⚡Vol 168: Grid hardware startups enter their scale era

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

💡 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

🤖 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

🇺🇸 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

🟢 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.

Funds x Climate

🗻 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

👕 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’.

Mobility x Climate

🚗 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