Hacksummit 2025: Inside the Climate Deep Tech Revolution

From microbial mining to fusion reactors: 5 breakthrough climate technologies to watch and key investment trends from Europe's premier climate tech conference

Read Time: 6 mins

Happy Wednesday!

I’m back from Lausanne, Switzerland this week where I attended Hacksummit. This is my second year attending the climate deep tech conference. Last year, I must admit I felt like a complete outsider 🤪 but this year after having made significant investments in various deep tech seed stage startups, I felt a lot more like I was “part of it,” instead of someone on the periphery.

You ever felt like an outsider in a new industry?

Fellow investors at Climate Insiders

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Lausanne, Switzerland

First of all, we need to take a moment for how beautiful Lausanne is. Last year I spent more time down by the lake so this year I walked up in the city, which is on a pretty steep incline haha. I consider myself fit but walking vertically had me out of breath. 😮‍💨 How stunning is this view of the lake?

Climate Technologies

HackSummit is an interesting conference because it’s meant to bring VCs and Founders together. This means the conference heavily emphasizes networking. I ran between 15 minute meetings and founders presentations, financing panels, and talk on circular economy.

Here’s an overview of interesting new startups and their application:

1. Endolith

Revolutionizing Mining with Microbial Power

• Endolith is aiming to narrow the gap by helping miners extract more copper from their mines. To do that, this Colorado-based startup is turning to microbes.

• Today, copper is typically recovered using hydrometallurgy, which generally involves pouring acid on piles of rock. This strips out some portion of the copper. Endolith supplements that, adding what are essentially domesticated microbes that can boost the amount of copper.

2. Epoch Biodesign

Turning the plastic crisis into a circular revolution

• Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch is now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists, and software engineers. The startup just raised a Series A to scale up production of its plastic-eating enzymes.

• This means transferring the biorecycling process from the labs where the team has been developing the enzymes to their first production facility this year, which Founder Nathan says will be able to gobble through 150 tons per year of waste once it’s up and running. Commercial scale capacity expected by 2028.

3. Renaissance Fusion

Building nuclear fusion reactors for clean energy

• In Grenoble, France, Renaissance Fusion (Series A) is a trailblazer for simplified stellarators. It’s recent fundraise enables its international team to become a manufacturer of HTS, further develop its proprietary liquid metal wall technology (prevents overheating), and build a reduced-scale HTS stellarator reactor module.

• Renaissance Fusion will quickly generate revenues from commercializing HTS, the only material that can disrupt energy generation, transmission, storage, and medical imaging.

4. GA Drilling

Geothermal drilling for zero-carbon emission energy production

• From Bratislava, Slovakia and headquartered in Houston, GA Drilling is developer of a drilling technology designed to produce geothermal energy.

• The company's technology focuses on building and commercializing its patented platform of renewable sources of clean and base load energy to provide scalable and modular alternatives for zero-carbon emissions energy production, enabling clients to get better time and cost savings.

5. OroraTech

Global intelligence to tackle wildfire challenges

• From early detection OroraTech’s platform enables fire spread insights and detailed burn analysis. The products provide the tools to protect, respond to, and restore ecosystems—easily integrated into your systems for seamless operation.

Kokomodo Cacao Ceremony

On Friday morning, I joined a cacao ceremony side event. Cacao in it purest form is meant to be a heart opener. Not like chocolate which has lots of milk and sugar.

What I enjoyed about this is it was held by the startup Founder Tal of Kokomodo. They actually won a prize in the startup pitch event held the day before. The Founder expressed that she had a dream about hosting this event at the conference.

For me what was special about this event was not only the intention setting, but also despite the conference being heavily male, this space was welcoming for females and people introduced themself as “a mom.” There was even one VC mom who brought her son with her.

I was just discussing with a friend how conferences are not very accessible to mom’s with young children because it’s not easy to leave a young child to travel and typically conferences are not welcoming to children. It was really cute to see her son engage in conversation.

Lausanne → Amsterdam

Finally, it was time to go home. On the last day, I walked to a Japanese grocery store to pick up sushi 🍣 for lunch while breathing in the fresh Swiss air and taking in a last view of the lake. I hopped on the train from Lausanne to Geneva Airport. As I landed in Amsterdam, I grabbed my bike at the station balancing my suitcase on the ground and bike handle in the other hand. I dropped off my suitcase before eagerly heading to pick up my dog Kuma. 🐾 (Yes, he was pissed off at me for leaving him)

The Essential Bytes

→ Europe is leading the way with the hit to US climate policy but American Founders were still present

→ Africa is essential for the energy transition and more startups are popping up

→ Climate Tech VCs have gotten more sophisticated with vetting projections and financial due diligence

→ Founders need to tell a story and “dumb it down” for VCs who are not technical to successfully fundraise

Comment which of these startups is most intriguing to you?

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