Ecosummit Award 2013 – 43 Nominees from 11 Countries – Application Deadline Ends Tonight
Ecosummit TV: Last year, we ran our startup award for the first time. 52 nominees from 9 countries participated in the Facebook and jury voting. This Ecosummit TV video documents the award ceremony of 2012 and features BlaBlaCar, Carpooling.com and MyCO2 (Facebook winners) as well as Smart Hydro Power, Heliatek and Carpooling.com (jury winners). This year, the Ecosummit Award 2013 promotes 43 nominees from 11 countries that will be judged by the 33 members of our expert jury. If you want to join the smart green startup race, hurry up, because the application deadline ends tonight at 24:00, Berlin time.
Read moreSmart Green Dealflow: Ubitricity, Saperatec, Skeleton, Waste2Chemical, O-Flexx and Romo Wind
Financing cleantech startups is a tough game these days. You need a strong team, product market fit and, even better, customers and revenues. In this difficult market environment, it is a great pleasure to report that 6 smart green startups managed to raise new venture capital: Ubitricity (around €3.5M, Germany), Saperatec (€3.3M, Germany), Skeleton (€2.2M, Estonia), Waste2Chemical (undisclosed, Netherlands), O-Flexx (€2.4M, Germany) and Romo Wind (€4.8M, Switzerland). The active cleantech VCs include Earlybird, IBB, NRW Bank, HTGF, eCapital, Dutch Greentech Fund, Emerald, Yellow&Blue, ABB and b-to-v. Let’s take a closer look at the startups and their new investors.
Read moreCleanweb Startups from Berlin – Meeting Ecotastic and FutureWatt at CeBIT Code_n 2013
Ecosummit TV: Our mobile Ecosummit TV studio stops again at CeBIT Code_n 2013 for more smart green startup interviews. This time, Jan interviews the Berlin-based founders Anna Yukiko Bickenbach of Ecotastic and Philipp Pausder of FutureWatt. Ecotastic is a new green marketing service provider that runs a reward system to foster green consumer behaviour. Consumers document their green actions with their smartphone and are rewarded with gift certificates from partner companies.
Read moreEcosummit in London: ECO13 Berlin, Market, Award, WHEB Partners and Friedola
Ecosummit TV: This is a short video recorded at our second Ecosummit Lounge London on 2 May 2013 at Taylor Wessing. It features very nice pictures of the city, another red bus going green for London and a preview of ECO13 Berlin, our 5th cleantech conference for startups, VCs and corporates. We also talk about the launch of Ecosummit Market, our new online platform for startups. Ecosummit Market is integrated with Ecosummit Award. 43 award nominees are busy mobilising votes on Facebook until 27 May. The application deadline for new startups to join the competition is 20 May.
Read moreMartin Riedel Pitches the Small Wind Startup Enbreeze
Ecosummit TV: Decentralised local energy production is a key trend in the Energiewende. While small PV systems are already widespread, small wind is a new market with large potential growing at 30% CAGR. The advantage of small wind is that the wind also blows during the night and on cloudy days. At ECO12 Duesseldorf, Martin Riedel pitches the German early stage cleantech startup Enbreeze that develops small wind turbines.
Read moreGuido Luetsch Pitches NTS and its High-Altitude Wind Technology
Ecosummit TV: “Fish don’t need electricity,” says Aloys Wobben of Enercon. While offshore there is more wind, there is also less demand. As Guido Luetsch explains in his pitch, the German startup NTS tackles this problem by going to an altitude of 500m onshore in order to harvest stronger winds. NTS has got a running prototype in which high-altitude kites are steered by robots sitting on a straight track system on the ground. NTS is backed by 3M and wants to raise €5M from new investors for the closed loop pilot system. Moreover, NTS is partner of Autodesk’s cleantech programme using their software to design the steering robots and track system.
Read moreJoerg Fabri Analyses Wind Energy and Recommends Operational Excellence
Ecosummit TV: The Energiewende, i.e. the transformation to a smart green energy system, is a massive challenge for the energy industry and the government. Globally, renewable energy attracts $200B investment per year to which wind energy contributes one third. In his talk at ECO12 Duesseldorf, Joerg Fabri of allocate, analyses how we can keep up the pace in the European wind energy sector if the level of subsidies further decreases.
Read moreOsborne Clarke’s Carsten Schneider Discusses Term Sheets and other Legal Challenges
Ecosummit TV: As Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson write in Venture Deals, 2 key things matter in a term sheet negotiation: economics and control. Carsten Schneider is a German Partner at the European law firm Osborne Clarke. In his presentation at ECO12 Düsseldorf, he gives condensed legal advice to cleantech startups and also discusses term sheets. During the lifetime cycle of a cleantech startup from seed stage to exit usually a number of financing rounds take place during which the interests of the startup, existing and new investors have to be balanced in a smart and sustainable way. In fact, the relationship between founders and investors is exit-driven and entrepreneurs should understand what this means in reality – for them and their startup.
Read moreCleantech for Africa – Meeting Helioz and Solarkiosk at CeBIT Code_n 2013
Ecosummit TV: Helioz from Vienna and Solarkiosk from Berlin are 2 cleantech startups that target emerging markets and tackle 2 big problems: drinking water and offgrid electricity. At CeBIT Code_n 2013, we interview Martin Wesian, CEO of Helioz, and Marc Zedler, Grant Manager at Solarkiosk, about their startups, products and milestones reached. Helioz already sold 2.000 Wadi devices that measure how long it takes to disinfect a bottle of water using sunlight. Now they look for €1M to scale up production. Solarkiosk installed 7 kiosks in Ethiopia and 5 in Kenya to enable local commerce in offgrid communities powered by the sun. Andreas Spiess, CEO of Solarkiosk, will pitch at Ecosummit Berlin 2013 to raise new capital for their international rollout.
Read moreFlorian Meyer-Delpho Pitches Solar E-Commerce Startup Greenergetic
Ecosummit TV: Florian Meyer-Delpho pitches Greenergetic at ECO12 Düsseldorf and believes that the market is ready for their solar e-commerce business model thanks to grid parity. Greenergetic develops an online portal to bring PV and smart home solutions directly to residential end customers. Houseowners can plan, finance and order their preferred PV system online. The Bielefeld-based cleantech startup also offers a whitelabel solution for utilities that are increasingly interested in selling solar systems to their customer base. Backed by eCapital and following the role model of Solarcity, Greenergetic is about to launch their new portal very soon.
Read morePhilipp Pausder Pitches FutureWatt
Ecosummit TV: The Energiewende is not only about electricity but also about heat. Philipp Pausder pitches the Berlin-based startup FutureWatt at Ecosummit Düsseldorf 2012. For business customers, FutureWatt controls the design, the financing and the operation of distributed energy systems with the aim of significantly reducing the energy bill. In December 2012, Philipp and his team launched the B2C Internet platform called heizkosten-senken.de which helps consumers reduce their heating costs.
Read moreUrban Keussen Introduces Connecting Energies, the new CVC of EON
Ecosummit TV: Urban Keussen presents EON’s innovation strategy for its smart green utility transformation and introduces their new corporate venture capital (CVC) activities. At ECO12 Duesseldorf, Urban announced EON’s CVC called “Connecting Energies” that co-invests in mid and late stage startups in Europe and the US that are focused on distributed renewable energy, energy storage, smart grid and customers and data. Moreover, Urban and his team work on a lot of innovation that does not have a business case yet but may well have in the future. Thus they are open for joint projects with smart green startups, especially if their solution is able to accelerate the Energiewende (energy transformation), the key task of all utilities.
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