By Carlota Ochoa Neven Du Mont and Paola Brenni

We are excited to announce our latest investment in Renasens, leading their €10M seed round with participation from Norrsken Launcher and Course Corrected, to back a company building critical recycling technology for Europe’s textile industry. As EU waste and recycling regulation tightens, Renasens is enabling Europe’s first truly domestic, closed-loop fibre recycling system — producing virgin-quality material from post-consumer textile waste, at a cost that competes with conventional inputs.

This is a strategic infrastructure play with the potential to reshape an entire industry. The best analogy is de-inking in paper recycling: before that technology matured, recovered paper could only be down-cycled into low-grade cardboard; after de-inking, recycled pulp could produce high-quality white paper, unlocking a circular market worth tens of billions. Renasens is bringing that same inflection point to textiles. Its supercritical CO2 process transforms low-purity, multicolor post-consumer waste into intact fiber that can re-enter the supply chain at quality parity — turning what was previously incinerated or landfilled into a premium resource.

The problem: current recycling methods degrade fibre quality and rely on energy-intensive, chemicals-heavy processes

The global textile industry remains heavily dependent on virgin inputs, particularly cotton and fossil-based polyester, despite growing pressure to decarbonise and improve resource efficiency. Fibre demand has risen rapidly, reaching ~124 million tonnes in 2023 and projected to grow to ~160 million tonnes (~€200 B) by 2030 (Textile Exchange, 2024), driven by population growth, rising incomes, and fast fashion dynamics. At the same time, textiles are a major source of emissions, water use, and waste, with less than 1% of materials recycled into high-quality fibres (BCG, 2025). As brands face tighter regulation, rising input costs, and consumer pressure for circularity, scalable textile-to-textile recycling has become critical to both emissions reduction and long-term supply security.

Existing recycling methods only partially address this challenge. Mechanical recycling degrades fibres and produces lower-quality outputs that are typically down-cycled. Chemical recycling can handle more inputs, including blends, but suffers from fibre loss, inconsistent quality, high energy use, and harsh solvents, making it costly and limiting true fibre-to-fibre circularity. Typically, polyester is depolymerised and cotton is dissolved into pulp to create man-made cellulosic fibres (MMCF) like lyocell or viscose. While these are marketed as “recycled,” they are essentially semi-synthetics that lack the natural performance, breathability, and durability of the original cotton fibre.

The solution: intact fibre recovery through supercritical CO2

Renasens has developed a proprietary, waterless process that separates and recovers fibres from low-purity, multicolour textile waste, the massive fraction of post-consumer blends that is currently ignored or incinerated. By utilising supercritical CO2, the company can “clean” and functionalise complex polycotton materials in a mild environment, leaving the fibre length and macromolecular structure intact.

The result is a fibre that can be re-spun into high-performance yarn, effectively bypassing the destructive “pulping” of conventional methods. Because the process is anhydrous, it eliminates energy-heavy drying stages and significantly reduces operational costs, allowing these recycled fibres to be sold at a “green discount” compared to raw, fossil-based materials. The company is already in the testing phase with textile manufacturers and in discussions with renowned fashion brands to secure the entire value chain, leveraging brand demand to pull tier-2 suppliers toward integrating the solution.

This technological approach is inherently scalable; rather than inventing an entirely new hardware category, Renasens leverages supercritical technology already proven at massive industrial scale in sectors like food and pharmaceuticals (e.g. for decaffeinating coffee or botanical extractions). Having already validated the process with partners at industrial volumes, the company is now moving toward a first commercial unit. This modular design enables a lean scale-up, allowing Renasens to quickly conquer the market.

Why we invested

After a thorough review of the competitive landscape, we are confident that the winners in textile recycling will be those who combine superior product quality (i.e fibre to fibre recycling) and a cost-competitive, resource-efficient process scalable by design.

● Enabling true circularity with superior economics and resource efficiency: Renasens’ technology produces quality outputs that compete on price and performance with virgin materials — at a green discount. In a geopolitical landscape where European resource security has never been more critical, this is an incredibly powerful value proposition: recovered fibres feed directly back into European spinning mills, establishing the continent’s first truly closed textile loop and producing high quality cotton domestically at industrial scale. This elevates circularity’s value proposition to being good for business, not just sustainability.

● De-risked and scalable technology: by utilising a modular design and existing supercritical technology, already proven at scale in other industries, Renasens is well placed for lean scale-up and rapid deployment.

● An outlier founder: Jade brings both deep technical knowledge in supercritical fluids and a sharp intuition for market dynamics and commercial strategy. Prior to founding Renasens, she worked in R&D at two sustainable materials companies, giving her the unique perspective required to bridge the gap between lab-scale innovation and industrial reality.

We are proud to back Jade, Nora, and the entire Renasens team on their journey as they work to become a global leader in fibre-to-fibre textile recycling.

Closing the Loop In European Textiles was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Nina Litman-Roventa

Decarbonising Europe’s most critical industries requires system-level change. Today, Extantia is proud to announce our lead investment in Uplift360’s oversubscribed €7.4M seed round, alongside the NATO Innovation Fund, Promus Ventures, and Fund F. With its breakthrough composite recycling technology, Uplift360 is transforming end-of-life materials into high-quality feedstock while building resilient circular supply chains in the process.

The problem: Over 90% of composite materials end up landfilled or incinerated, creating an environmental crisis and supply chain vulnerability

High-performance composite materials, particularly carbon fiber, are essential to aerospace, automotive, energy, and defence due to their exceptional strength-to-weight ratio and durability. Those same properties make them extremely difficult to recycle, especially when embedded in resins. Today, more than 90% of end-of-life composites are landfilled or incinerated, representing both a significant environmental burden and a multi-billion-euro opportunity locked in wasted high-performance fibres.

The urgency is growing on multiple fronts. Composite waste volumes are accelerating as aircraft and wind turbines reach end-of-life. Europe’s reliance on Asia for precursor materials creates acute supply chain risk, particularly for aerospace and defence-grade fibres. And the carbon intensity of virgin fibre production, which requires energy-intensive processes to manufacture from scratch, makes decarbonisation nearly impossible without circular alternatives.

These pressures arrive at a pivotal moment for European industry. Reindustrialisation efforts across defence, aerospace, and clean energy depend on secure access to advanced materials. Yet current supply chains remain fragile, concentrated in a handful of geographies, and vulnerable to disruption. Securing domestic, circular sources of these materials is now a strategic priority for European industry.

Existing recycling pathways cannot solve this at scale. Pyrolysis, though the most mature, degrades fibre quality through high heat and requires expensive containment. Mechanical methods produce resin-rich, lower-grade outputs with limited reintegration potential. Other emerging alternatives remain costly and energy-intensive, undermining both the economic and climate case for adoption.

The solution: Virgin-grade fibre recovery at room temperature

Enter Uplift360. The company’s novel chemical recycling process recovers virgin-grade fibres from waste composites without compromising material performance. Unlike competing approaches, Uplift360’s technology handles diverse end-of-life composites while operating at room temperature, preserving fibre integrity and enabling economics that can reach parity with virgin materials without relying on green premiums.

The process is designed to scale: low energy consumption, standard industrial equipment, and a cost structure that improves with volume. For customers, this means access to high-quality recycled fibres that perform identically to virgin material, at competitive cost, with a fraction of the carbon footprint. For Europe, it means the foundation of a truly circular composites supply chain, one that reduces import dependency, cuts emissions, and keeps strategic materials within domestic industrial systems.

Founders Sam Staincliffe and Jamie Meighan are both ex-defence with strong track record in high-pressure environments and deep networks across aerospace. They witnessed both the composite waste problem and the strategic need for these materials firsthand on the field. That background gives them direct access to the industrial partners needed to scale, and the credibility to close offtake agreements.

Why we’re excited

At Extantia, we believe Uplift360 is positioned to become the category-defining leader in circular composites. By transforming one of the hardest-to-recycle waste streams into a reliable, high-quality resource, the company addresses a critical climate challenge while strengthening European industrial sovereignty.

We’re proud to back Sam, Jamie, and the Uplift360 team as they build the circular backbone of the composites industry.

Rebuilding and Decarbonising Europe’s Composites Supply Chain was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Tobias Lechtenfeld & Yair Reem

When a new technology is introduced, we normally expect adoption to go up the moment the price goes down. But that wasn’t the case for solar. By the 1990s, the price for solar panels had already significantly decreased, but global solar panel installations stayed low, and they remained low for nearly 15 years before exploding. But why? What caused solar’s 15 year stall, and what lessons can we learn from that for the future?

A Closer Look at the Solar Stall

The idea of solar energy has been around for a very long time. The very first solar panel was supposedly created in 1883, by New York inventor Charles Fritts (although some intriguing evidence suggests it may actually have been a man called George Cove), but the first patents for solar powered engines date back to the 1860s. Now, we weren’t using solar to power anything significant at the turn of the 20th century, and it should be fairly obvious why. Early solar panels were expensive to make, and couldn’t produce enough energy to be worth anything.

For nearly a century after, solar occupied this strange place in the energy market–theoretically possible, technically exciting, but impractical in everyday life, except in space applications. In the 1970s, with the energy crisis solar panels came on the scene, but they remained incredibly expensive, producing energy at a price of $128.27 per watt in 1975, at a time when regular energy prices cost less than $0.22 per kilowatt hour. That means that in 1975, solar was between one and two orders of magnitude more expensive than getting power from the (mostly fossil fuel) grid. Nobody was paying that, no matter how exciting the technology.

But the price of solar started dropping nearly immediately, hitting only $11.72 per watt in 1990, a nearly 91% decrease. Despite that, solar panel adoption lagged, with solar panels not really picking up speed in the market until roughly ten years ago. So what caused this long valley of almost nothing happening?

Well, to answer that, we first have to talk about cost.

The cost of solar panels was “good” in 1990, but it still wasn’t good enough for the mass market. While solar panels were remarkably cheaper than they were when they first came out, solar was still far more expensive than wholesale electricity from coal and gas, which at this point in 1990 cost about $0.08 per kilowatt hour on average. No matter how good your technology is, no one is going to pay 3–5x more for electricity!

The costs of the modules themselves had dropped, but system prices, including installation, permitting, and everything actually required to keep a solar system functioning (balance of system; BOS) kept the total cost per kWh high. This meant that solar had a high levelized cost of energy (LCOE). The sun itself is free, but putting so much money into a system to purchase the components and install it means that, in the long run, people were still better off staying with their energy utilities. Technology only reaches the adoption stage when the all-in cost makes sense, not just the cost of a single component.

But cost is only one part of the problem. To get into the rest of it, we need to talk about system readiness.

Technology Readiness vs. System Readiness

In the 1990s and early 2000s, solar panels were technically improving, but widespread adoption was still limited. This wasn’t because the technology itself was inadequate, but because the surrounding system or ecosystem wasn’t ready. To understand this, it’s critical to distinguish between technology readiness and system readiness.

In the climate tech space, we often talk about technology readiness levels (TRLs). These levels refer to whether a product is technically capable and cost-effective in principle. That means that these levels only measure whether a system theoretically works, and whether it could, again theoretically, compete on price.

But while TRLs are a useful tool for evaluating new technologies, they sometimes fail to capture what’s going on in the real world, and that’s what happened with solar. To explain solar, you need to think about system readiness.

System readiness captures the broader ecosystem that allows a technology to be adopted at scale. Even if a solar panel is cheap enough on a per-watt basis, adoption isn’t going to happen until the entire system–meaning finance, policy, supply chain, installation, grid integration, and consumer engagement–can support it. Without system readiness, a technology may stagnate.

To put it simply, people don’t want a headache. A lot of consumers are willing to pay a bit more for convenience. When choosing between two options of roughly the same price, people are more likely to go with the option that can be installed easily, and cheaply, without having to go through a ton of paperwork and red tape, and without having to spend the next 10 years explaining to technicians exactly what strange, unproven technology they’ve installed in their houses, even if that technology might be a bit cheaper than the one everyone already uses and knows.

Of course, there might be exceptions, like early adopters or people keen to get off the grid, but by and large, people are going to stick with what’s supported by the system, because that’s easy, unless the price difference is significant enough to make the effort of switching worth it.

The key components of system readiness

TRLs focus mostly on how mature a particular technology is, but there isn’t just one facet we can point to when it comes to system readiness. Instead, system readiness comes from a whole host of different factors, and solar lagged behind on all of them, for different reasons. Here’s why.

Permitting and regulatory integration

Before a new energy source can be widely adopted by consumers, it needs to integrate well with existing energy sources. That means that for solar to be a convenient alternative to fossil fuels, it needs to be handled the same way ordinary electricity is handled, through the grid. So before solar can be widely adopted, there needs to be a process for integrating it into existing systems.

In practice, that means that grid codes, interconnection rules, metering standards, and inverter regulations need to be in place, to allow solar technology to connect and operate safely. Since solar operates differently from fossil fuels, it’s not simply a matter of plugging it in and hoping for the best. In the 1990s, all that background prep work just wasn’t there, which meant that utilities had no idea how to integrate intermittent solar generation. That locked most people out of solar power for their homes. After all, a cheap panel is useless if the system can’t accept the electrons it produces.

Financing and business models

Do you have 30,000 EUR in your pocket right now to spend on a home renovation?

For some of you, the answer might well be yes, but you’re probably aware that that puts you in the minority. The typical household just can’t afford large upfront costs, and neither can your normal SMEs. And yet, 30,000 EUR is well within the typical range of what a new heat pump installation costs in Germany, and people sign up to pay that cost. It’s not because every homeowner has that capital upfront, but because homeowners have access to financing and subsidy programs that make that sort of thing feasible for them.

You’re probably aware that there are programs you can sign up for that will help pay for solar power in your home, either through subsidies or through financing schemes, but in the 1990s, those methods just weren’t available. Without long-term PPAs, solar leasing, asset-backed vehicles, and tax equity markets, there was just no way for ordinary consumers to afford solar panels, not even when panels were technically cheap.

Demand-pull policy

Here’s another question: who do you imagine would want to switch over to solar power in the 1990s, when fossil fuels were still so cheap? It’s a difficult question to answer, especially when solar panel and climate tech can still be met with skepticism, even in today’s environment. It isn’t enough for a technology to be cheap, the demand for it has to be there, and when adopting a certain technology aligns with a government’s goals, they can create policies that increase that demand.

Governments create markets through feed-in tariffs, tax credits, and renewable portfolio standards, but such standards only emerged sometime after 2004 or 2005 (Germany’s 2004 EEG, Italy’s 2005 Conto Energia…etc.). Without policy support, a new technology could be lacking a guaranteed buyer, which would make investors cautious.

Manufacturing scale and supply chains

Adoption requires mass production at low cost. Before China entered the market post-2000, solar manufacturing was small, fragmented, and expensive. To drive costs down further, we needed to see polysilicon, wafer, cell, and module production scaling up, and until China came on the scene, that was difficult to accomplish. With the supply chain tiny, fragmented, and expensive, it would have been difficult for solar panels to scale up to meet demand, even if the demand existed.

Installation and distribution networks

Even a ready technology needs people to deploy it, making installers, EPCs, distributors, and O&M providers a vital part of the ecosystem. Early solar suffered from a “missing middle” in deployment infrastructure. Even in cases where people might want to install solar panels, it was often hard to find someone with the expertise to install them safely, and installation costs from those who did exist could cost an arm and a leg. Without enough people who know how to deploy new technologies safely and cheaply, it’s tough for tech to scale.

Consumer awareness and market narrative

The last point is the simplest, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Technologies need motivated buyers. In the 1990s, climate change and energy security were simply not mainstream concerns, so consumers and corporate buyers did not see the value of solar. Aside from a few fringe cases, there was just no reason to make the shift, even if the tech was becoming more cost-competitive. Even at a lower price, people need a reason to care.

The Core Insight: Cost Parity is Not Enough

Solar panels did reach cost parity earlier on, but even when they reached parity, the conditions just weren’t there for customers to exist. Policy, financing, manufacturing, installation networks, and grid readiness were all missing, and without those in place, there was just no way for solar to take off.

Once the system was ready, thanks to a combination of policy pressure, financing, Chinese manufacturing scale, installers, grid codes, and more, the curve flipped from cost-led improvement to demand-led exponential adoption. Adoption accelerated dramatically, leading to the rapid upward progress and further cost reductions we see today.

That means that while cost parity is necessary for adoption, it’s not sufficient on its own. Markets need three conditions to form:

1. The technology needs to be cheap enough.
2. The system needs to be able to absorb it.
3. Customers need to have a way to buy and finance it.

Without all of these things coming together at once, it’s just not going to happen. In the 1990s and early 2000s, only one point was true. The technology was cheap, but the lack of the other two points held back adoption. Around 2010, all three points aligned.

These points about ecosystem readiness are exactly why the DOE introduced the idea of Adoption Readiness Levels (ARLs), a tool that’s meant to complement TRLs to evaluate new technologies. While TRLs still focus only on technology readiness, ARLs focus on everything we’ve discussed so far, all the barriers to adoption that make a new tech, while exciting, just not profitable. The tool uses 17 different dimensions to determine a tech’s ARL, but those dimensions roughly fall into four categories:

1. Value Proposition — whether a technology can deliver the functionality the market requires at a cost customers are willing to pay.
2. Market Acceptance — whether a technology can survive in the current market, given all the other market players.
3. Resource Maturity — whether the inputs required to produce the technology (like supply chains) are mature enough for scale.
4. License to Operate — whether the regulatory environment is ready for the technology, or whether roadblocks exist.

For a new tech to take off, it has to have a high TRL and a high ARL. Solar just needed to get there, and it took about 15 years for solar to finally take off.

Cost Curves Don’t Scale Markets: Lessons from Solar’s 15-Year Stall was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Paola Brenni and Nina Litman-Roventa

Copper: the metal that powers progress

Copper has shaped human civilisation for millennia, from the Bronze Age to today’s electrification era. It was one of the first metals humans learned to extract and work with, then became a quiet force behind the industrial revolution as its mechanical and thermal properties were essential for steam engines and early manufacturing. As industries grew more complex and electricity began to spread, copper moved from a useful industrial metal to a foundation of modern power systems. It’s fair to say that no other material has played such a central role in the rise of electricity. As the metal that carries current and industry, copper made large scale electrification possible and with it mass lighting, modern industry, and communication. Today everything from wind turbines, solar panels to circuit boards, transformers and power distribution systems all rely on copper for its conductivity, durability, and ease of processing at scale.

Decarbonisation is essentially an electrification story, and electrification is a copper story.

While copper is indispensable for electricity as well as for industrial and digital infrastructure, the global supply chain faces structural limits. Figures from the IEA show that demand for copper is expected to rise from roughly 25Mt in 2023 to 36Mt by 2040. The main drivers are the energy transition, the rapid expansion of data centres, and general economic development. Supply, however, remains flat because ore grades continue to decline, mines are aging, permitting processes take many years, and exploration success rates keep dropping. In addition to geological limits, financial conditions also create pressure since long periods of economic and price uncertainty raise the cost of capital and make new projects harder to finance.

Europe faces a pronounced exposure to this supply gap. In 2023, the continent accounted for only 9% of global mining capacity. A similar pattern appears across the copper value chain. As smelting capacity expanded quickly in China over the past decades, the share of global smelter production in Asia grew from 21% to 69% between 1990 and 2023. Over the same period, the Americas fell from 39% to 10% and Europe declined from 29% to 15%.

The continent depends heavily on imports to satisfy rising demand and substantial work is required to build truly sovereign supply chains. This situation creates a clear risk for Western economies since copper is central not just to the clean energy transition but also to broader industrial competitiveness and global economic stability.

The copper value chain: from ores to wires

Copper has been and will continue to be key for society. Thankfully solutions addressing the copper supply and demand conundrum exist across the entire copper value chain, from exploration to recycling.

The production and use of copper can be broadly divided into upstream and downstream segments:

Upstream: turning ores into metal

The upstream segment of the copper value chain is attracting the most innovation and startup activity, as it represents a high-risk, high-reward space where traditional exploration, mining, and processing methods are costly, slow, and increasingly unsustainable.

Exploration and mining: conventional copper exploration is expensive and slow. Startups can bring AI, machine learning, remote sensing, and geochemistry to accelerate discovery and reduce exploration risk.

• SensOre: increasing discovery rates with AI assisted prediction and selection of suitable, economically viable locations.
• Ekion: developing a transformative mining technology called Electrokinetic In Situ Recovery (EK- ISR). This fully electric process enables extraction without fracking or excavation, does not generate waste and does not require dewatering, resulting in a significantly improved environmental impact.

Processing and concentration: mining faces declining ore grades and environmental pressure. Startups can develop bioleaching microbes or sensor-based ore sorting to make extraction more efficient and greener.

• Endolith: engineering AI guided microbes that adapt and learn from each deployment, for faster recovery in heap leaching.
• Transition Biomining: creating additives that boost the microbial activity in heap leaching operations (potentially complementary to Endolith’s microbes), unlocking the use of lower quality sulfide ores
• SiTration: membrane-based concentration and economical recovery of copper and other critical metals from mining wastewaters

Smelting and refining: reducing carbon footprint, energy costs, and processing low-grade ore is key. Startups and scaleups are exploring electrolytic innovations, greener smelting methods and recycling integration (see more on this below).

• Still Bright: substituting smelting with an electrochemical process using a vanadium based solution, which is regenerated and recycled so that chemical waste is reduced.
• Elmery: developing an electroextraction method to recover copper and other precious metals using a pulsed current.

For anyone that wants to dive deeper into these technologies, this article authored by Chloe Coates from Zero Carbon Capital is a must read.

Downstream: converting copper into products

The downstream segment of the copper value chain is about adding value and using copper in products or industrial systems. It tends to see more incremental innovation, largely driven by established corporations, with startups primarily focused on specialised niche applications. Among the big players in these segments, we can find wire and cable manufacturers (Sumitomo Electric and Prysmian), major electric motor manufacturers (ABB, Siemens), energy technology companies (GE Vernova) and many others.

Fabrication: processes such as producing wires, foils, rods, and sheets are mature, with innovation mostly centred on optimising materials, coatings, and manufacturing efficiency rather than reinventing the process.

• Addionics: manufacturing advanced 3D current collectors, reducing the need of copper in the final product and enabling lighter, faster charging and more energy dense batteries.
• Fabric8Labs: producing high purity metal components via a room temperature, electrochemical 3D metal printing technology. This approach builds at atomic level from a metal ion rich feedstock, allowing micron-scale feature resolution and complex structures.

End use applications: copper is just a material input for EV motors, batteries, electronics, etc. Startups are more likely focused on the product itself (motors, batteries) rather than copper per se.

Recycling: the infrastructure for scrap collection and recovery exists, but “old” end-of-life copper collection is only 40–45%. Moreover, current smelting methods are energy-intensive (though far less than primary copper production from ore), capital-heavy, and heavily concentrated in China. Novel approaches present major opportunities for corporates and start-ups to both reduce reliance on primary mining through more energy-efficient methods while localising supply chains.

• Recupere Metals: enhancing conductivity of copper without the need for energy intense smelting and starting from locally available copper scrap. The targeted output is virgin like copper winding wire that can be used for electrical applications.
• Cyclic Materials: developing a hydrometallurgical process to isolate permanent magnets from end-of-life products, such as EV motors, while simultaneously separating and recovering copper, steel, aluminium, and magnet material into distinct streams. The company secured a multi year offtake with Glencore to supply recycled copper for further refining into copper cathodes.
• Mint Innovation: combining hydrometallurgy and biotechnology in a low cost, green chemistry process to selectively recover metals from e-waste.

Our thesis

• The structural copper shortage is inevitable. It reflects the most fundamental economic imbalance: rising demand meeting constrained supply. While this creates pressure across the entire value chain, it also presents clear opportunities for those who can expand capacity or unlock new efficiencies.
• Recycling remains an underserved opportunity that could meaningfully narrow the supply-demand gap. However, scrap typically arrives contaminated with plastics, insulation, or mixed alloys, complicating the melting process and requiring chemical fluxes to remove impurities. As a result, much recycled copper fails to achieve the purity required for electrical applications — lower conductivity limits its use in grids and electronics where performance is critical. Companies successfully addressing these pain points without commanding price premiums are best positioned to capture this opportunity and reduce import dependence.
• Differentiated go-to-market strategies and clear ROI proof points are essential. Common challenges when assessing companies in this space, particularly those operating upstream, include protracted sales cycles with deeply conservative customers. Mining companies operate with slow procurement processes and resist changes to established equipment and production methods. When adoption requires operational changes, hesitation intensifies and quantifiable ROI evidence becomes non-negotiable. Many companies also fall into the single-customer trap, leaving their entire business dangerously exposed. Effective countermeasures include thoughtful vertical integration and scaling through equipment and processes that make use of existing infrastructure.
• Copper has long been treated as a low-margin commodity, but this need not define its future. The companies that break out will be those that translate technical innovation into sustained margin expansion at scale by offering transformative technology rather than incremental solutions. In a market defined by supply constraints and quality requirements, step-change innovations that fundamentally reshape economics will command premium valuations that commodity players cannot.

Mind the Copper Supply Gap was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Carlota Ochoa Neven Du Mont

At Extantia, we back pioneers who are re-engineering industries for the future. We look for solutions that are faster, better, and cheaper, driving mass adoption of clean technology with compelling economics. When we met Joerg and Johannes from EcoG, we immediately recognised that they have built the core piece of this puzzle for mobility: an operating system that lays the foundation for the next generation of reliable, smart, and scalable EV infrastructure. We are thrilled to co-lead the €16 million Series B round alongside GET Fund and Bayern Kapital to help EcoG scale its charging platform and accelerate the global expansion of commercial fast-charging infrastructure.

The Problem: A Fragmented and Unreliable Charging Ecosystem

The EV charging landscape today is neither scalable, reliable nor smart. It lacks a universal architecture and a software layer that ensures compatibility and interoperability across different manufacturers and vehicles. As any EV driver will know, this results in a deeply frustrating customer experience, where a quarter of attempted chargers in the field are non-functional, and 21% of all charging attempts fail. Drivers are often forced to download new apps or set up a new account for every different charging point, leading to a disappointing experience, particularly when compared to gas stations. On the flip side, OEMs face long times to market, burdensome certification processes and high development costs for new product lines. All driven by a lack of industry standards and a universal charger architecture.

This challenge is becoming particularly acute as the market shifts from passenger vehicles to high-utilization commercial fleets and logistics hubs. Charge Point Operators worldwide, highlight the urgent need for robust, standardised, and manageable solutions for depot-based fast charging.

The Solution: EcoG’s Universal Core Operating System

EcoG provides the universal, agnostic, and open IoT control platform for EV chargers. The best analogy is that EcoG is the Android OS for chargers. Their solution, which includes a controller running an adaptive, open OS, standardises the complex EV charging ecosystem.

This “Universal Core” approach delivers tangible benefits:

• Faster Time-to-Market: EcoG shortens time-to-market for OEMs by 2x and reduces development costs by 30% through reference architectures and pre-certified standard architectures.
• Superior Reliability and Flexibility: EcoG outperforms market leaders on reliability and offers the flexibility for its blue chip customers to rapidly enter the market and ensure close to 99% uptime.
• App ecosystem to unlock further value add: The adaptive, open OS that EcoG provides allows for flexible business process integration via third party applications such as predictive maintenance, fleet management, and payment services. These value added services unlock the full potential of charging infrastructure.

Why We Invested

EcoG doesn’t just solve a big problem, it is also a great business that has passed the inflection point, led by tenacious entrepreneurs. These are some of the reasons they are heading for massive scale and highly defensible growth:

1. Enabling the Electrified Logistics Revolution: The market for fast-charging infrastructure, particularly for electrified logistics and commercial vehicle fleets, is expanding rapidly. EcoG’s focus on depot-based and highway charging aligns perfectly with the urgent need for reliable infrastructure to support electric trucks and other commercial vehicles.
2. TAM Expansion: The foundational layer that EcoG provides is the key to unlocking the full potential of charging infrastructure through Value-Added Services (VAS). Services like predictive maintenance, fleet management, and payment convenience are the future of monetisation and will significantly increase the total addressable market of EV Charging.
3. Exceptional Team: The company is led by an experienced team who understand e-mobility and automotive deeply. Co-founders Joerg and Johannes are driven, tenacious and deeply knowledgeable. They have been able to attract top talent to their team and complement each other.
4. Infrastructure Moat: By becoming the essential communication and smart management “brains” inside the charger , EcoG is integrated into their customers’ production lines for their entire product lifecycle, establishing a strong lock-in with long-term revenue potential.

By tackling the underlying architectural challenge of EV charging, EcoG is not just building a product; it’s laying the common foundation for the next generation of reliable, smart, and cost-efficient electric vehicle infrastructure. This is a game-changer for the energy transition, and we are excited to partner with them on this journey.

The Android for EV Chargers: Why We’re Investing in EcoG was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Paul Eisenberg and Paola Brenni

We’re thrilled to announce our investment in NexDash, leading their €5M seed round alongside our friends at Clean Energy Ventures. NexDash is building the first neo-carrier for EV trucks in Europe. Starting with a few strategic acquisitions of legacy carriers, they leverage asset-backed securities to deploy EV trucks at scale. Operated with their very own NexOS, this creates the first true next generation, zero-emission (and at some point autonomous) logistics network in Europe.

The problem: a legacy trucking industry slow to electrify

The transportation sector (including road, aviation, and shipping) accounts for roughly 24% of global CO₂ emissions, and within this, 35% are associated with diesel trucks.

Over 80% of the world’s road freight is moved by small, undercapitalized carriers, which are fragmented, analog, and largely locked out of the electrified future. In Europe alone, more than 90% of carriers operate fewer than 10 trucks, often running on razor-thin margins and aging fleets. These operators lack both the capital and the operational leverage to modernize or invest in clean technologies.

TCO’s (total costs of operation) for EV trucks are at a tipping point, and now lower than Diesel trucks in many cases. However, the transition to electric freight isn’t just about replacing vehicles — it demands a complete rethinking of logistics infrastructure, from charging networks and route optimization, to energy management and financing models. Without a scalable platform that integrates these elements, it is very difficult to run EV fleets effectively.

As a result, the trucking industry sits at a critical inflection point: a massive market ripe for transformation, yet constrained by fragmentation, capital requirements, and outdated operations.

The solution: a platform to deploy, finance, and operate EV trucks at scale

NexDash is building the first neo-carrier for EV trucks in Europe. In essence a scalable platform that can quickly integrate large numbers of EV trucks into its operations, deploy capital at scale, serve customers with cost-competitive zero carbon logistics, and conduct complex operations in an increasingly optimised and automated fashion.

Starting with a few strategic acquisitions of legacy carriers, NexDash leverages asset-backed securities to grow and shift its fleet towards EV trucks. Routes, charging, and load are optimised via the proprietary operating system NexOS. In the future, smaller trucking carriers can also benefit from EV truck cost advantages via NexDash’s trucking-as-a-service offering, without having to shoulder large sums of upfront capex.

Why we invested: an outlier entrepreneur and a generational opportunity

From the moment we first met Michael, we knew that we were dealing with a true outlier entrepreneur. Since then, we’ve been thoroughly impressed by his focus and execution speed, ambition and vision, habit to think 3 steps ahead, and ability to attract an exceptional team around him.

The combination of a trucking industry under pressure and looking for answers, obstacles to renewing itself from within, and the tipping point for EV truck TCO’s, create a perfect storm and unique time window for disruption to succeed.

We couldn’t think of a better team to take on this grand challenge and generational opportunity and we’re proud to support Michael, Karsten, and Co on their journey as they build the platform that transforms Europe’s trucking industry at scale.

Emission-Free, Optimised and Autonomous Freight Services: Why We Invested in NexDash was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Building the Next Generation of Autonomous Ground Robotics

By Jan Olsson and Christian Guba

Farmers these days face tough challenges: too few skilled hands, too many machines in need of repair, and rising costs tied to diesel and maintenance downtime. On specialty-crop farms, tractors often sit idle while waiting for parts or service calls, putting entire harvests at risk.

Despite years of announcements, the agricultural machinery sector still falls behind in autonomy and electrification. Incumbents like John Deere have poured billions into R&D, yet the result is a handful of semi-autonomous pilots and software-locked machines that are notoriously difficult to repair. Their closed system, “Apple-style” approach keeps customers dependent, parts expensive, and innovation slow.

While farms remain stuck in the mechanical past, autonomy has transformed other industries. Cars are learning to drive themselves with Waymo and Tesla in much more complex environments. Humanoids are walking factory floors with Figure. Logistics hubs, ports, and warehouses operate with fleets of autonomous vehicles every day. But on the land that feeds us, automation and electrification are still in the rather early stages. This is where Voltrac comes in.

Engineering autonomy and electrification from first principles

Voltrac’s vehicle, “Thor”, is a fully electric, autonomous ground platform built from the ground up for rugged, unstructured terrain. With 70 % fewer moving parts and a crab-steer chassis, Thor is built to thrive where others stall — from vineyards and olive groves to construction sites and defense operations.

The result: less downtime, lower operating costs, and up to 80 % lower CO₂ emissions compared to diesel equivalents. Implements can be mounted in minutes via a modular hitch system, enabling one robotic platform to switch seamlessly between use cases. What impressed us most: Thor is built from first principles — it’s how you would design tractors today if you could start from scratch.

When we visited Voltrac’s test site in Spain, we saw Thor working live in the field — an autonomously working machine operating quietly (because electric) across uneven, muddy terrain. The simplicity of the design and the amount of data collected with each drive made a lasting impression on us.

Built in Europe — for Europe

But technology alone isn’t the story here. Voltrac is building European resilience, making our food systems and front-line logistics more autonomous, less fossil-dependent, and less exposed to fragile global supply chains.

Their Valencia-based production site already assembles Thor at competitive prices, and the team is scaling toward 100 units per year in 2026. Unlike many hardware startups that rely on subsidies or “green premiums”, Voltrac has cracked the cost curve. Through smart design, Thor already achieves price parity with diesel and is on track to undercut it as production scales.

A team that blends founder-market-fit with ambition

The founding duo — Thomas Hubregtsen (ex-Google X, BMW Research, Co-Founder of Extropic) and Francisco Infante Aguirre (ex-Volocopter, Destinus) — brings together rare hardware and software depth. Within a year, they took Thor from prototype to field-tested production, proving that European hardware innovation can move fast. On the customer side, Fran has the perfect founder market fit: Growing up in a family business in the agricultural machinery space.

From farms to front lines

Thor’s design also scales beyond just agriculture — it’s a Robotics Platform. The vehicle can carry up to four tonnes of cargo autonomously across rugged terrain — a capability directly relevant for defense logistics. In modern conflicts, more than 50 % of casualties occur in front-line resupply operations. The Voltrac team has already visited Ukraine to explore how Thor can help make these missions safer.

Why it matters

As electrification and autonomy converge, Voltrac sits at the intersection of both revolutions, where Europe’s engineering tradition meets technological sovereignty. In a world defined by fragile supply chains and rising geopolitical risk, companies like Voltrac help Europe stay fed, powered, and protected.

At Extantia, we back founders who build the hard-tech foundations of a regenerative and resilient economy. Voltrac fits that mission perfectly. What started as an agricultural robot is becoming a platform for autonomous ground mobility — built in Europe.

From Diesel to Data: Why We Invested in Voltrac was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Tess Dury

Climate change doesn’t discriminate, but its impacts aren’t felt equally. Around the world, women and marginalised communities are often hit first and hardest. Yet, despite this reality, these same groups remain underrepresented in the climate tech conversation. As we highlighted in a previous article, the very people most affected by the crisis are too often excluded from shaping the solutions.

To quantify just how much this participation gap is hurting climate tech innovation, we partnered with Climate Mosaic and HSBC Innovation Banking to create a report on diversity in climate tech — or the lack thereof. Climate Mosaic put out a survey targeting both climate tech founders and investors. The survey asked about backgrounds, experiences, and perceptions regarding diversity in the climate sector. You can download the full report here. In this article, we highlight some of the many interesting things we learned with the report, not just about the numbers of women and other marginalised professionals in climate tech, but their experiences in the industry. We also outline some solutions and our commitments at Extantia.

Bias in Climate Tech is Real

While we might like to think of climate tech as a forward-thinking industry, our survey’s respondents reveal that bias is very real in this space. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women were three times more likely to report experiencing bias than men. Many women describe feeling excluded from decision-making and having to fend off frequent challenges to their credibility.

The numbers reflect this perception. More than two-thirds (69%) of the women who responded to our survey do not have investment voting rights, compared to only 57% of men. Also, while women are well-represented in junior roles, they aren’t similarly represented at higher levels. At higher age groups and in more senior positions, men dominate, suggesting that women leave the workforce mid-career.

This isn’t unique to climate tech, but fairly common across all technical and STEM fields. Studies show that the leaky pipeline might be responsible for about 35% of the gender gap in technical careers. It’s a systematic problem with no quick fixes. Across all technical fields, women report discrimination on the job, but also policies that make it difficult to balance career advancement with family or caregiving responsibilities. Whatever the cause, the leaky pipeline hurts everyone, because the loss of highly-trained young professionals means less innovation, creativity and diverse voices at the top.

But women being underrepresented in senior positions is only half of the problem. On the investment side of climate tech, female investors also tend to have significantly lower carried interest than their male counterparts. 80% of our survey’s female respondents expect to receive carried interest in the 0–5% range, meaning that they receive only a small share of their firm’s profits, compared to 48% of the male respondents. Since higher carry is often tied to seniority and decision-making power, this implies that women are largely excluded from climate tech investing’s most influential roles.

It’s not just about gender: Bias is intersectional

The results further revealed that the bias in climate tech is intersectional. Regardless of gender, non-white professionals reported greater levels of bias than white professionals, despite making up a smaller percentage of the work force. This bias appears across all aspects of the industry. Respondents from ethnically underrepresented groups were more likely to not have voting rights, meaning that the majority of decisions in the climate tech industry are still being made by white professionals.

Ageism is also a factor. Younger professionals reported being talked over in meetings, excluded from key decisions, and having to work harder to prove their competence. While diversity appears to be improving at the junior levels, the lack of inclusion and encouragement can make it harder for young professionals to see a long-term future in their workplaces. Without the appropriate support and career guidance, many are more likely to move on.

Nicole Le Blanc from Woven Capital suggests that one way to counter this could be to let junior team members speak first in meetings where many are present, and to allow them to lead projects. She also suggests praising them often when praise is earned. While this might sound quite obvious, people aren’t great at implementing this in the day-to-day. Doing so could empower younger team members, particularly those who more often than not receive disempowering messages.

Caregivers are also more likely to face bias. While caregivers only made up a quarter (~26%) of the respondent population, they were twice as likely to report bias. As two-thirds of respondents with caregiving responsibilities were women, this bias disproportionally affects female respondents. Interestingly, among investors, more men than women reported having childcare duties, reflecting a growing trend of men taking on visible caregiving duties.

Neurodivergent respondents also reported having difficulty in communication, with bias stemming from different communication styles. However, there does appear to be some progress in this area. Neurodivergent respondents consistently had voting rights, at a rate similar to the neurotypical population. Only 1% of respondents identified as being disabled, making it difficult to determine if disabilities affected bias, but this is something we look into with a larger survey. When gender is added to the mix, though, things get undeniably tougher. Fewer than 5% of the senior investment professionals who responded to our survey identified as both women and as members of underrepresented ethnicities.

Solving Climate Tech Bias Means Making Cultures More Inclusive

The report reveals promising signs, particularly for LGBTQ+ and neurodiverse professionals. But as seen, climate tech is still far from inclusive, especially at senior levels, where decision-making roles narrow along predictable lines of gender and ethnicity.

Lasting change requires more than quick fixes; it demands a cultural shift. Without it, DEI policies risk being lip service. Already, startups without formal DEI programs are 50% more likely to face retention problems, leading to a steady loss of talent and weakened innovation. This statistic suggests that forming a robust, functional DEI program is an important first step towards solving this problem in your organization. At the moment, our report shows that climate tech companies are more likely to adopt structured DEI programs as they grow, but the adoption of these initiatives remains uneven, so there’s room for improvement.

But while forming a DEI program is an important step, it’s not the only one. Tackling persistent bias requires embedding inclusion into everyday culture and decision-making. This means being intentional about the things that set the tone; like the language used in meetings, the flexibility offered around work schedules, or how parental leave is structured so both parents can participate equally. It also means seeking different perspectives, whether through diverse coaches, advisors, or structured workshops, to help identify blind spots and shift behaviors across teams. These steps are ways to build environments where a wider range of people can thrive.

At the organisational and ecosystem level, more structural levers matter. Hiring with intent — for example, ensuring that your pipeline is seeing diverse candidates and rethinking rigid credential filters — helps reshape who gets in. Equally, transparent promotion criteria and clear accountability for advancement decisions prevents unchecked biases from influencing career progression and opaque processes. Investors and funders can amplify this impact by communicating how their own decisions are made, co-developing DEI plans with founders early on, and following through by assessing progress at critical inflection points like follow-on investments.

A diverse company has repeatedly been shown to be an asset. Research shows diverse teams outperform on resilience, efficiency, and stakeholder alignment — all critical in climate tech. Climate change is a complex, interdisciplinary challenge. To address it effectively, we need teams with broad perspectives. Without that, the sector risks replicating the same exclusionary systems it set out to transform.

Our Commitment at Extantia

At Extantia, we believe that solving the climate crisis demands diverse perspectives. We need to create an environment where diversity of all kinds can thrive, including diversity of thought. Without an array of different perspectives, we won’t be able to tackle the climate problems facing the world today, or the problems that will face the world in the future. We believe that we have a responsibility to make sure that tomorrow’s solutions are undertaken by everyone, for everyone.

We hope that this report sparks action in the climate tech industry. We’ll continue to push for greater diversity in our ranks, and in our portfolio companies, but wider action is essential in order to make sure that the climate tech industry doesn’t repeat the mistakes of the past, and instead brings us all forward into the future.

Click here to preview and download the full report, ‘The (Other) Climate Gap’

Mind The Gap: Who is Still Being Left Out of Climate Tech? was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Extantia is proud to announce our €5 million seed investment in Bees & Bears, alongside Contrarian Ventures. The Berlin-based climate fintech is democratising access to renewable energy financing, following a €2 million pre-seed round in 2024 and a landmark €500 million financing framework from a listed European bank, positioning the company to finance 25,000 solar, heat pump, and battery storage systems over the next two years.

By Paul Eisenberg and Jan Olsson

The Problem: Capex is blocking deployment at scale

The world is moving from high opex / low capex fossil technologies to low opex / high capex renewable solutions. Many of the new technologies (PV, batteries, heatpumps, EVs) already beat their fossil counterparts on a Total Cost of Operation (TCO) basis. However, adoption remains painfully slow, with many would-be customers struggling to shoulder the upfront capex.

Most homeowners, small businesses, and even many industrial players hesitate to commit large sums of upfront capital, even if there is clear visibility to cost-savings over an asset’s lifetime. Banks are slow, processes are tedious and opaque, and people are reluctant to either commit large sums or navigate the process of obtaining financing. The result: thousands of viable projects never get built.

This isn’t just a problem for solar panels and heat pumps. As clean technologies continue to come down the cost curve — from batteries to charging stations — upfront capex will remain the structural bottleneck.

The Solution: Embedded financing at the point of sale

Bees & Bears solves this by making financing as simple as clicking “yes” at checkout.

Founded in 2023, the Berlin-based company embeds financing directly into the sales process of installers. Customers can immediately spread the cost of a solar or heating system over predictable monthly instalments, usually substituting higher fossil operating costs with lower clean-energy payments.

It’s a win-win-win:

• Homeowners immediately lower their monthly costs without large upfront payments (and can feel good about doing their part in the energy transition).
• Installers can expand their customer range, finance working capital, close contracts faster, and can provide holistic customer solutions that are competitive to industry giants like Enpal and Co.
• Banks and investors can deploy capital at scale into a fast-growing, attractive asset class that has verified real assets behind it and helps them reach their green lending goals at the same time.

Bees & Bears has been a pioneer in streamlining the customer journey to eliminate all friction from the buying process (think Klarna-for-renewable–assets). And in the credit game, size matters — in early 2025, the company secured a €500 million financing framework from a large European financial institution. This partnership allows Bees & Bears to offer some of the most attractive terms on the market, accessible via an onboarding process that takes just minutes for both installers and customers.

The Vision: The financing layer for the energy transition

Bees & Bears’ ambition goes far beyond the residential space. The team is building the missing financing layer that enables the energy transition across sectors.

Any situation where someone somewhere is buying a standardised renewable asset, Bees & Bears can offer an alternative payment solution. Today that can be PV, heatpumps, EV chargers, or batteries. Tomorrow that might be whatever new device or invention is coming down the abatement cost curve and becoming profitable to deploy.

And it doesn’t matter whether you’re an individual household or a company — Bees & Bears can create a solution to finance your distributed energy asset.

Why we invested

At Extantia, we back technologies and business models that remove bottlenecks to the energy transition. Financing is one of the biggest obstacles hindering large-scale deployment of already profitable renewable technologies.

The founders Jakob and Marius impressed us with their incredible execution focus, ability to form win-win partnerships, attention to detail, and the quality of the team they managed to assemble around them. In a short time, they have secured enough funding to leapfrog many of the incumbents and helped finance millions in loans that made a real difference in the lives of installers and households.

The combination of the team, proven market pull, a massive market, and an already operational €500 million financing facility made this the most compelling fintech opportunity in climate tech that we’ve seen.

We’re proud to back the Bees & Bears team as they build the financing infrastructure that will power the next trillion euros of the energy transition.

The Financing Infrastructure Layer for the Energy Transition: Why We Invested in Bees & Bears was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Tess Dury

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations are becoming increasingly important, especially for any companies working in climate tech. Despite this, many companies still treat ESG like a box that needs to be checked off, a minor task that founders need to take care of before they can get to the “real” work.

This is the wrong approach. Poorly-executed ESG represents a real risk to the company, while ESG done well can set companies on the right track to become best-in-class. Also, taking a close look at your company under an ESG lens can reveal business opportunities that you have otherwise missed, and ways to distinguish yourself from the competition.

At Extantia, we believe that ESG is important, especially for early-stage companies, and that it is more than just a box-ticking exercise. That’s why we have formalised our approach in an ESG playbook. We want to share it with early stage companies so that they can clearly and systematically integrate ESG into their business operations.

In the following piece, we’ll talk about how to set your ESG priorities, and share some tips on how to make ESG work for your company, based on our newly developed ESG Playbook.

The ESG Prioritisation Tree

In our climate tech portfolio companies, we’ve identified ESG topics that come up often, and have placed these topics in a “prioritisation tree”. The topics are roughly divided into three sections, depending on company attributes, and is intended to make it easier to pick out the relevant topics according to company priorities.

Every company’s priorities will differ — a concept known as materiality — which refers to the ESG issues most relevant to your operations, stakeholders, and long-term value. Under double materiality, you should assess both how ESG factors affect your business (outside-in) and how your business impacts people and the environment (inside-out). Identifying these priorities is the first step to focusing your ESG efforts where they matter most.

This is the Prioritisation Tree:

It starts with attributes that describe your company: Production of Physical Products, High Usage of Data/AI, and Strong Growth Ambitions. Under each of these attributes is a list of topics that most relate to those overarching attributes.

As part of our early conversations with any company, we go over the prioritisation tree together and pick the 3–5 most relevant topics to their business model. If you’d like to do this on your own, we emphasise not just selecting things that you have already worked on, or easy “wins” Remember, you’re not just trying to check off a box, you’re identifying topics that will impact the future of your company. So as you select your priorities, really focus on the ones that are actually important and relevant to you.

Let’s take a company whose product relies on rare earth elements such as neodymium and dysprosium; common in technologies like EV motors, magnetic refrigeration, or wind turbines. These materials are essential for performance but come with complex environmental and social risks: high-impact extraction processes, limited global suppliers, geopolitical concentration, and weak labor or environmental standards in some mining regions.

Because of this, Raw Materials and Supply Chain management naturally emerge as two of the company’s most material ESG topics. Why? First, the sourcing of these critical materials directly affects the company’s environmental footprint and exposure to social risks. Second, supply chain resilience, transparency, and traceability become business-critical in the face of regulatory scrutiny, stakeholder expectations, and potential disruptions. In short, companies relying on rare earths cannot address ESG meaningfully without a clear strategy around both their raw material inputs and the integrity of their supply chains.

Now imagine a company with a production line that uses heavy machinery, hazardous materials, or operates in high-voltage environments. For them, Employee Health and Safety is clearly a material ESG topic. As the company scales, prioritising a safety-first culture and implementing strong safety protocols becomes essential; not just to protect workers, but to manage operational risk during rapid growth and increased investor scrutiny.

Once you’ve established your priorities, you have the hard job of actually implementing actions addressing them. We’ve tried to make that job easier by breaking each topic down into a bespoke checklist by stages.

The ESG Checklists

Once you’ve identified your priority topics, the next step is translating them into action. That’s where our ESG checklists come in. We use these checklists to develop bespoke, actionable ESG action plans based on each company’s material topics and checklist items; turning high-level priorities into concrete steps that drive meaningful, measurable progress.

We’ve built custom checklists for each core ESG topic, organised into three stages. These don’t align with funding rounds, they track your company’s maturity. The idea is to help you move from early foundations to market leadership in your ESG performance.

• Stage 1: Establish
  Set a clear foundation. Build basic systems, values, policies and awareness around your priority ESG topic.
• Stage 2: Integrate
  Embed the topic into your core business strategy, operations, and decision-making.
• Stage 3: Lead
  Aim for industry best practice. Drive innovation, transparency, and continuous improvement.

Let’s bring this to life with an example. Think back to the company using rare earth materials. We identified Supply Chain Management as one of their key ESG topics. In the first stage, they should focus on mapping their critical material sources and understanding key supply chain risks. In the second, they could develop responsible sourcing guidelines and start evaluating suppliers based on ESG criteria. And in the third, they should conduct full supply chain audits, publish transparency reports, or participate in collaborative industry standards. All of these steps are outlined in the full checklist below:

Now take Energy Usage, a material topic especially relevant for climate tech companies with high energy demand, like a direct air capture (DAC) startup. DAC processes are notoriously energy intensive, whether they rely on chemical sorbents, heat, or large-scale fans. That energy use isn’t just a sustainability issue; it directly affects unit economics ($/tCO₂), incentive eligibility, and the credibility of a company’s net-negative claims.

In Stage 1, the focus is on embedding energy efficiency early. This could include creating energy consumption maps for prototype stages, drafting a prioritised list of energy-intensive processes, and conducting a regulatory landscape analysis of energy efficiency requirements relevant to the product and scale. In Stage 2, the company shifts toward integration — installing energy metering systems across key production lines, testing process control strategies for efficiency gains, applying energy efficiency criteria to procurement, and conducting a gap analysis for readiness against standards like ISO 50001.

By the third stage, as the company scales, the focus turns to leadership. That might mean conducting full lifecycle energy audits — and publishing them -, shifting to renewable energy procurement at commercial scale, or participating in industry alliances to set energy efficiency standards for DAC. At this point, energy performance is part of the company’s operations, market positioning and policy engagement.

ESG checklists aren’t the end of the journey — they’re living documents that should evolve with your company. As you scale, move to higher TRLs, or undergo major pivots, revisit your priorities and adapt your action plans. Our ESG Playbook helps companies do just that, giving founders a flexible, visual framework to take ownership of their ESG roadmap and focus on meaningful progress over “tick-boxing.” It’s applicable across climate tech, turning ESG from a compliance task into a strategic advantage that drives resilience, unlocks growth, and builds lasting value. Once all topics are identified and action plans are in place, we also encourage founders to share progress with investors using our ESG board slide template, released last year to make reporting simple and impactful.

If you’d like to learn more or receive a copy of the Playbook, reach out! We’d be happy to share it.

More Than a Checklist: How to Make Your ESG Strategy Count was originally published in Extantia Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.