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🌊 Financing the Hardware Era

Why climate founders need to stop treating equity as the default way to pay for CapEx.

We’re joined by William Godfrey of Tangible, who has spent the past few years developing a thesis around how climate and hardtech founders should combine equity, debt, equipment finance, asset-backed lending, project finance, and other forms of capital.

Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear:

We’re not going to solve climate change through software alone.

Climate companies need factories. Equipment. Batteries. Robots. Infrastructure. Physical assets.

And financing all of that with venture equity can become an extraordinarily expensive mistake.

In this episode, we go deep on how founders should actually finance capital-intensive growth — and why the best climate companies may increasingly need to become as sophisticated at financial engineering as they are at technical engineering.

One framework from William stuck with me:

Equity is for uncertainty. Debt is for repeatability.

Equity makes sense when you’re funding something that has never been done before: R&D, prototypes, first-of-a-kind technology, new teams and markets.

But once you’re repeatedly deploying an asset with increasingly predictable economics, a different pool of capital becomes available.

And learning how to access it can fundamentally change the economics of the company. Listen to this episode to learn more or read this guide by Tangible.

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

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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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🌊 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.