Veronique Hördemann is Managing Partner and CFO at Future Energy Ventures, a climatetech VC firm investing in the software layer of the energy transition. From her base in Essen (with a side of Berlin), Veronique talked about going from corporate VC to a fully independent impact fund and why they’ve made a deliberate choice to stay clear of hardware.

In this episode we talked about:
 🏙️ How they segment their investments across “future energy”, “future cities”, and “future technology”
 📉 The real reason they avoid hardware investments (spoiler: it involves capital, time, and regret)
 👩‍💼 The diversity problem in VC and why she wants more female-led startups in her pipeline
 🔁 What it’s like going from corporate-backed VC to managing a regulated, independent impact fund
 🏫 Why she thinks the school system is stifling innovation—and how that’s become personal

#climatetech #impactinvesting #venturecapital #VC 

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Anastasia Pavlovic is the co-founder of Eion, a carbon removal company that accelerates Earth's natural rock weathering process to lock away CO₂—permanently. Eion works with farmers to deploy enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in agricultural fields, creating a carbon sink disguised as soil amendment, with benefits to landowners and climate alike. Anastasia joined the podcast from Detroit to talk about carbon, kids, and the importance of remembering to eat.

In this episode we talked about:

 🪨 How volcanic rock dust turns farms into carbon capture sites (and why the best rocks might be in Norway)
 🌽 How Eion aligns climate goals with farm economics
 🚢 The surprising math that makes ocean shipping rock across the Atlantic more carbon-efficient than it sounds
 💰 Why climate tech founders need to think like infrastructure financiers and not just software bros
 📉 How Anastasia regulates the highs and lows of startup life—with a side of mac & cheese

#Climatetech #CarbonRemoval #Agtech

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

Nemailla Bonturi is the co-founder of ÄIO, an Estonian startup fermenting fats and oils from yeast instead of palm oil or animal products. A Brazilian scientist-turned-founder, Nemailla now works at the intersection of synthetic biology, circular economy, and baked goods—with an in-house chef, of course.

In this episode we talked about:

 🧫 How a “very special yeast” turns sawdust and stale bread into palm oil alternatives
 🌍 Why Estonia is a unicorn factory
 🥐 A plant-based butter that could make your croissant carbon neutral
 🧴 Turning leftover dairy and tea leaves into moisturizers and lip balms
 🧠 Mental health, therapy, and the importance of shutting your laptop at 6pm
 📺 Why The X-Files may be the most pro-climate tech show of the 1990s

#fermentationtech #climatetech #circularbioeconomy

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Eugene Beh is the founder of Quino Energy, where he’s commercializing organic flow batteries that are safer, cheaper, and more scalable than their vanadium and lithium-ion cousins. With a background in physics and chemistry from Harvard and Stanford, Eugene has traded academic labs for chemical plants—and he’s betting that petroleum byproducts might just be the unlikely hero of long-duration energy storage.

In this episode we talked about:

 🔋 Why Quino's aqueous organic flow batteries don’t catch fire, unlike lithium-ion
 💰 How Eugene expects his electrolytes to undercut vanadium on cost—possibly this year
 🏗️ Why reusing tank infrastructure could slash battery installation costs
 🌍 What makes Quino’s batteries geopolitically boring, and why that’s a good thing
 🏥 Why hospitals, factories, and AI-fueled data centers might be early adopters
 🛢️ And how coal tar and clothing dye might save us from an electrified future dominated by flammable batteries

 #climatetech #energystorage #batterytech

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Selina Tobaccowala is a Silicon Valley veteran turned climate entrepreneur. With hits like Evite, Ticketmaster, and SurveyMonkey on her resume, she’s now taking aim at one of the biggest sources of residential emissions: energy inefficiency. Through her startup HomeBoost, she’s making home energy assessments as simple as scanning your walls with your phone.

In this episode we talked about:

 🔍 How HomeBoost uses AI and thermal imagery to let you run your own home energy audit
💡 Why the humble HVAC filter swap can cut 10% off your energy bill
🧠 Lessons from 20+ years in tech—from dot-com “eyeballs” to today’s LTV/CAC gospel
🛠️ What consumer tech folks can (and should) bring to climatetech
📉 Why climate investing is down, and why some founders might just be labeling things wrong

#climatetech #energytransition #founderstory

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Leise Sandeman is co-founder of Pathways, a company using AI to make heavy manufacturing more sustainable. Based in Copenhagen, she brings deep expertise in steel production and AI to the challenge of industrial decarbonization.

In this episode we talked about:

🏭 How Pathways is building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing, with their software now deployed across hundreds of plants

⚡ The current reality where sustainability teams spend 90% of their time collecting data and only 10% implementing changes 

🤝 The "playground" mindset of being a first-time founder and the importance of co-founder trust

🌍 Taking a strong stance on being a "single planet society" while working with diverse perspectives across regions like Texas

#ClimateTech #manufacturing #sustainability #EPD #LCA

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Eric Rubenstein is an oil and gas banker turned climate tech investor based in Houston. As founder of New Climate Ventures, he focuses on bridging the gap between traditional energy and climate innovation, bringing a pragmatic perspective shaped by his background in finance and fossil fuels.

In this episode we talked about:

🌡️ The critical need for more power generation capacity and why we need both renewable and reliable energy sources with built-in redundancy

📊 How the ability to measure and monitor carbon impacts drove Eric's interest in technologies like carbon capture, bioplastics, and carbon utilization

🔄 Practical advice for professionals looking to transition into climate tech, emphasizing gradual, deliberate steps and community engagement

🍸 How to turn CO2 into vodka

#climatetech #carbontech #energytransition #renewableenergy

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate

Julia Bialetska is the founder of S.Lab, a Ukrainian company creating sustainable packaging solutions from agricultural waste.

In this episode we talked about:

🌱 How S.Lab transforms agricultural waste into packaging that can be used in food, pharmaceuticals, electronics, furniture and fashion

📊 The impact of EU regulations requiring all packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2030, and why that means companies are rushing to find sustainable alternatives

⚙️ The parallels between today's sustainable materials evolution and the plastic revolution of the last century

🇺🇦 The resilience of Ukrainian startups operating during wartime and the growing recognition they're receiving globally

💰 S. Lab’s impressive pipeline worth approximately 20 million euros in monthly revenue and their current fundraising round of 2.5 million euros

#ClimateTech #SustainablePackaging #Packaging #Mycelium

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Jannik De Winter is an investor at PT1, a Berlin-based VC focused on greening the built environment. He recently co-authored a white paper on adaptation tech—the technologies we’ll need now that we’ve officially blown past 1.5°C. We talked about why climate resilience is an investment opportunity, not just a government expense, and why adaptation tech is still so poorly defined.

We touched on:

🔥 How climate adaptation tech is more than just seawalls and sandbags—it includes urban cooling, climate risk modeling, and even giving EV batteries a second life
💰 The trillion-dollar adaptation funding gap and why most of it isn’t coming from the private sector (yet)
🌍 Why Europe, and especially Germany, is ahead on adaptation policy, and what that means for startups and investors
🚰 The wild inefficiencies in water infrastructure—40% of Italy’s piped water just disappears—and the startups trying to fix it
🛰️ AI-powered disaster detection, from wildfire monitoring via satellite to real-time flood tracking
🎙️ PT1’s upcoming event on adaptation tech in Berlin, plus their podcast series diving into specific adaptation challenges

#AdaptationTech #ClimateFinance #ClimateTech

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast

🧑‍💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate

Chris Bernkopf is the founder of Podero, a tech company that helps utilities balance power loads by controlling distributed energy resources like heat pumps, batteries, and EVs. Fresh off a major fundraising round, he's building his remote-first team to expand across Europe while delivering 25% energy savings to customers.

In this episode we talked about:

🔌 How Podero's software enables utilities to aggregate and trade power from customer-owned devices on energy markets

🌏 How growing up watching the same YouTube videos creates a global tribe of like-minded founders

🎯 The value of focused mentorship through programs like Y Combinator in developing founder mindset

💰 Why closing a funding round is just the beginning - it's "registering for the marathon, not finishing it"

🏗️ Building a remote-first company culture with quarterly offsites, virtual coffee chats, and camera-on meetings

#climatetech #energytech #cleanenergy

🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast