đ°Â Youâre building a climate hardware startup and struggling to raise follow-on funding.
đ«Â Finding the right talent and expertise for your climate hardware venture is keeping you up at night.
đ Youâre looking for the most effective pathway to market your groundbreaking climate hardware product.
đ Youâve developed promising green technology at university and are thinking about spinning out.
đ Youâre wondering how to measure and communicate the environmental impact of your hardware effectively.
đ”ïžÂ Youâre an investor and thinking about including hardware in your investment scope.
Scaling up climate hardware solutions is critical if we want to reach our climate goals. However, building and funding the hardware-heavy businesses that we need to decarbonise our economies is not trivial. We have created this playbook predominantly for the early stage climate hardware founder teams, looking for a recipe on how to get their offering to scale. However, we believe the quality of the industry insights make this suitable reading for founders at the growth and exit stages too, looking to optimise their organisations. Lastly, we believe this playbook will prove to be a valuable reading for investors backing companies in this area already, and those keen to learn more about the space.
In 2023, we engaged key stakeholders to gather industry insights, resources, and learnings for this sector, which we have compiled here. This playbook is a community effort and largely based on dozens of interviews with founders and investors, a survey with 118 investor and 142 founder participants as well as historical data from NetZero insights, a market intelligence platform, covering 3600 climate hardware funding announcements in Europe between 2015 - 2023.
Hardware is hard - here is why â>
Learn more about this report â>
A quantitative view of European startups â>
Challenges of Climate Hardware
The playbook is structured to cover all relevant aspects of climate tech startups. Above youâll see an overview of the state of the industry and some thoughts on the challenges and opportunities of investing in climate hardware solutions. The remainder of the playbook covers topics ranging from Technology, Team, and Fundraising to Go-to-Market, IP, and Operations. In the final sections, we elaborate on the importance of Impact Measurement and Navigating Policy for scaling climate hardware tech.
This playbook in itself is a âfirst-of-a-kindâ and we hope it's helpful for anyone interested in building or investing in climate hardware solutions!
Authors:
Florian Schabus, Kim Dang, Jessica Burley, Christian zu Jeddeloh, Sophia Escheu.
Collaborators:
Louis Millon (Systemiq Capital), Net Zero Insights, Tobias Lechtenfeld (Tech for Net Zero), Kobi Weinberg (CREO), Suzana Carp (Cleantech for Europe), Jakob Medick (DWR Eco).