Founders Associate

Axle Energy, a London-based energy flexibility platform, raised $9M (£7M) in seed funding, bringing its total funding to over $10M (£8M). The round was led by Accel with participation from Picus Capital, Eka Ventures, and angel investors including Amit Gudka, Sierra Peterson, Hanno Renner, and Nico Rosberg. The funds will be used to expand the team and grow across the European energy market. FinSMEs 01/08/2024.

Axle Energy is a B2B, back-end infrastructure business focused on connecting flexible assets, such as electric vehicles and home batteries, to energy markets that aren't otherwise available for consumers to dip into.

In the dynamic European climate tech landscape, a wave of enthusiasm is building around pioneering startups that are blazing new trails toward sustainability. These companies are not only pushing the boundaries of technology but they are also driven by a mission to address the challenges of climate change, propelling us toward a more sustainable future.For those interested in staying up to date with the latest innovations, the question arises: amidst the vast array of over 30,000 climate tech startups active in this space, which truly stands out? To answer this, we turned to those in a privileged position— the prominent investors and VCs that are most active in this space.With all those conversations with founders and their teams, the due diligence done on the most promising startups, and in some cases, also the investments made, they are, therefore, certainly more informed about what’s happening in the market than most of us.Here, we’ve sought the insights of those specialising in climate tech investments – from the energy transition and the circular economy to sustainable and food production but also climate fintech and the blue economy. Specifically, we asked them which European climate tech startups they are particularly excited about and what sets these companies apart, whether it’s their technology, mission, or potential impact.But enough with this introduction, as it’s now time to turn our attention to their insights!Irena Spazzapan, General Manager at Systemiq CapitalSystemiq Capital is a London-based venture capital fund investing in early-stage climate tech startups.One interesting place where we see untapped (or, at least, less recognised) potential is in the datacentre. We’ve looked at companies developing low-power custom ASICs for big data applications and companies rethinking public cloud load balancing to account for the hour-by-hour swings in the carbon intensity of specific datacentres’ energy sources. Two companies we think are doing really interesting things are Corintis and ONiO.Corintis, spun out of EPFL in Lausanne, is developing a new approach to cooling high-power processor cores. Datacentres are one of the biggest global users of both energy and water due to the unfortunate tendency of silicon-based semiconductors to get really hot and incinerate themselves if not aggressively cooled