With Laurent's segalent from London and Gerard read from Berlin. This is redefining energy
minutes minutes. So John, let's start with the number. Oh, go
on, give me the number. The number is ten thousand dollars, Paton.
And to give you a clue, it has doubled into twenty three.
It's doubled in two. Oiler oil, olive oiler, olive oil, olive
oil. Of course it has because the weather. All right, course,
oh my god, it's a ten thousand Wow Jesus. Draught disease production in
the EU down forty last year. So olive oil is becoming a luxury.
Don't laugh, it's a tragedy. Do you know why I'm laughing, Because
I tell you why i'm laughing. I'm laughing because what we're going to talk
about today is clean tech investments. And actually, for me, one of
the most interesting areas agriculture. And the fact that you start with olive oil
leads me on to agriculture, is that. Listen, there's a huge change
going on in the whole world of agriculture. Right. I've got you know
where I'm living in Germany. You've got the farmers on the streets protesting and
and there's lots of new technologies there. So that's why I was laughing.
The idea of this episode game because of that report clean Tech one hundred,
and we'll put the link in the show notes. It's a fantastic report.
Who presents the hottest one hundred startups in the clean tech sector. I want
to put my hats out to Richard Youngman, who has been doing this for
fifteen years. A clean tech group. I actually thought about a decade ago
they should change the name because clean tech was one of those dirty words.
But somehow it survived, and actually it's not so dirty anymore. It's clean.
They have a fantastic advisory board Cycle Capital Marathon Engine You Venture Carbon Trust,
Joazio Capricorn. He has managed to put a lot of very very clever
judges. First of all, the big picture is the hangover, and the
hangover is a clin tech investment into twenty three was done forty percent and in
terms of amount we go back to tour twenty so we had the crazy excess
of toward twenty one to or twenty two and now the party's over. Well,
actually I'd say that the hype cycle is over all in the party and
I listened. I'm someone that i've obviously I'm doing corporate finance advisory in the
space, and it was just crazy around. And you saw this yourself with
the SPACs and the crazy businesses that certainly had multi billion dollar businesses and they
hadn't had any they didn't have anything much. Hypes is not always a good
thing because what tends to happen is the bubble bar, so the bubbler's burst.
I think clean tech is here to stay. And let's be clear,
it's not just clean tech is the old VC universe. If you look at
crunch Base Peach Book, the all the VC rounds are minus fifty or even
sixty percent, So you know a certain weigh down, forty percent is a
bit better than the rest of the industry. We've just started twenty twenty four
and we've seen the biggest private equity investment in history in Europe and that's Northfold,
right, yeah, yeah, all right, So there is still let's
say, appetite, and actually, more importantly, there's a strategic realization case
in point Northfold that we really do need to invest into these technologies because a
critical and not a different way as a critical to the future of the planet.
They're also very very important from a competitive point of view and as well.
So yeah, the report as five subsect dolls, and we're gonna touch
from the smallest to the largest. So the smallest is, as you said,
agriculture. Then we have logistic and transportation, then we have materials,
then what they call resources, environment, and finally energy. So I've also
counted the countries of origin out of one hundred, USA thirty nine, Europe
thirty nine, Canada thirteen, Australia three, Israeli toi, China two,
India one, Singapore one, Korea, Japan zero, So it's a bit
of a Western skewed ranking. Yeah, you're absolutely right on that. I
mean, that's indeed the Asians, if I may say, do it in
a slightly different way, which they tend to do more I would say in
house. Right. Yeah, So agriculture, while it has really gone down
because there was the bubble of all those beyond meat impossible burghers and so on.
You're absolutely right. So that's that whole alternative protein area, which is,
in other words, what's the alternative to eating beef really beef? And
the reason beef is because of the methane emissions in relation to farming beef and
cattle. You know, I follow that area very very interesting, interesting.
I don't know if you've tried these beyond burger alternative meats. I mean they
actually taste okay, they taste good actually, right, But still you're that
there was a huge amount of hype in that area. But that area is
not going to go away. For me. It's more exciting in the whole
agricultural area is back into We've got climate change going all around us, which
we're going to need drought resistant crops, and there's going to be a whole
change in the way we do agriculture here. And so I think that area
is going to get very exciting over the next few years. You know,
of course, Giniditina, that's going to take exactly things exactly exactly. Okay,
So let's move second category transportation and logistics. So here it's ride a
laing a lot of software around ev charging, battery data analyze this, So
that's everything around electric mobility, and obviously that's also a huge growth area going
forward, is that whole decarbonization of transport, which is really really, really
critical, and that takes also in a little bit of the hydrogen area,
also the battery area and stuff like that. Very very exciting going forward.
Okay, next sector matterials and chemicals. And by the way, the material
chemicals, if I may say, that's actually the heart of everything. Yes,
because if you look at it, if we want to go and bring
in better batteries, we need better materials. If we want to improve let's
see the use of pesticides and insecticides in and around farming. Again, it's
back to material use in chemicals. So this is a critical, critical area
and it's one of those really really difficult areas to understand. Yeah, look
for me for it's the hardest. And if I look at the least,
you've got busted metals still making brimstone, they try to do carbon neutral cement.
You have new type of plastics, new chemicals. This is really heart
tach. It is tech. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, See that's
sup. So we're going to move next to what they call resources and environment.
And here we have a lot of carbon recycling, we have pressibility software
for supply chain, a lot of circular economy here. But that's where we
also find our friend from Kero Sero Space is in the list directly to extraction.
For me, that's all circular economy. Yeah. I think what's also
interesting that there is, although the deal volume the amount of capital invested collapsed,
actually the number of deals increase quite substantially. And this is obviously a
very very very important area. But I mean my own unit, it's just
difficult to really really scale businesses in and around that area. It's a bit
of really of a mixed bag because I don't really know. You get stuff
like lader hyperspectual imaging and machine learning algorithm technologies. I mean, if you
present me a deal like that, what to say anyway? And of course,
last but not least, which is you know, the most of interest
and the biggest category, because half of the companies in the list are here,
it's energy and power. There are a few that I know that are
fantastic Acure, which is an API to access battery data to monitor that.
We health block power. So here that's heating and cooling, retrofit services.
We have geothermal, a lot of geothermal like eve Ore, Fervo, of
course geotherrmal as well, and then stuff around hydrogen, new electric motors.
I mean, the list go the Piklow the market for flo This is where
thin take's happening. There's no doubt about it. Oh no, no,
no, there's no doubt about it. Listen, I've got a lot of
my former clients there like Oxford PV and stuff like that there as well.
And do you know the thing that struck me wrong? And I look through
this list, and let's be clear what this list is. These are non
listed companies. These are privately fun to venture back businesses and that have not
been bought by anyone, right, so they're independent. And I looked at
it and I thought, what's amazing for me was I looked at the oldest
company on the list. Do you know how old it is? Like ten
years or something? Two thousand? Wow, the twenty three years old.
And by the way, quite a few businesses that were twenty ten and before
that. What struck me in all of it was sometimes it's just this sector
is it's really difficult to get scaled because you've got a lot of my reflection
on it, is you've got a lot of incumnance that are blocking. That's
what they're doing. They're blocking these new technologies getting to market. And there's
also regulatory hurdles to prevent these technologies. Get that. That was what struck
me anyway, one of those things that struck me as I as I looked.
I don't know what else struck you when you are looking through the list
and reading shore the report. The thing I'm always looking into is what's the
business model. If it's a SaaS model, your clients are everywhere like PVCSE,
that's great. If it's a SaaS model and your clients are a few
utilities, that's tougher. Oh yeah, Are you a supplier of the utilities
or are you a competitor to the utilities, which also is very difficult,
or are you just selling electrons or molecule in liquid market? And in that
case, energy traders which facilitate the market, they don't serve the market.
They are in the market make much more money than the people who want to
sell services to utilities, which is a tough one. So here it's really
not about the tech, it's how you position the tech and the revenu model
the market. Actually, i'd like your comment there and software as a service,
because the amount of businesses that I'm speaking to where I'm looking at them
and I sort of said, why did you go down the software as a
service business model, and the reason that went down was because of evaluation perspective.
They thought, oh yeah, yeah yeah, but then they can't scale
and they end up with like two million in revenues. And while they could
have gone other business models, and you said, they're actually the example of
your the trading area. There's a lot of software as a service businesses in
that whole area of utilities and they just can't scale even though they're doing very
important things within that value chain. Right yeah, gp SB, say it
again, gp SB, GPSB, great product sty business. Okay, John,
we're gonna leave it here all right, by Bred. Take care,
Jeers. Thank you for listening to redefine Y. Don't forget to rate the
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