Lessons from expanding climate startups globally

Last week I caught up with some of our climatetech founders and the Wavemaker Impact team in Singapore. It reminded me how much Europe could learn from the pace, creativity, hunger and grit of emerging markets when it comes to building climate solutions. In South Asia, you don’t have the luxury of slow progress or “pilot purgatory.” Climate impacts hit hard and fast, so the innovation mindset is lean, practical and deeply connected to livelihoods. 1. The Green Discount Forget moonshots and massive R&D budgets. Across South Asia, founders are building cleaner and cheaper solutions that work now: modular, low-capex climatetech with real unit economics from day one, like turning waste into biofuel (Octayne) or agricultural residues into biochar (WasteX) while improving customer margins. ✅ Lesson for Europe: Move beyond the “green premium.” We don’t always need new tech; we need to deploy what already works, faster and at scale. 2. Decentralised Energy and Leapfrogging Like Africa skipped landlines to go mobile, South Asia is leapfrogging traditional grids with off-grid solar, microgrids and batteries replacing diesel, from Agros to Helios Solar Company Limited and SOLshare. ✅ Lesson for Europe: Distributed renewable energy isn’t just cleaner; it’s more resilient. Energy security in wartime or flood season may depend on it. 3. Nature-Based and Community-Led Solutions After decades of deforestation and degraded land, pioneering models are fighting back through community reforestation, mangrove restoration and regenerative agriculture. Ventures like Bumi Baru and Fair Ventures Social Forestry make nature profitable by working with local populations. ✅ Lesson for Europe: Climate action sticks when people have skin in the game. Build with communities, not just for them. 4. The Just Green Transition In emerging markets, climate isn’t a distant moral issue; it’s a development and equity issue. Policy conversations link emissions to jobs, food and public health. When clean tech creates livelihoods, people back the transition. ✅ Lesson for Europe: Embed justice, inclusion and affordability at the heart of the transition, not as an afterthought. 5. Adaptation and Resilience South Asia is among the most vulnerable regions to climate change and has no choice but to adapt: flood defences, early-warning systems, better weather data and climate-resilient crops. Ventures like Rize and Intensel Limited prove that resilience and profitability can coexist. ✅ Lesson for Europe: Don’t just decarbonise, adapt. Resilience is also an investment class. After more than two decades building start-ups across Asia, I’ve seen how constraint breeds creativity and urgency drives focus. Europe has the capital, talent and technology. Maybe it also needs a bit more of that emerging-market scrappiness and hunger. Because the truth is, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to roll it faster. 🌍💚

Most founders ask "where should we expand?" The real question is: "are we actually ready?" This was a powerhouse panel at the Business Leader Summit with Aron Gelbard / Huib van Bockel / Isobel Stephen / Anthony Goodwin / Simon Gilson-Fox moderated by Jason Mahendran, and it delivered some brutally honest advice on global expansion. Here's what the panel who've done it shared with us: → Lesson 1: Max out your home market first. The starting point sounds obvious.  Get the model right at home before you look elsewhere. But it's more nuanced than that. If you're Tenzing, the UK energy drinks market is large enough to build a significant business. But if you're Bloom & Wild, the UK flower market is smaller, and investors will pressure you to go international before you feel ready. Know the size of your opportunity at home. → Lesson 2: Build the playbook before you pack your bags. Before you even think about entering a new market, do this: Create a detailed executional playbook of exactly how your model works at home. → Lesson 3: Score every market before you commit. The panel discussed having a clear framework for evaluating where to go next. Build a scorecard. Assess every factor that matters such as: → Consumer behaviour — how similar is it to your home market? → Competitive landscape — do you buy your way in or grow organically? → Political & regulatory environment — what are the hidden costs? → Existing advantage — do you have a partnership, a foothold, an edge? → Internal readiness — will this distract from your core growth? → Operational scalability — can your infrastructure stretch? → Pilot opportunity — is there a low-risk way to test before you commit? → Lesson 4: Never underestimate culture. Bloom & Wild learned it the hard way. This was the moment of the session that stopped the room. Bloom & Wild expanded into Germany. It worked. But they also went to France. It didn't. Why? Cultural appetite for a British brand was fundamentally different. The lesson: really interrogate your pilot and your data before you scale. Lesson 5: Look for what stays the same across every market. Amid all the differences — regulations, culture, competition — look for the constants. Try not to damage more than 10% of the model. If you were in 20 countries one day and each was 20% different, that is a recipe for complexity and potential disaster. Anthony Goodwin put it brilliantly. In recruitment, the characteristics of successful leaders are identical across every market they operate in: Resilience. Initiative. Curiosity. Outside-the-box thinking. Your proposition may need to adapt. But if your core is built on something universal, that's your greatest asset when going global. Global expansion isn't a growth strategy.  It's a test of whether your foundations are strong enough to stretch. Another brilliant session from a remarkable day at the Business Leader Summit.

Six weeks after a perfect launch in Stockholm, we made a $1M mistake in Madrid. We launched Voi in Stockholm in August 2018. It went as well as it possibly could. The product and operations were duct taped, but demand was massive. Our scooters ran out of battery before lunch every day. Everything felt validated. Naturally, we assumed the playbook was proven. We mapped out Europe and chose Madrid next. Megacity. Sun year round. Decent bike lanes. Who doesn’t like Spain? We launched six weeks later, in early October. Everything broke. Demand was much weaker. Vehicles were stolen and vandalized. Operations couldn’t keep up. We had a heroic local team, hired just before launch, trying to hold things together. In hindsight, it was a naive and expensive launch. Total cost was roughly $1M. What made it harder was timing. We were raising our Series A at the same time. Momentum mattered. Growth looked good from the outside, from inside the company, it often felt like survival. We learned a few things the hard way. First, expansion requires much more local knowledge than global confidence. Second, optimism has to be pragmatic. Naivety is costly. But there’s a third lesson I still go back and forth on. Momentum matters enormously in the earliest stages. When investors, employees, and partners make decisions in days or weeks, not years, imperfect momentum can be the difference between survival and failure. We eventually shut down Madrid. We also raised our Series A, led by Balderton and Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen. Both things can be true. The mental model I took with me is not “never move fast.” It’s this: Move fast, but be explicit about what you’re willing to break in order to do so.

Most startups dream of funding rounds. These founders started with none. Tru Earth began in a garage in Canada — just 3 founders, an idea, and a mission: Make eco‑friendly laundry affordable and easy. Today, their laundry strips are shipped to 70+ countries, reducing millions of plastic jugs from landfills.   And they did it without the big VC checks everyone thinks are “required.” Here’s what Tru Earth’s story shows us: Small can be powerful Their first customers came from a single Facebook group. Proof that testing locally before scaling globally still works. Mission beats marketing   They didn’t need gimmicks. Their mission — cut plastic waste — was the hook. People wanted to join the movement, not just buy detergent. Scrappy beats fancy   Starting in a garage meant focusing on impact, not aesthetics. They scaled on results, not pitch decks. The big lesson? You don’t need millions to make millions of lives better. Sometimes, the strongest startups are built with nothing more than grit, a mission, and a garage. So let me ask you: Could your local idea scale global if you went all‑in?

I'm excited to share something that I've been working on for a little while was just published as in Harvard Business Review. While some companies in the US and the Global North pull back from #climate and #sustainability, many in the Global South face ongoing challenges caused by climate change and rising pollution loads, and are developing ingenious #CircularEconomy solutions to solve them. In Barbados, Legena Henry founded Rum and Sargassum to convert sargassum seaweed that clogs Caribbean beaches into biofuel. Betty Lu created Confetti Snacks - Marvellous Veggie Chips to upcycle surplus produce into healthy snacks in Singapore. Nigeria-based SALUBATA upcycles ocean plastic into stylish, modular sneakers. I suggest that corporations and investors need to pay more attention to #sustainable #climate and #circular #innovation from the Global South. These innovative enterprises aren't charity projects. They solve real business challenges, like resource efficiency and supply chain resilience, while operating in constrained environments. Companies like H&M, IKEA, and Unilever are already co-investing with local innovators in Africa, Asia and Latin America through ventures that deliver mutual financial and non-financial value. How can companies put these ideas into practice? 1. Broaden your innovation funnel: to seek and collaborate with entrepreneurs from under-resourced communities. 2. Map your waste streams as opportunities: to find and develop new sources of value, as International Synergies Limited does with business networks around the world. 3. Invest for shared value: to cultivate local enterprises that can also strengthen your supply chain, like Unilver Nigeria's investment in Wecyclers Corporation's network of recyclers. 4. Update your metrics: to measure real #ESG impact across financial and non-financial capital stocks. Most of our future population growth will happen in the Global South, cultivating and investing in indigenous solutions today will deliver long-term and lasting value. https://lnkd.in/gCur-djq

What can we learn from the failures of asset-heavy startups when building Climate Tech and Deep Tech at scale? 🌱 The recent wave of collapses in agriculture and food startups provides sobering insights. Critically, it wasn’t the technology that failed — lab results and production worked fine in more than 100 companies that recently shut down. So what went wrong? Looking at the patterns highlighted in the "Autopsy of the Agrifood–Climate Tech Collapse" by Eugen Kaprov (link in comments), several concrete lessons emerge for climate tech and deep tech founders: 1️⃣ Don’t giga-scale before costs are under control. Focus relentlessly on the cost-down curve. 💰 In asset-heavy startups, unit economics are king. Founders must prove contribution margins early and drive costs down aggressively before expanding. Scale alone cannot fix economics – it only amplifies losses if costs remain too high. Every incremental unit should move the business closer to self-sufficiency rather than deeper dependence on external capital. Key takeaway: Don’t aim for a Giga-Factory; build a staircase – and cut costs on each step. 2️⃣ Expand modularly and tie growth to guaranteed demand. 🏗️ A common failure was building large facilities or multiple sites before demand was verified. Modular, incremental production units allow startups to expand only when off-take agreements or contracted revenue justify it. This approach limits upfront capital exposure, reduces operational complexity, and makes each expansion financially sustainable. Key takeaway: Only build what your contracts justify – let demand pull scale, not narrative. 3️⃣ Move beyond VC as early as possible 💳🤝 Long-cycle, capital-intensive hardware startups benefit from strategic equity from corporates or industrial customers. These investors provide patient capital, market access, and alignment with long-term operational goals – anchoring the business to real demand. On top of that, founders can layer debt instruments, asset leasing, asset-based loans, and sometimes working capital for modular deployment without diluting equity. Public guarantees can further de-risk debt, unlocking lower-cost capital that would otherwise be unavailable. Key takeaway: Bring in customers as strategic investors once you have a product. Use debt instruments and guarantees to further reduce VC exposure. Scale should never be the strategy in itself. It is the outcome of aligning unit economics, production strategy, and capital structure. #ScaleupFinance #ClimateTech #DeepTech #Gigafactory Lea Saurin Sascha Steffen Helmut Schoenenberger Florian Egli Julia Reinaud Ann Mettler Jon Fuller Dorothea Ringe Max Vellguth Dr. Heba Aguib Kelsey Emms Paula Schmid Schmidsfelden Jules Besnainou Victor van Hoorn Magnus Agerström Sarah Mackintosh Magdalena Jabłońska Kädi Ristkok Stefan B. Wintels Jörg Goschin Dr. Dominik Steinkuehler Miki Yokoyama Yair Reem Tim Woodcock Wim Reyntiens

Most climate founders organize their GTM around their product roadmap. They think in features, milestones, and technical innovation. But your customer isn't moving through your roadmap.  They're going through a transformation.  Leaving what's familiar and stepping into the unknown. And that transformation follows a pattern. Carl Jung saw it in human psychology.  Joseph Campbell documented it across every culture's mythology.  Hollywood used it to move billions of people. It's called the hero's journey. And it's not just storytelling, it's the psychological map of how people actually experience change. Which means it's also the map of how your customer adopts your climate solution. Here's what your customers actually need at each stage and where most founders get it wrong: → The Ordinary World (They need education about the hidden costs of their status quo, not product pitches) → The Call to Adventure (They need proof this is urgent for their specific industry, not generic climate statistics) → Refusal of the Call (They need case studies from companies exactly like them, not more detailed feature walkthroughs) → Meet the mentor (They need a low-risk pilot to test with, not full enterprise contracts upfront) → Crossing the Threshold (They need a quick win in the first 30 days, not six-month implementation roadmaps) → Tests, Allies, and Enemies (They need ROI tools for their champions to sell internally to procurement and legal, not product update emails) → The Approach (They need benchmarks showing typical 18-36 month adoption curves, not pressure to move faster) → The Ordeal (They need founder-level intervention, not standard escalation protocols) → The Reward (They need help quantifying and packaging the results, not just celebrations) → The Road Back (They need recognition of who they've become and opportunities to expand their impact, not just renewal paperwork) → The Resurrection (They need celebration of what they've achieved and validation of the journey they took, not treated like just another account) → Return with the Elixir (They need to be empowered as champions who can guide others through the same transformation, not just asked for reference calls) Your customer is the hero of this story. You're the guide who helps them transform. Most founders flip this. They make their breakthrough technology the hero and wonder why deals stall in the middle. Build your GTM around your customer's transformation, not your technology milestones. That's how you stop losing deals and start creating champions who bring others along behind them. PS. Want to see what your GTM looks like when you're the guide, not the hero?  DM me and I'll show you how we've rebuilt this for other climate founders.

We've been working with entrepreneurs in East Africa building profitable, energy-enabled businesses in some of the most climate-exposed communities on the continent. Many climate-development “win-wins” sound great in theory but fall short under rigorous testing. This one delivered. The first study in this new series examines solar-powered cold chains for small-scale fisheries in Kenya, evaluating the Keep IT Cool (KIC) model around Lake Turkana. The model: In Kenya, ~40% of fish catch is lost to spoilage. Drying is often the fallback option—locking fishers into lower-value markets—but that fails when temps hit 50°C. With KIC cold storage and logistics, fresh fish can reach urban markets, where value is significantly higher. Fishing households reported 5–7 major economic and climate shocks per year. A single bad month can erase years of progress. In this context, these sorts of findings are critical for livelihoods on the knife’s edge: • Large reductions in post-harvest losses • No increase in total catch. This is about efficiency, not increased extraction • Greater dietary diversity and nutrition among fisher households • Increased investment in productive assets like boats and gear Policy brief: https://lnkd.in/eV7xZhgj KIC is no secret in climate-smart development circles. The wider lessons are about enabling those that follow: 1. Private-sector delivery models CAN reach some of the most vulnerable and climate-exposed households. As we adjust to the pullback in aid, identifying these enterprises becomes more important. 2. The cost of capital for small companies delivering these services is too high. DFIs and impact investors need better ways to reach early-stage enterprises with smaller ticket sizes and lower-cost capital to enable scale without being strangled by expensive debt. 3. Once a viable delivery model is identified, build from it. For example, with KIC delivering cold-chain services, now is the time to pair it with credit lines, insurance products, and targeted TA to help fisherfolk manage cash flow, invest in productive assets, and plan for shocks. 4. I have problems with how blurred the line between climate finance and dev finance has become. But this is a case where the overlap is real. Resilience is what these communities are asking for—and, crucially, this study shows they are willing to pay for it when services deliver. That demand signal makes scale and long-term financial sustainability feasible. High-five: Francis N., Mbithe Kiio and the Keep IT Cool | Earthshot Prize Winner 24 team, the Duke University and University of Nairobi/EfD_Kenya research team: Alejandro Diaz Herrera, Mirna Elsharief, Marc Jeuland, Richard Mulwa, ELLY MUSEMBI, Liilnna Teji, Ferran Vega Carol; Juliette Keeley, Ama Bartimeus MBA, Tanya Kothari and the Shell Foundation team; UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

I've been monitoring the climatetech and decarbonization startups this year, and here’s what I learned. International Energy Agency (IEA) expects global clean energy investment to hit $2 trillion in 2024. According to the IEA, approximately 90% of cleantech startups, including venture-backed startups, fail within their first few years.  Many believe that one reason for the failure is the highly fragmented nature of the cleantech market. But that’s not 100% true. Failed startups don't have customer or community pull. This is the primary reason most climatetech and decarbonization projects fail. Here are some examples: - Hyperloop One: Despite raising over $450 million from investors, it failed to secure customers and is now selling off its assets and laying off its staff. Dramatically changing transportation systems is hard. - Running Tide: The company raised $54 million in September 2022 to tackle marine-based carbon removal suffered from low customer demand and MRV challenges. - Universal Hydrogen: Hydrogen-powered fuel cell developer raised around $100 million but failed to raise additional funds for the early stage hydrogen aviation company. - Bird: Once valued at $2 billion, the electric scooter startup filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in 2023. - Zinc8 Energy Solutions: A flow-battery aspirant struggling to survive after losing its CEO and cutting most of its staff. There is a fantastic opportunity to learn from these companies. Push versus pull. The ones that do survive have two things in common: They focus on customers and community engagement! They have more customer pull than those that fail. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study found that startups with strong community engagement are 2.5 times more likely to succeed. If you are new to the CO2 or low-carbon space, talking to everyone and building relationships is important. Creating customers and community around those relationships is key to building a business. Connect with consumers, local communities, innovators, leaders, and EVEN your competition. Find your customer and community early. Last year, I met so many cleantech leaders, innovators, and industrial emitters. Amazing people building, learning, and iterating every day. Despite common challenges like permitting delays and infrastructure limitations, the startups succeeding are creating and harnessing the customer and community pull.

Every geographic expansion costs startups 6-12 months of founder attention. Most can't afford that distraction. Here's why: Many companies tend to assume growth means more geographies. They launch in California, expand to Texas, then Florida. But it’s important to understand that expansion only should happen once you nail down a repeatable playbook. Without a repeatable play book, each new market may require a different GTM strategy. If that sounds like you, here are 3 things to do before your expand geographies (based on Aquaria's playbook): 1/ Evaluate market priorities based on urgency and importance of your solution. In the early days, there are likely many markets your company may have a rationally reasonable reason to tackle. But that’s actually a problem. You should not get distracted, and you should prioritize and pick markets where you solve a large, painful problem. Even if the market seems small at first. Don’t pick a large market where you solution is only a “good to have” We picked Texas because we had the strongest customer feedback on the urgency and importance of our product for independent, reliable water. Communities in Texas have been feeling water challenges for generations, and it’s only getting worse. We chose to move away from NY (My home) and SF (Our old HQ) because water in both places are good. We’d be building a novelty cool Silicon Valley company if we didn’t get closer to our initial ICP first. 2/ Pick one geographic market to focus where your ICP is defined, where you can physically visit your customers. Listen to their problems, their feedback. Iterate on product market fit relentlessly. For us, Texas alone has a $50B residential water market. When we can visit 4-5 customer sites in one day instead of flying between states, we cut sales cycles in half. Our installation teams know every local contractor and troubleshoot problems on-site within hours, not days. Other climate hardware companies that have successfully used this playbook include Sealed, Gradient, Copper etc. 3/ Hire regional sales reps who live within 50 miles of your target customer clusters instead of remote reps covering multiple states. Our Texas reps understand local water challenges, know which neighborhoods have the worst well problems, and can be at customer sites for installation support within an hour. Remote reps covering multiple states can't build these local relationships or provide this level of service. — Geographic concentration proves execution velocity: → Shorter sales cycles → Faster installs → Stronger local relationships That’s the foundation for scaling climate infrastructure market by market, without burning years on premature expansion.