A venture investor, a bank, an investment bank, and a CFO who has raised over a billion. They disagreed productively about what makes a deep tech company fundable.
Securing growth capital for a decarbonisation business means satisfying several types of investor. Each wants different things and measures risk differently. A panel at Energy Tech Summit put four of them on stage together, and the disagreements proved more useful than the consensus.
Ashwin Shashindranath, Partner at Energy Impact Partners, moderated. He was joined by Rajesh Swaminathan, Partner at Khosla Ventures; Christian Patino, Head of Impact Tech at UBS; Jan de Dreu, Executive Director for Debt Investments at BBVA Spark; and Andreas Aepli, CFO at Climeworks.
Session panelists at Energy Tech Summit 2025
Founder Readiness: Get to the Point
Asked for the most common mistake deep tech founders make when pitching, Swaminathan was unsentimental. Founders are too long-winded, he said, and take too long to arrive at the point.
His rule is specific. The first two slides should establish why you’re the best investment available, what your cost position is, and where your IP differentiation lies, in a handful of bullets. Founders routinely spend that time building the market case instead, which an investor has already seen many times, and which actively hurts the pitch.
Patino named a complementary failure from the investment banking side: overhyped business plans, and plans that may not be deliverable. De Dreu’s advice on venture debt was the shortest answer of the session. It works as a complement to equity, to optimise the capital structure, and not as a substitute for it.
On the slow financing timelines now common in climate infrastructure, Swaminathan returned to milestones. Be very clear about the immediate next milestone, keep the timeframe short, break the elephant into edible chunks, and demonstrate consistently that you can hit them.
Which Milestones Actually Unlock Capital
This is where the panel split, and the disagreement is worth reading closely, because it defines who a company should be talking to.
For Khosla at pre-seed and seed, the milestone that matters ties to techno-economics. Swaminathan said the firm doesn’t run cash-on-cash return analysis on early companies. Instead, founders should tie milestones to the top three to five variables in their techno-economic model, and de-risk those as far as possible, even at the earliest stages.
De Dreu, lending rather than investing, wants financial metrics: revenue, revenue growth, runway.
Patino said the market focus has moved decisively toward profitability, and he acknowledged that his answer would have been different not long ago. Swaminathan pushed back directly. In deep tech and hard tech, nobody is anywhere near profitability. By that standard, no capital could be deployed anywhere. There’s usually no revenue, and often no offtake agreement either. If profitability is the test for material science problems that take a decade, the sector traps itself in a self-fulfilling prophecy where these companies never get funded.
His alternative test: milestones, unit economics, and whether the company has a scalable plan that reaches deployment on minimal cash.
Aepli, speaking as the operator in the room, offered the synthesis. Deep tech needs a long time and heavy capital to reach profitability, and a company must be clear about how it gets there. But it should do that in sequence, because scaling means scaling the market, the technology, and the company’s own operational capability all at once. Staging reduces risk for investors, and proves you’re one step closer each time.
De-Risking by Deploying
Asked how Climeworks addressed investor concerns about a technology with no precedent, Aepli gave advice that generalises well beyond direct air capture.
Deploy in the field as quickly as possible, because that’s the real proof point. Do it at a scale you can digest, so the organisation and operations scale alongside the technology. Then get third-party verification of each de-risking step, which makes the progression far easier for investors to accept.
The concerns he faced in early rounds stayed consistent: how quickly this turns into profitability, and whether the market can develop in line with the growth plan.
Two Ways to De-Risk a Fusion Company
Swaminathan gave the most detailed answer of the session, using two investments to show that de-risking strategy is company-specific rather than formulaic.
When Khosla invested in Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the sector was widely considered uninvestable. The firm knew commercialisation would take enormous capital, so it asked two questions. What’s the minimal thing this company must de-risk, and what capital does that require? And if fusion never happens, is there a beachhead market where the work still holds value?
The team identified a long list of risks. The dominant one was achieving a high-field magnet, because that reduces system size dramatically. The reassurance came from the second question: even if fusion never arrives, high-field magnets have a substantial market in medical imaging. That gave investors a worst-case scenario they could live with.
The principle underneath both cases: de-risk from a capital stack perspective and from a milestone perspective, so the company remains investable at every point, rather than simply throwing money at the problem.
How a Lender Sees Risk Differently
De Dreu drew the distinction founders most often miss. Venture investors focus on the upside. Banks, by contrast, focus on whether the company or project can repay over the life of the loan, either from new financing or from internally generated cash flow.
That makes financial flexibility the thing a bank examines: the ability of the team and the project to adjust operations to generate the cash needed, or to raise capital when required.
Asked which companies are debt-ready, his answer pointed to those closer to maturity and profitability with a clear use case. For deep tech with a very long path to profitability, debt is difficult. He suggested a horizon of a few years as the threshold, and was refreshingly direct about sequencing: a company at that stage may want to approach the EIB before a commercial bank, since a semi-public institution can be more flexible with long-dated deep tech.
Patino added the risk he watches after investing: regulatory change, and whether the business plan proves deliverable. He noted that, as an investment bank, UBS doesn’t take technical risk, since it brings investors to companies rather than underwriting the technology, though it does carry reputational risk.
Where the Momentum Sits
Swaminathan named nuclear and geothermal as the sectors drawing the most capital. Both offer round-the-clock base load power, and data centre operators are looking hard at long-term energy security. Current US policy has also been comparatively supportive of both.
Incentives Decide Where, Not Whether
Aepli reframed the role of government support in a way that founders with proven technology should note. For Climeworks, incentives are primarily a siting decision. The technology works, so the question is where on the planet to deploy it, trading off energy, location, build speed, and the incentives available.
His ideal programme structure does two things at once. It takes some risk by participating in the capital stack, and it lowers the entry point for customers buying a product still carrying a price premium.
The Strongest Predictor Is Who You Hire
Asked what actually predicts success across two decades of investing, Swaminathan named the team, then made the answer far more specific than usual.
What matters is bringing senior leadership from outside the industry in question. He described spinning out an electrolyser company with a hardcore technical team that needed a commercial CEO. His single biggest hiring criterion was to avoid anyone from the hydrogen industry, on the grounds that nobody in it had scaled anything, so they wouldn’t know how to build a plant, commercialise, or approach a customer.
They hired instead from solar and contract electronics manufacturing, and brought in engineering leadership with advanced manufacturing experience from the automotive sector. In his account, that combination made the decisive difference.
Don’t Take On Debt Too Early
Asked what he would change in hindsight, Aepli pointed to unknown unknowns, which he thinks are systematically underestimated. Some things only reveal themselves once you deploy in the field. So deploy early enough to discover them, and leave wiggle room for what you find.
His stronger warning was about capital structure. Do not introduce debt too early in pursuit of fast growth, before you know that everything works and understand the ramp-up curve on your projects. And do not be scared of dilution. Deep tech is capital intensive, and you need flexibility in that capital until you reach the point where debt genuinely fits.
De Dreu, asked whether he’d seen companies fail because of capital structure, gave a measured answer. It’s rare on the corporate and project side, because as long as the underlying business is viable, lenders will generally look for a solution. He was more candid about his own misconception: he expected climate tech adoption to move considerably faster, and now believes the sector requires a long horizon and preparation for cycles along the way.
Patino added that he’s learned more from companies that struggled or failed than from the successes, and that those lessons benefit the whole industry.
Christian Patino, Head of Impact Tech of UBS at Energy Tech Summit 2025
The Lightning Round
The closing exchange produced several answers worth keeping.
Founder traits drew four answers: the ability to learn, iterate, and fail fast; ambition paired with surrounding yourself with capable people; tenacity and energy over a long build; and focus, which Aepli argued matters most at growth stage, when there are far too many opportunities to pursue.
What signals fundability first split the panel too. Answers ranged from traction and a path to profitability, to whether the company pursues the highest impact with the most differentiated technology capable of hitting the cost metric. The panel split evenly on traction itself, between pilots and revenue.
Investor red flags drew a sharp warning from Swaminathan: investors who jump into climate tech quickly tend to jump out just as quickly. Choose credible, committed long-term investors, even at a lower valuation. Aepli’s version was shorter — short-term exit expectations.
Buzzwords to retire got a full list: claims of being unique or one-of-a-kind, references to AI where the business isn’t actually about it, and discussion of the green premium. Swaminathan was firm on that last one — it fluctuates too much, so focus on cost instead.
The single superpower question converged on the same idea from different angles: bringing people together, and regulatory certainty and long-term commitment sustained across governments. Swaminathan’s point was that a country able to set a twenty-year plan and stick to it captures the manufacturing, regardless of where the innovation originated.
The parting advice: be prepared, because windows open with little warning and the work has to happen beforehand. Round out the team with people who add credibility on scaling. Focus on system and product cost rather than operating cost. And don’t price against what the market signals today — price against the economics the industry will require several years from now.
Key Takeaway
Growth capital isn’t a single conversation. A seed investor wants techno-economic milestones. A lender wants repayment capacity and flexibility. An investment bank wants a deliverable plan, and increasingly, a path to profit. The founders who raise well know which of those they’re talking to, sequence their scaling so each stage removes a specific risk, and hire people who have built at scale before — even when those people come from another industry entirely.
Energy Tech Summit Europe returns to Bilbao on 7–8 April 2027, bringing together the investors, lenders, and operators who decide what gets funded.
