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Brought to you by:

EDF: partnering with New Wave on this mini-series to explore how cleaner energy, industrial innovation, and ambitious startups can rebuild Europe’s productive edge. Discover EDF’s work with industrial and climate innovators here.

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👉 Europe cannot rebuild the past

Reindustrialisation does not mean bringing back the factories Europe lost in the 1980s and 1990s. With high energy prices, material dependencies, labour shortages, and fragile supply chains, Europe needs a fundamentally different model: cleaner, more automated, less resource-intensive, and more flexible.

👉 Startups don’t need more pilots. They need venture customers

A startup cannot rebuild European industry alone. Neither can a corporate or a VC. The real unlock could be a three-way alliance: startups create the technology, investors finance the risk, and venture customers provide credibility, industrial access, and a path to scale.

But are corporates prepared to make bold commitments, or will startups remain trapped in endless €10K pilot projects?

👉 Europe has a speed problem

European founders are asked for three years of factory data before building their first factory. American investors ask whether the same technology could work in space.

Europe has grants, engineering talent, and political ambition. What it lacks is faster capital, simpler programmes, unified rules, and a greater willingness to back step changes rather than incremental improvements.

The cost of moving too slowly? Europe’s most ambitious companies, and their factories, may be financed and built elsewhere.

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References

EDF Pulse Pilot and industrial demonstration programmes

SPRIND innovation programmes

European Innovation Council funding programmes

Europe’s net-zero manufacturing capacity objectives

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Wave Makers

Dr. Anne Umbach — HTGFMichel Hunsicker — EDF Pulse VenturesTom Vroemen — TETMET

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Chapters

(00:00) Can startups help Europe reindustrialise?(01:05) What reindustrialisation actually means(03:20) The factory of the future(09:15) Does Europe need to own its industrial infrastructure?(12:30) The role startups should play(15:40) What makes an industrial startup VC-backable?(21:35) Europe’s capital gap—and the American comparison(26:30) Venture customers as the missing unlock(31:35) How EDF helps startups cross the industrialisation gap(34:25) Grants, bureaucracy, and Europe’s fragmented programmes(37:10) Bold bets versus techno-economic reality(41:20) Will customers pay a European premium?(43:35) Is Europe on track for 2030?(48:20) One wish to accelerate European industry

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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

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🌊 Can Fashion Break Free From Fossil Fuels?

How Syntetica plans to turn the textile industry’s most complex waste into a scalable source of new materials.

We’re joined by Marco Bertone, CEO and co-founder of Syntetica, a circular chemistry company building technology to recycle blended nylon waste.

Fresh off a $30 million funding round, Marco is working on a problem few companies have been able to solve: recovering high-quality nylon from garments made with multiple fibres, colours and coatings.

The scale of the challenge is difficult to ignore.

More than 100 billion garments are produced every year. Many are worn only seven to ten times, while roughly 92 billion garments end up in landfill or incineration.

In this episode, we unpack why the textile recycling system remains fundamentally broken — and what it takes to build a circular alternative that can compete with fossil-based materials on quality, performance and price.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why fast fashion created a waste problem that consumer behaviour alone will not solve

→ Why blended fabrics make textile recycling radically more difficult than recycling bottles

→ How Syntetica separates nylon 6 and nylon 6,6 from cotton, polyester, elastane and coatings

→ Why low-temperature, low-pressure chemistry could unlock competitive unit economics

→ What it takes to finance a first-of-a-kind chemical facility

→ How partnerships with Michelin, Lululemon, Uniqlo, MAS Holdings and other industry players help de-risk the path to scale

→ Why recycled materials must reach price parity with virgin nylon to become truly mainstream

Marco also shares what he had to learn moving from marketing into chemistry, industrial operations and project finance — and why the long-term ambition extends far beyond textiles.

The bigger goal: prove that a century of fossil-based production can be replaced by genuinely scalable circular technology.

✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.

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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

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Supported by:

Leonard: The innovation and foresight platform of the VINCI Group, to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing VINCI’s businesses: the digital revolution, the accelerating pace of innovation, and the environmental transition.

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🌊 The Next Climate Wave Is Built, Not Coded

Why decarbonizing the physical world requires better materials, specialist investors, patient capital, and a new approach to industrial adoption.

We’re joined by Juan Nieto of Zacua Ventures, an investor focused on the technologies reshaping construction, infrastructure, real estate, and the wider built environment.

Juan began his career as a civil engineer before moving into private markets and later joining Cemex’s corporate venture capital team. There, he saw firsthand that many of the technologies needed to decarbonize construction simply did not exist yet.

That realization eventually led him to help build Zacua Ventures: a specialist investment platform connecting ambitious founders with some of the world’s largest construction and industrial companies.

In this episode, we explore why the built environment represents one of climate tech’s largest, and most difficult, opportunities.

Construction is responsible for a major share of global emissions. But replacing cement, steel, insulation, and other foundational materials is not as simple as producing a better result in a laboratory.

A startup must meet strict performance standards, navigate regulation, integrate into deeply entrenched supply chains, win the trust of conservative buyers, finance industrial production, and prove that its technology works repeatedly in the real world.

The opportunity is enormous. So is the execution risk.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why cement is so difficult to decarbonize

→ What is really pushing construction companies to change

→ Why a superior material is not enough

→ How startups can compete with industrial incumbents

→ Why industrial scaling cannot follow the SaaS playbook

→ Where Juan sees the strongest material opportunities

→ Why specialist investors may see the next wave earlier

→ How AI is redirecting capital toward the physical world

→ Where robotics meets climate and construction

→ Why construction innovation is ultimately a humanitarian issue

Juan’s central message is clear:

The physical world will not decarbonize through one breakthrough material or one category-defining startup.

It will require coordinated progress across materials, energy, robotics, financing, regulation, industrial production, and customer adoption.

The next generation should not inherit a world where basic housing, clean water, electricity, and infrastructure have become less accessible. Innovation in the built environment is how we begin to change that.

✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.