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Manufacturing

Reshoring Stall: The reshoring boom will stall in 2026 as renewed steel tariffs make U.S. manufacturing prohibitively expensive. Projects once hailed as symbols of industrial revival will be delayed or canceled, forcing companies to maintain or even expand production in China rather than bring it home. 

Critical Resource Innovation: In 2026, the next wave of critical resource innovation will focus on extracting valuable materials from dilute sources, aka turning waste streams and low-concentration deposits into viable supply. From lithium in brines to methane and copper in trace environments, breakthroughs in separation and recovery will reduce dependence on foreign mines like those in Chile.

Fertilizer: A fertilizer revolution is coming. By 2026, next-generation fertilizer will be half the cost and half the size, replacing today’s wasteful, high-emission formulations that slow crop performance. Agriculture will finally start treating nutrients like precision-engineered materials, not commodities.

Floor-worker Enablement Becomes a Core Efficiency Lever: By 2026, manufacturing’s main constraint won’t be machines but skilled labour. We expect rapid adoption of AI copilots for frontline workers that combine live machine data, SOPs, and visual context to reduce errors, speed onboarding, and improve safety - with direct impact on yield, scrap, and uptime.

Industrial AI Agents Move into Autonomous Control: Manufacturing AI is shifting from analytics to closed-loop control. Industrial AI agents will increasingly manage setpoints, scheduling, and energy-aware optimisation in real time, layered on top of existing control systems. The most valuable startups will own narrow, high-frequency processes end-to-end, from sensing to action

Energy and Material Efficiency Become Core Control Objectives: Energy, materials, and carbon will become first-class variables in industrial control. AI-driven systems will continuously optimise production against energy prices, emissions, and yield, unlocking 5–15% efficiency gains in processes historically run on static set points. This turns efficiency from a reporting metric into a real-time decarbonisation lever.

Nanozymes:
These nanomaterials with enzyme-like catalytic activity, unlike natural enzymes, can be engineered for higher stability, tunability, and cost-effectiveness. They can offer a paradigm shift in biotechnology and industrial chemistry in making greener processes where enzymes have often been unsuccessful. 

Green Chemicals:
The global chemical industry is a $5+ trillion sector, but also one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Converting feedstock such as CO₂ and biomass into sustainable chemicals tackles two problems at once: it reduces dependence on fossil feedstocks and transforms waste into value. 

AI Discovery Platforms for New Chemicals:
Instead of decade-long, trial-and-error R&D cycles, AI-driven platforms can identify promising candidates orders of magnitude faster. Companies that master this capability don’t just build one product, but can continuously generate pipelines of new, IP-rich chemicals tailored to market needs.

The Petrochemical Feedstocks Transition: Achieving a genuine net zero transition requires the petrochemical industry to reinvent how it uses diverse and varying sources of carbon and hydrogen building blocks. We are striving to support the development of deep technology that can deal with fast temporospatial changes in both feed-stock supply and use-case demand.

Platform Solutions for Bio-Feedstock: Bio-sourced feedstock is a promising resource for the chemical industry, however varying quality and accessibility remain challenging. Wider application of bio-sourced feedstock requires innovative and standardised pre-treatment methods and quality control, as well as implementation of smart supply chain management. For example, we are exploring platform technologies that function as intermediaries between bio-feedstock suppliers and off-takers to simplify the adoption of novel feedstocks.

Aromatics, Electrification of Catalytic Reformers: Reactions required to produce aromatics are endothermic independent of whether we are using fossil or alternative feedstocks - high temperatures will always be required. It’s essential to find ways to use alternative energy sources to drive efficient conversion processes and we’re committed to seeking out solutions to this complex problem.

Data-Layered Circular Infrastructure: Product level data is unlocking new margins across regenerative value chains. Regulatory momentum around the Digital Product Passport, in Europe, is accelerating investment into data platforms that connect agricultural practices, manufacturing inputs, logistics, and consumer behaviour. These platforms create measurable benchmarks - essential for institutional capital and corporate procurement - and enable cost reductions through operational efficiencies. 

Intelligence Platforms Abstracting Natural Capital: A new category of ventures is emerging: ventures that integrate biological, logistical, and behavioural data into interfaces for corporates. These data infrastructure for circularity allow for real-time decision-making across product design, sourcing, and distribution. These platforms optimize supply chains and create asset classes based on regenerative performance, enabling internal pricing of externalities. 

Carbon-Negative Products as Economic Multipliers: We’re seeing increased market validation for products with verified negative carbon impact. These products reduce input volatility, increase asset performance, and expand brand equity. The linkage between materials, consumer health, and financial products (e.g. insurance, credit) is opening new models for profitability and long-term asset value creation.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF): Aviation has no easy decarbonization path, creating strong pull for SAF. The methanol-to-jet route is emerging as the most efficient and scalable solution.

Low-cost Green Methanol Production: Enabling cheaper methanol is the key unlock not just for SAF, but also for green shipping fuels and chemicals. 

Carbon Mineralization & CO₂ Utilisation: Technologies that lock CO₂ into permanent mineral forms (cement, aggregates, mine tailings) or convert it into chemicals and fuels (ethylene, formic acid, polymers). These pathways not only deliver durable carbon removal but also tap into trillion-dollar construction and materials markets.

Physical AI in Smart Factories: Beyond copilots and LLMs, AI is now showing up in robots, vision systems, and factory workflows. In already automated factories, “physical AI” often lands first as incremental autonomy: vision-guided manipulation, inspection, adaptive corrections, and safer human–robot collaboration. What drives adoption is clear ROI (throughput, uptime, scrap reduction), combined with a path from pilots to repeatable deployments once integration and reliability are solved.

Maritime Decarbonisation: Decarbonisation is an accumulation game, built on stacking efficiency and near-term solutions—such as wind-assist technologies, improved routing, anti-fouling, propeller and hull optimisation, and advanced energy management—each shaving meaningful percentages off fuel consumption and emissions while remaining economically rational to adopt.

Batteries & the Grid: Batteries represent a large share of EV value (often ~30–40%), so battery performance and lifecycle directly drive the EV business case, especially in fleets where utilisation and longevity are everything. We’re watching the stack around State of Health, predictive degradation, charging optimisation, and second-life decisioning, increasingly pulled forward by regulation like the EU battery passport that will be active in 2027.

AI x Materials: AI has the potential to reduce discovery-to-deployment cycles and helps to bring improved materials to market.

Novel Mining Technologies: Improved extraction and processing can deliver critical metals with less water use, waste, and biodiversity impact

Materials Recycling: Improved recycling for copper, aluminium, and other strategic materials should expand secondary supply and cut emissions.

Next-Generation Mining Technologies: Mining is undergoing a quiet transformation. New technologies boost extraction efficiency, open up resources once left behind, and cut environmental impact. The push comes from rising demand for critical materials, rapid tech advances, and the urgent need for more resilient supply chains. We’re actively exploring investments in this space.

Critical Raw Materials Recycling: The richest new mines aren’t underground — they’re above ground, in our waste streams. Closed-loop recycling cuts emissions, strengthens supply chains, and is powered by policy drivers like the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act. The climate upside is massive: recycling aluminum alone saves up to 95% of the energy compared to mining. That’s why we’re backing the next generation of recycling technologies, not just for critical raw materials, but also for other key inputs where “urban mining” can turn waste into value. 

Low-Carbon Cement: Cement is the single largest source of CO₂ emissions among materials, making it a prime target for decarbonisation. The industry is at a tipping point: large-scale adoption of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) is accelerating, and early movers are already partnering with major producers. Globally, drop-in solutions that can even capture or utilize CO₂ at scale remain scarce. We are focusing on companies with proven pilots that can cut 30–50% of emissions while maintaining performance and cost competitiveness.

Technology Unlock Metals Shortage: Access to copper, nickel, rare earths and other key metals is becoming a genuine bottleneck for the energy transition. Traditional mineral exploration is slow and capital-intensive, with timelines stretching over a decade. Novel AI-driven discovery tools hold great potential to dramatically shorten discovery cycles. At the same time, we are monitoring advanced recycling technologies unlocking competitive economics. Investable companies addressing mineral scarcity increasingly look like deep tech platforms rather than traditional mining operations and creating new, more localised and secured supply chains as demand intensifies.

Climate Adaptation is Finally becoming Mainstream: The US has spent over $7 trillion on climate-related recovery since 2000, with costs accelerating. As these risks translate into balance sheet impacts, the infrastructure and technology enabling adaptation are shifting from optional risk management to baseline requirements for many sectors.

AI Commoditisation Drives Focus to Physical Integration: As foundation models become more accessible and performance gaps narrow, differentiation through model ownership alone is weakening. One response emerging across the startup landscape is a shift toward physical-world integration: building AI systems that require hardware, proprietary sensors, or deep operational expertise in specific environments. Our hypothesis for 2026 is that capital will increasingly favour AI companies where competitive advantage comes from how the technology integrates with physical processes, not just the intelligence of the model itself.

AI for Material Discovery (and cheaper manufacturing): AI will increasingly narrow the search space for new materials. First, it brings speed: fewer candidates, faster iterations, and quicker validation cycles from concept to prototype. A win is improving manufacturability - using models not just to find “best-in-class” materials, but to find materials that can actually be produced reliably and at lower cost. From ML to quantum ML, a wave of startup developing these materials platforms across several verticals has the potential to take the materials world by storm this year.

New Electrochemical Materials (efficiency-first pathways): Some chemical reactions for existing industrial processes are ready for a new spin: material and paired cell design innovation that boosts efficiency. This could result in better yields and lower energy intensity than current processes and can be enough to change unit economics. A wave of scalable (and potentially local production!) technologies spanning fertilizers and chemical commodities, where scale and cost are everything, and where incremental efficiency gains can unlock big emissions reductions are reaching maturity. Added bonus to look for: replacing precious metals.

New Bio-Based Materials (scaling fermentation and biomaterials): Bio-based materials are broad: cellulose-derived, fermented biopolymers and plastics, protein-based materials, pigments and dyes, and structural materials like mycelium composites or even SCMs. The 2026 story is less about novelty and more about cracking scalability and cost. Several companies appear close to the tipping point where process optimization, feedstock strategy, and downstream processing finally align and are ready to commercialize. A massive win for the bioeconomy.

AI as the Dominant Tool for Discovering, Scaling, and Operating New Materials: AI enables rapid discovery and scale-up of novel biomaterials, alternative proteins, and sustainable ingredients. By integrating generative models with experimental platforms, startups can leapfrog years of R&D, engineer high-performance materials with a lower carbon footprint, and bring tomorrow’s food components to market faster and more cost-effectively than ever before.

New Mining, Based on AI and New Hardware Tech, for Materials and Energy: Next-generation resource production combines AI with advanced hardware, from sensor-driven subsurface exploration to robotics that minimise energy consumption and land disruption. AI accelerates the discovery of critical minerals and clean energy substrates, enabling smarter extraction paths and circular resource cycles that push climate systems toward truly sustainable infrastructure.

Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES): Unlike the 4-hour lithium batteries now common on solar farms, these systems store energy for 8 hours to 100 hours (or more) using iron-air chemistry, liquid-flow electrolytes, hot rocks or even stacked concrete blocks. Whoever owns low-cost, multi-day storage will own a bottleneck in the clean-power stack, and valuations are beginning to reflect scarcity.

Industrial Heat Pumps & Waste-Heat Recycling: Factories and food plants throw away huge amounts of warm air and water. Next-generation high-temperature heat pumps capture that waste heat, boost it to 120-200 °C, and feed it straight back into processes like drying, pasteurising or chemical reactions—just as home refrigerators move heat from inside the fridge to the kitchen.Heat makes up about two-thirds of all industrial energy use, so replacing fossil-fuel boilers is a massive decarbonisation prize.

AI-Driven Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) – “thousands of small devices acting like one big plant”: Instead of building a new gas turbine, a VPP uses software to knit together home batteries, smart thermostats, rooftop panels and—most exciting—electric cars. An algorithm tells each device when to charge, when to pause, and when to push power back, so the whole fleet behaves like a single, flexible power station. Regulators are opening lucrative “grid-services” markets to these fleets, so the business model looks more like high-margin SaaS than heavy infrastructure—a sweet spot for climate-tech investors.

Circular Concrete and Low-Carbon / Next-Generation Cement: Concrete and cement remain among the biggest levers for industrial decarbonization, and by 2026 the focus is firmly on circularity at scale. We’re excited by technologies that recycle concrete, cut clinker through alternative binders, embed CO₂, and increasingly turn steel waste into cement, unlocking EAF/BOF slags (not just blast furnace slag) as true binders. The most investable solutions won’t just be greener but will plug into existing construction workflows while improving cost, performance, and/or reducing waste.

Metals Circularity for the Energy Transition: Critical metals (lithium, nickel, copper, aluminium) will remain central to electrification and infrastructure buildouts, and supply risk is now investment risk. Circular approaches such as advanced recycling and recovery from industrial residues are moving from the sustainability fringe into strategic supply-chain infrastructure. The most compelling companies deliver primary-grade outputs at lower energy and cost, making metals circularity a core play for climate, security, and industrial growth.

Materials Recovery and Infrastructure: By 2026, construction circularity will mean turning end-of-life materials into real supply, not waste. Platforms enabling high-value recovery and reuse are cutting both carbon and costs, with EU policy now (hopefully) catching up, from the Circular Economy Action Plan and revamped Construction Products Regulation to the expected Circular Economy Act. Interesting models combine physical logistics with operational infrastructure, making reuse commercially competitive at scale.

AI x Electrochemistry as a Platform for Next-Gen Industrial Materials: The convergence of AI-driven materials discovery and electrochemical manufacturing is poised to unlock a new class of low-carbon, scalable industrial materials—from green cement alternatives to novel polymers. Traditional thermal and petrochemical processes are difficult to decarbonise, but electrochemistry offers a cleaner, electricity-powered alternative, while AI accelerates the identification and optimisation of new compounds with superior climate performance.

Hyperlocal and Regenerative Material Supply Chains: Manufacturing is shifting from global, extractive supply chains to hyperlocal and regenerative material loops, driven by the need to reduce emissions, manage geopolitical risks, and enable circularity. Future materials will be regionally sourced—from agricultural waste, mycelium, algae, or captured CO₂—powering everything from construction to textiles. Startups at the forefront are combining biomanufacturing, urban mining, and community-based supply chains to cut transport emissions, create local jobs, and restore ecosystems, advancing both climate resilience and climate justice across diverse geographies. 

The Rise of Cheap and Scalable Bioplastics: A new wave of low-cost, high-performance bioplastics is poised to disrupt the global plastics industry by replacing fossil-based polymers in packaging, textiles, and consumer goods. With increasing regulatory pressure on single-use plastics and rising demand from consumer brands for circular alternatives, startups developing scalable biorefineries and drop-in solutions are well positioned to lead a transition toward more sustainable, compostable, and recyclable materials.

Carbon-Negative and Circular Construction Materials: Construction is under mounting pressure to decarbonise, but the pace of material adoption remains cautious. Carbon-negative concrete, CO₂-cured materials, and nano-enhanced aggregates are getting attention because they solve two problems at once: emissions and performance. The strongest demand is coming from applications where these materials reduce embodied carbon without requiring changes to existing processes. Solutions that improve curing time, supply chain resilience, or logistics efficiency are especially well-positioned. 

Bio-Based Materials via Synthetic Biology: Traditional petrochemical inputs are under pressure due to emissions, supply chain volatility, and policy constraints. Synthetic biology is unlocking programmable materials, bio-based composites, and low-carbon industrial inputs, especially for chemicals, agriculture, and packaging. The convergence of biotech, materials science, and automation is enabling the production of custom materials with low carbon footprints and precise functions. These are poised to disrupt packaging, fashion, chemicals, and agriculture—with strong ESG, regulatory, and consumer tailwinds. 

Electrified Industrial Materials: As heavy industry decarbonises, demand is rising for materials that perform under extreme thermal, chemical, and mechanical stress. Key innovation areas include plasma catalysts, solid-state components, and electro-stable composites for sectors like chemicals, construction, and storage. These materials enable fossil-free processing, reduce energy losses, or improve system integration — and adoption is fastest where they drop into existing infrastructure. Venture entry points emerge where materials unlock capex savings, grid flexibility, or ESG-compliant procurement. The biggest opportunities are in cross-sector platforms that deliver both performance and scalability.

Synbio for Construction: Solutions like self-healing concrete, biopolymer coatings, and microbial adhesives are gaining traction. Startups that pair credible unit economics with high value, scalable applications will be best positioned to succeed.

Encapsulation: Encapsulation is emerging as a key enabling technology, improving the stability, functionality and targeted release of bioactive compounds. The opportunity lies in scalable, stimuli-responsive platforms that maintain stability from production to shelf life. These systems unlock applications in nutrition, agriculture, industrial biotech and beyond. Platform-driven startups are structurally better positioned to scale.

Biomining: Biomining is becoming a promising way to secure critical metals. Demand for materials like copper is rising with electrification and advanced electronics, while accessible copper oxide deposits decline. Extracting metals from low-grade sulfide ores has become a bottleneck as conventional methods fall short. We’re interested in biotechnologies that reduce chemical use, avoid energy intensive smelting, and perform on lower grade ores. As supply constraints tighten, biomining is moving from a sustainable alternative to a key part of energy transition infrastructure.

The Energy Deployment Bottleneck: The constraint in energy is no longer technology, capital, or demand. It is deployment. As power demand accelerates, driven by AI, electrification, and industrial reshoring, projects increasingly fail upstream. Siting, permitting, and grid access now determine what gets built and what stalls. The opportunity is shifting away from improving energy generation cost curves toward improving execution, speed, and predictability. Energy becomes less about “can this work?” and more about “will this get built?”

The Rise of Energy-Native Industrial Design: Industrial systems were built on the assumption of cheap, always-available energy. That assumption no longer holds. We’re starting to see “energy-native” industrial design, where processes, layouts, and operating modes are shaped around energy availability rather than treating energy as a fixed input. This shift is less about greenfield projects and more about retrofittable systems that can operate flexibly in volatile power environments without sacrificing throughput.

Robotics and Automation as an Energy Lever in Industry: Robotics and automation are increasingly being adopted not just to replace labor, but to stabilise and optimise energy-intensive operations. In heavy industry and manufacturing, automation enables tighter process control, higher utilisation, and faster response to energy constraints. The most interesting systems aren’t general-purpose robots; they’re deeply embedded in specific workflows, where efficiency gains compound at scale.

Cheap Electrons: Affordable energy is the cornerstone of the transition. We are tracking advancements in nuclear fission, geothermal, and tidal energy to secure reliable baseload power at a competitive Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE). We also see high value in modular technologies — by decentralising production and moving it closer to consumption, we can significantly reduce grid congestion.

A Robust and Intelligent Grid: Grid modernisation is a parallel priority. We are targeting innovations that bolster resilience and streamline renewable integration — spanning everything from Grid Enhancing Technologies (e.g., advanced conductors) to power electronics.

Raw Materials Security: Electrification depends on critical inputs like copper, Rare Earth Elements (REEs), graphite, and lithium. Europe must urgently build out its recycling and metals processing capabilities to ensure strategic autonomy and supply chain security.

Grid Technologies: As energy generation decentralises and demand rises, grid capacity is becoming the critical bottleneck of the energy transition. It needs a smart(er) intelligence layer on top of physical infrastructure to maximise utilisation of existing power lines, alongside next-generation hardware, such as advanced conductors and cables. With Flexible Connection Agreements on the rise, we will also see a growing need for solutions that help large energy consumers to efficiently deal with grid constraints and accelerate grid connection permitting. And, of course, cybersecurity for energy infrastructure will remain on the agenda.

Heavy-Duty Electrification: As fleets electrify, charging must be orchestrated across vehicles, depots, storage assets, and grid constraints. We are looking for software-led and smart infrastructure solutions that enable reliable, grid-aware charging and a seamless integration and routing optimisation for fleet operators.

Industrial Efficiency: At the intersection of industrial tech and climate tech, we see a surge in AI-driven control and optimisation software for asset-heavy manufacturing processes. These intelligence layers operate on top of existing industrial systems to monitor and optimise energy consumption, material flows, and waste generation in real time. We see most value in solutions that integrate seamlessly, enable continuous performance monitoring, and translate growing data complexity into actionable insights for operators.

Embedded Finance: The clean energy transition is no longer held back by technology but by affordability. With 85% of installations handled by undercapitalised SMEs, costs of €30–70k per household, and a €130B financing gap, mainstream families are locked out. Embedded finance can close this gap—bringing point-of-sale lending to renewable energy just as it did for cars, enabling the transition to scale from early adopters to mass adoption.

Fleet Electrification: We are now at the tipping point where battery-electric trucks can beat diesel on total cost of ownership, and falling battery prices plus Chinese OEMs entering the market will accelerate that cost advantage. With policy tailwinds and fleet operators chasing lower operating costs, the electrification of freight is set to scale rapidly.

AI-powered Control Systems: Industry is the biggest energy consumer, using around 37% of global energy and causing 40% of CO₂ emissions. Still, most plants run on static controls that can’t optimise in real time, leaving 5–15% efficiency gains on the table. External shocks such as volatile commodity prices, labor shortages, and tightening carbon regulation further increase the pressure to improve productivity. AI-powered control systems can change this by layering onto existing infrastructure, using real-time data to optimise yield, energy use, and uptime. 

Closing the $4 Trillion Financing Gap: To reach Net Zero, the world faces an annual investment shortfall of over $4 trillion. We need to prioritise "Climate FinTech" that unlocks institutional debt for the mass market. With 40% of European households unable to afford heat pumps, batteries or solar without instalments, the winners will be platforms that can secure large-scale debt facilities to make home electrification as easy as buying a car.

Industrializing the "Depot of the Future": Road transport represents 22% of CO2 emissions in Europe, yet zero-emission tech still only accounts for 2% of the truck fleet. As this shifts, logistics depots will see a 10x increase in electricity demand. We are prioritizing companies that solve this physical bottleneck by providing turnkey infrastructure—securing grid power and deploying onsite BESS—to transform depots into revenue-generating power plants.

Autonomous Grid Orchestration: Orchestrating "behind-the-meter" devices at scale is estimated to save over $15BN and 100M tons of CO2 annually by avoiding redundant grid upgrades. We are focusing on mission-critical software that provides the autonomous orchestration required to turn millions of EVs and batteries into a unified Virtual Power Plant.

Bring Your Own Power: Hyperscalers are adding compute capacity faster than grids can realistically keep up. Grid connection queues are already stretching in the multi-year range in parts of Germany, the UK and Nordics. Capacity aside, this trend would otherwise inevitably result in energy prices spiking for residents in affected regions. Whether driven by government mandate and the threat of being required to subsidise resident power bills we will see these data centre operator being required to "Bring Your Own Power". As a result we should see significant venture opportunities emerging in the fields of modular power generation. These may include microgrids with gas turbines, large stationary battery + fast-charging loads, and small nuclear reactors.

A Rare Earth Reckoning: China has cornered the supply chain for rare earth elements (REE). They mine 70% of REEs. But the real supply chain bottleneck lies with refinement and separation - here China processes 90% of the world's REEs. With supply chain sovereignty front-of-mind for all global powers, we need to rethink the whole processing ecosystem. With necessity driving innovation, we will see a myriad of venture solutions being funded in the areas of refinement tech, recycling, materials science, and distributed processing hubs.

Flexibility Aggregation Actually Becomes a Thing: We're now at a level of commercial adoption and technical maturity (coupled with favourable EU legislation changes) that make these aggregators (EV chargers, heat pumps, HVAC) a genuine part of our energy infrastructure. We should see an emergence in vertical-specific optimisation (EV fleets, industrial heat, cold storage), automated multi-market bidding, and financial mechanisms to turn flexibility into cash for companies and households.

Flexibility for Power Intensive Industries: As flexibility markets develop, much of the low hanging fruits for flexibility - like low complexity asset-based demand response and battery energy storage systems (BESS) - are being well served by a wave of emergent players. However, there are substantial opportunities for power intensive industries like data centres and mettalurgy, where their high load profiles have potential for huge flexibility capacity for the grid, but where greater complexity requires more tailored solutions.

Sustainable Energy Transition Minerals: The energy transition is hungry for metals, and we have a huge gap to fill. Take lithium, where we need 6x more volume by 2030 to build the batteries, EVs, and other assets required to reach net zero, but the known project pipeline for lithium only covers 30% of this. We need smarter approaches to finding new mineral sources and substituting rare metals with commons or recycled sources, all while reducing the environmental impact of extraction and recycling processes.

Replacing Fossils for Industrial Heat: Industry consumes up to 30% of global energy production, and comes from processes that are hard to abate due to high temperature needs cheaply delivered by gas or coal powered combustion. We need wholesale solutions that replace fossils for high temperature industrial heating needs, such as technologies allowing high heat with renewable energy or hydrogen, thermal energy storage, and more.

Batteries & Power Electronics: Storage is evolving from a standalone component to a dynamic enabler of grid stability, load management and resilience. As the cost of lithium-ion, BMS and inverter tech continues to drop, new startups are emerging with integrated systems that unlock value far beyond the cell. 

Magnets & Electric Motors: As everything from vehicles to factories electrifies, the demand for compact, precise and robust motor systems grows fast. We’re particularly interested in innovations that push performance per kilogram: new materials, cooling techniques and embedded control all open up possibilities in motion-heavy sectors. 

Embedded Compute: Microcontrollers, real-time operating systems and (AI) edge processing are increasingly what make the stack adaptive. These aren’t just chips; they’re what turn a system from hardware into intelligence. 

The Structural Shift Underway in our Global Food System: Away from calorie-dense, ultra-processed products and toward nutrient-rich, nature-based foods. This is no longer a niche consumer trend, but a durable reallocation of demand, regulation, and capital toward real ingredients, healthier outcomes, and sustainable production models.

Agriculture itself is Being Reimagined: Younger generations are choosing farming as a mission, not a fallback, embracing regenerative practices, soil health, biodiversity, and farm-to-plate models that shorten supply chains and build resilience at the source.

From a VC Perspective: Deep pattern recognition across cycles, technologies, and consumer behaviour enables them not only to select winners, but to proactively shape ideas, incubate concepts, and even create the companies they believe “must" exist to fix structural gaps in the food system.

Food Will Be Designed Like Preventive Healthcare: By 2026, the most successful food products will not be marketed as indulgences or even “better-for-you” swaps. They will be positioned as preventive care. As healthcare systems strain and longevity thinking goes mainstream, consumers will increasingly expect everyday foods to actively support metabolic, gut and immune health. This will push brands towards clinically validated ingredients, higher nutrient density and clearer functional outcomes. Food will not replace medicine, but it will be judged by how effectively it helps people stay out of the system.

Health Data Will Quietly Reshape the Food Supply: The next food revolution will start in apps. As nutrition data becomes aggregated and normalised, food companies will be forced to respond to evidence, not trends. Products that consistently spike glucose, inflammation or fatigue will lose shelf space, while foods that demonstrate positive outcomes gain distribution.

Resilient Food Will Beat “Sustainable” Food: Shorter supply chains, regional production and locally scalable protein and nutrient sources will become strategic advantages rather than sustainability talking points. Governments and consumers alike will favour food systems that reduce dependency and perform under pressure. Nutrient-dense, affordable, locally produced foods will be treated as infrastructure, essential to national resilience and public health. Sustainability will not disappear, but it will be reframed through a more urgent lens of functionality.

Biotech & Sustainable Ingredients: Precision fermentation, novel microbes, enzymes, and other biotechnologies are major solutions, enabling functional foods, alternative proteins, extended shelf life, and functionality. Also, upcycling and circular approaches—turning byproducts and waste into valuable ingredients—are gaining traction and are valuable from investment perspective.

AI, Digitalization & Supply-Chain Tech: Food companies are pouring investment into AI, digital supply-chain tracking, big data analytics, robotics, and automation—seeking greater efficiency, cost reduction, and smarter decision-making. 

Functional Ingredients & Longevity: Functional ingredients tied to longevity, gut health, and metabolic support are becoming central to food-tech innovation, especially as the rise of GLP-1 medications (Ozempic) reshapes consumer behaviour. Prebiotics, protein hydrolysates, and polyphenol-rich extracts are drawing investment for their ability to stimulate GLP-1 pathways naturally, supporting appetite regulation, satiety, and glycemic control. The intersection of biotech, functional nutrition, and pharma-driven consumer shifts is catalyzing a new wave of food innovation—where longevity, prebiotics, and GLP-1 impacts converge to define the next generation of health-focused food-tech.

Enabling Tech of Food Production: AI and Machine Learning may often sound like buzzwords, yet in many industries they are already driving real efficiency gains and unlocking new opportunities. In Food Production, we see massive untapped potential. Unifying siloed data, rethinking R&D and building digital twin prediction tools will not just help us discover sustainable ingredients, it will also enable us to produce them in a more time- and cost-efficient way. While these technologies have already been applied successfully in other industries, Food Production is still at the beginning. 

Fermentation Tech: Alternative proteins have already demonstrated the transformative potential of fermentation by offering a more sustainable way of eating. We see two major impact areas here: First, the independence from traditional agriculture allows us to meet the growing global demand for food production in a resource-efficient way. Second, fermentation enables us to create cleaner food products (and in many cases even better ones) by harnessing the power of microorganisms. 

Functional Beverages: Today, we see a new category of beverages emerging that fundamentally changes how we think about soft drink consumption: Functional Beverages. 49% of Gen Z reduces the consumption of alcohol and the longevity hype from the US is slowly making its way into Europe. We see this category as a response to exactly these shifts. 

Rebuilding Sourcing: We’re entering an era where sourcing is no longer a back-office function – it is core. Climate volatility, geopolitical disruption, regulation and biology are reshaping where and how food can be grown, and the cracks are now clearly visible across categories. We will see fruit supply chains become the new cacao – with price spikes, reformulation pressure, retailer delistings and sudden urgency around alternatives. We will be focused on solutions that enable true supply chain resilience – from soil and crop to ingredients and finished products.

Blue Economy: Aquaculture is one of the fastest-growing food sectors globally – and still a relatively young industry. We are particularly focused on solutions that enable: Next-generation aquafeed ingredients, welfare-first farming technologies, products that aims to replace antibiotics and mechanical treatment, water quality, waste and nutrient management technologies that prevent pollution, enable circularity and protect surrounding ecosystems.

Build for What Comes Next: We need radical new technologies, born in universities and research institutions, and brave enough to challenge how the food system actually works. Supporting researchers early as they turn deep expertise in food, biosolutions and agriculture into real-world impact is not just what we do. It’s how the fund was built. It’s in our DNA.

Nutrition Density Becomes the Next Better-for-You Imperative: As more people in Western countries become calorie conscious - accelerated by GLP-1 adoption - food companies will face mounting pressure to deliver more micronutrition per serving. This is already driving innovation toward nutrient-dense formats designed to support health during reduced intake. The winners will be solutions that demonstrate clear efficacy, scalability, and regulatory credibility, especially around protein, fiber, and sugar reduction.

Speed to Market Over High-Value, Integrable Ingredients: In a capital-constrained environment, time to revenue outweighs raw ingredient cost optimisation. Food manufacturers are prioritizing higher-value, functionality-driven ingredients - such as specialty fats or fermentation-derived inputs - that integrate smoothly into existing supply chains and solve multiple constraints at once (performance, regulation, scalability). This shift reinforces a broader trend: the most durable FoodTech impact in Europe will come from technologies embedded within existing industrial infrastructure, not standalone consumer brands.

From Claims to Outcomes: Health-driven food is moving from consumer preference to structural pressure, shaped by regulation, retailers, and healthcare costs. The focus is narrowing around protein, fiber, sugar reduction, and proven functional outcomes, particularly in gut health. Innovation is shifting from ingredient-led claims toward outcome-based science (postbiotics, metabolites, translational research), demanding tighter alignment between research, regulation, and commercialization. In this context, the future of FoodTech in the EU will be defined less by incremental change and more by intentional, system-level reinvention that connects science, capital, policy, and industry at scale

A Much More Focused Ecosystem: Due to the tight funding environment most start-ups across the food value have focused on business fundamentals - delivering value to customers. As weird as it may sound now, there were years were cool technology and a lot of hype, worked to raise a lot of money. And while we will still see the aftereffects in 2026 - the best companies are emerging by being focused on actually delivering on their promise to customers.

The Alternative Ingredient Space will Prove Itself. Geopolitics and climate change are forcing everyone in food to reassess their formulations and supply chains. While a few years ago, alternative ingredients based on novel technologies were all the rage, we will see more and more tangible real businesses emerge. The driving force is the continued supply chain volatility.

The Robots are Coming: From cooking to harvesting, in 2026 robots will be commercially present in the food value chain. The hardware is becoming cheap enough to enable very interesting business models across the food value chain - a value chain that is severly suffering from labour shortages across harvesting, production all the way to the consumer.

Nature Risk & Accounting Become Hard Business Criteria: Nature risk is still not priced into most assets, but this is about to change. What has still been seen as fluffy and impossible or costly to measure will soon have hard business value - positive or negative. In the past year, leading tech solutions have massively advanced. Nature data is becoming decision-grade, and makes nature risk and opportunity translate into measurable balance-sheet positions.

High-Quality Carbon Markets — Finally Accessible to Small Landholders: A key unlock is making high-integrity carbon projects economically viable for small landholders. Startups are enabling previously excluded small forest owners to participate in the carbon markets — without prohibitive upfront capital or technical complexity. By adopting cutting-edge technologies like LIDAR and AI-driven MRV, fragmented land parcels can be aggregated to meet institutional standards. This not only improves carbon quality and permanence but also channels capital directly to those managing nature on the ground — a structural shift that strengthens both climate impact and rural economies.

Water as the Next Planetary Boundary in Focus: On average, around 30% of treated freshwater is lost before reaching end users; in some regions, losses exceed 50–60%. As freshwater change is a planetary boundary we have already crossed, AI-native water infrastructure is becoming mission-critical far beyond utilities - for cities, industry and national resilience alike.

The Rise of Biocontrol and Biostimulants: Agri-food industry players are seeking alternatives to combine productivity and sustainability. Biocontrols and biostimulants are thus seriously gaining momentum given their ability to prevent pests and crop resilience using microorganisms. With biostimulants alone representing a $2.5 bn market today, there’s no doubt this sector will accelerate in the coming years, especially in Europe, which remains a hotspot for Naturetech innovation. 

Data & Biodiversity: Thanks to advances in AI, MRV is now delivering unparalleled accuracy. Carbon neutrality will not be achieved without effective carbon market management and AI-driven MRV ensures an accurate and trustworthy carbon certification. The Verra scandal indeed dealt a blow to the sector and pinpointed the need for an accurate and compliant MRV methodology. Given the compliance schemes on the rise, demand for real-time, audit-ready MRV solutions will only intensify. 

Climate-Adaptive Water Systems: In a context of increasing scarcity of water resources, depicted by intensifying droughts, the water sector is now looking at climate adaptation. Leak detection and circular reuse appear as major solutions to face this global challenge. Real-time leak detection platforms, powered by acoustic sensors and machine-learning analytics. At the same time, recycling systems are developing to cut supply on strained freshwater sources and provide drinking water to commercials, industrials and residential.

Instrumented Nature as Infrastructure: Sensors, satellites, drones, eDNA and models are making ecosystems measurable in near real time. That enables decision-grade MRV across carbon, biodiversity, water and soil, plus insurance-grade risk scoring (including parametric products) and compliance reporting.

Adaptation and Resilience as Non-Discretionary Spend: Climate impacts are now a day-to-day constraint. Demand is rising for technologies that keep energy, water, cooling, food and logistics running through heat, drought and floods — and through policy and geopolitical shocks. Budgets are often pulled forward by insurance terms, permits and downtime costs: “keep operating”, not just net-zero.