transport for rural communities.

Water x Climate

Credit: TechCrunch

🌊 Seattle-based ocean data startup Apeiron Labs raised $9.5 million Series A funding in a round led by Dyne Ventures, RA Capital Management Planetary Health and S2G Investments. It will use the funds to scale low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles that repeatedly sample subsurface ocean conditions and deliver far cheaper, persistent data for defence, fisheries and climate uses.

🍇 Heard on the grape vine: Nestlé is set to sell its $5.8B Global Water Business.

 🤠 Cabriolet x Climate

🪴 How to have your own garden in a public space:

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Editorial and curation by Nicola