Smart Green Business TV

Ecosummit TV on YouTube features Europe’s leading cleantech startups, investors and coporates in HD quality. Ecosummit TV is official YouTube partner and looks beautiful on big and small screens. The free Ecosummit TV channel received over 58.000 video views and offers 160 videos of which 10 highlights are presented below. To view all videos please go to Ecosummit TV on YouTube or browse the articles on the Ecosummit Blog. Ecosummit TV is produced by Gernot Tögel and Jan Michael Hess.

Ecosummit London 2013 on 15-16 October at the Crystal

We want to live and work in a Smart Green City. And we like London. The smart green capital is an important cleantech hub, provides access to the UK market and serves as the bridge to America. Therefore, we are very proud to invite you to Ecosummit London 2013, our 6th cleantech conference for startups, investors and corporates. ECO13 London will be held on 15-16 October at the Crystal, the new urban sustainability headquarter of Siemens in the Docklands. Take a look at our short Ecosummit TV video and get ready for your cable car pitch. ECO13 London explores the city of the future and your company should be part of it.

Ecosummit in London: ECO13 Berlin, Market, Award, WHEB Partners and Friedola

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. The video ends with a short story told by Rob Wylie of WHEB Partners about their recent exit of Friedola, a German late stage startup they sold to Kleiner Perkins and Silver Lake doubling their money in 2 years.

Jan Michael Hess opens Ecosummit Berlin 2012

Ecosummit Founder Jan Michael Hess opens Ecosummit Berlin 2012 on 22 March at Radialsystem. Our third Smart Green Business Conference is climate neutral thanks to the carbon offset powered by ClimatePartner. According to Bart Markus of Wellington Partners, cleantech includes many big markets such as wind, solar, water or efficiency. Big markets attract lots of VC money and absorb experiments and execution mistakes. According to Prof. Karl Leo, Europe is good at basic research – this is our culture – but bad at application and bringing new ideas fast to global markets. That’s exactly why we do Ecosummit.

Alois Flatz Talks about Cleantech Venture Capital 2.0

Alois Flatz, Partner at Zouk Capital, talks about Cleantech Venture Capital 2.0 and explains how investment strategies are changing in the current market. On the one hand, Alois thinks positive as cleantech becomes ubiquitous and affects all aspects of life. On the other hand, he has learned from 20 years of experience that VC investors (general partners) depend on fast exits to be able to raise new funds from their investors (limited partners). Thus, investment horizons are shortening and startups need to generate cash and prove their business models as quickly as possible. Zouk Capital is a late stage investor that accelerates cleantech startups that already have at least €5M revenues.

Peter van Gelderen Pitches Icos Capital

Peter van Gelderen is a Dutch piano-playing cleantech investor who pitches his VC firm Icos Capital at ECO12 Düsseldorf. Founded in 2006, Icos Capital has got €75M under management and a portfolio of 9 cleantech startups. Peter likes to point out that his firm is an early stage investor because this is where the fun is and smart green company builders are needed the most. To be successful as early stage Cleantech VC, close relationships with corporates are a key success factor. Peter is Ecosummit Advisor and currently raises a new fund to which he invites German corporates as new LPs. Whether you are a corporate or startup, go and find Peter to discuss the art of early stage cleantech investing and the benefits of working together.

Stefan Roest Pitches Dutch Solar Testing Startup Eternal Sun

Eternal Sun was a real highlight at Ecosummit Düsseldorf 2012. The lean cleantech startup from TU Delft in the Netherlands develops and manufactures state-of-the-art solar testing equipment and found customers all over the world within 1.5 years after company foundation. The audience was impressed by the fact that Eternal Sun focuses so well on lean product development and fast customer development while still being self-funded by the founders. CTO Stefan Roest delivers an awesome pitch on Ecosummit TV and now looks for VCs that know the solar testing market well and can help scale sales and production.

Urban Keussen Introduces the new CVC of EON

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.

Cleantech for Africa – Meeting Helioz and Solarkiosk at CeBIT Code_n 2013

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.

Cleantech Crowdfunding Rocks – Meeting Carzapp and Seedmatch at CeBIT Code_n 2013

P2P car sharing meets crowdfunding at CeBIT Code_n 2013. Jan Michael Hess interviews Oliver Lünstedt of Carzapp and Jakob Carstens of Seedmatch to learn more about Carzapp’s recent cleantech crowdfunding round and enjoy a magic ZappKit demo. Carzapp raised €250K within 3 weeks from 350 investors on Seedmatch, Germany’s crowdfunding pioneer. At Code_n13, Carzapp won a useful award sponsored by Continental who invites Carzapp to join their big booth at IAA 2013. Since September 2011, Seedmatch raised more than €4.5M for 36 startups from more than 3.000 investors. Cleantech crowdfunding rocks!

Cleantech Panel: USA vs. Europe

Europeans don’t think big enough. Michael Linse (KPCB), Pascal Mauberger (McPhy Energy), Oliver Stahl (Entelios) and Bart Markus (Wellington) discuss the differences between the cleantech startup and VC business in USA and Europe. There are many things we can learn from each other. On average, US cleantech startups get 4 times more capital than European ones. This has to do with the different environment in terms of market size, capital availability and competition. In the US, the key ideas are thinking bigger and acting faster as a consequence of overly optimistic and ambitious entrepreneurs and investors coming together. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. At the same time, Entelios and McPhy Energy prove that it is possible to raise capital in Europe provided that you have a strong business model, superior team and powerful technology.