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A short edition today to share a great opportunity

if you are working in

• Carbon removal

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• Ocean Alkalinity enhancement

• Methane Abatement

• Mangrove restoration

• Next-gen CO2 capture

… You are eligible!

Each individual grant is between $350K and $500K

This is exactly the kind of unglamorous, high-uncertainty science that struggles to get funded anywhere in the world… Seize that opportunity.

Open call to innovators, nonprofits, researchers.

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Let’s keep building,
— Jérôme

🎧 Reactor — Tech for Good
We make the hard stuff simple — one founder, one story, one breakthrough at a time.

PS1: Lots of people asked me all the time where is the best place to invest into climate tech projects?

I always recommend keenest - French private investment club focused solely on profitable and scale climate tech businesses.

Check it out for free here

PS2: Other people ask me how I grow Reactor to dozens of thousands of followers. Here is one of the secret I have been using for 4 years now.

Struggling to keep your sales pipeline full?

Most startups fall into the same trap: you find leads, focus on closing them… and stop generating new ones. Then the pipeline dries up. And the cycle repeats.

My solution for the past 4+ years has been lemlist.

It lets you run multichannel outbound campaigns (LinkedIn, email, calls, WhatsApp), personalize at scale, and book meetings with up to 30% of cold prospects. Its email finder uncovers up to 80% of contacts, far more than most tools.

I’m now an official lemlist affiliate, and I genuinely recommend it to any climate tech startup with <50 sales reps.

👉 14-day free trial here: get.lemlist.com

Amazon is planning an enormous new AI data center campus in West Texas.

And one number has dominated the coverage:

That’s roughly what the natural-gas power plant associated with the project has been permitted to emit.

Imagine what you need to power San Francisco for a year…

Got it?

Make it 5 times.

If it actually reached that level, it could become one of the largest single sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. EVER.

Which has produced a pretty irresistible headline:

Except that’s not quite what’s happening. At least, not exactly. Let’s dive in!

GW Ranch in Pecos County, Texas. Rendering: Pacifico Energy.

First, the 30-million-tonne number is real. But it needs context.

The project is called GW Ranch, an 8,000+ acre energy and data center campus in Pecos County, Texas.

Amazon has confirmed that it acquired the site and plans to use new on-site generation to power its data center campus. Initially, the system will operate separately from the Texas electricity grid.

At the center of the project is a gigantic natural-gas power plant.

Texas regulators have approved 35 simple-cycle gas turbines, with a nominal plant output of 5,000 MW. Pacifico Energy says its permit allows up to 7.65 GW of dispatchable generation as the project expands.

And the emissions permit is extraordinary.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality allows the site to emit up to 33.2 million US tons of CO₂-equivalent per year.

Converted to metric units, that’s about 30 million tonnes of CO₂e.

For comparison, the largest emitting power plant displayed in the EPA’s latest facility-level power-sector data emitted about 16.6 million metric tonnes of CO₂e in 2023.

So the GW Ranch permit ceiling is roughly 1.8 times that amount.

But here’s the important distinction:

A permit is not a forecast.

The regulators calculated maximum annual emissions assuming the main turbines could operate for 8,760 hours a year: literally every hour of the year.

The plant may never operate like that.

So saying “Amazon will emit 30 million tonnes of CO₂ every year” would be wrong.

That’s true. (I’m naïve sometimes).

Saying that Amazon is backing a project permitted to emit around 30 million metric tonnes annually is accurate.

And there’s another correction.

The data center itself isn’t producing most of those emissions.

The power plant next door is.

That’s important, because it tells us where the actual problem and the potential solution lies.

Why does an AI data center need a power plant this big?

Forget AI for a second.

Think about the electricity.

Pacifico says GW Ranch is designed to eventually provide more than 5 GW of dedicated power.

Five gigawatts running continuously would equal:

43.8 terawatt-hours of electricity per year.

That’s no longer the electricity consumption of a normal industrial site.

It’s electricity consumption on the scale of a small country or several major cities.

And unlike many factories, the ideal data center doesn’t want power only between 9 AM and 5 PM.

Servers are expected to operate around the clock.

The cooling keeps running.

Networking keeps running.

And increasingly, enormous clusters of GPUs are expected to run highly computational workloads for days or weeks at a time.

So Amazon doesn’t just need a huge amount of electricity.

It needs a huge amount of electricity that is available when the computers want it.

That’s where Texas runs into a problem.

GW Ranch is being designed as a private power system rather than initially relying on ERCOT. Rendering: Pacifico Energy.

The Texas grid has an AI queue problem

Connecting 5 GW to an electricity grid isn’t like plugging in a new factory.

Generation has to exist.

Transmission lines need enough capacity.

Substations may need to be built.

The grid operator needs to know that adding the new load won’t destabilize the rest of the system.

And Texas is suddenly being asked to connect an absurd amount of new demand.

As of August 2026, ERCOT was looking at more than 474 GW of requests for new connections.

Around 90% of that requested load comes from data centers.

For perspective, those requests add up to more than five times Texas’s record peak electricity demand.

Not all of those projects will ever be built.

But the queue tells you something important:

The bottleneck isn’t necessarily land.

It isn’t GPUs.

It isn’t even money.

It’s electricity infrastructure.

Pacifico’s answer is brutally simple.

GW Ranch is effectively a giant private electricity system built beside the computers consuming the power.

Pacifico explicitly markets the project around this advantage: avoiding grid interconnection delays allows power to be deployed much faster. The company is targeting first power from the project in 2027.

From Amazon’s perspective, this solves two problems at once.

It gets electricity faster.

And because the project initially generates its own power, Amazon argues that its new demand won’t push the cost of new infrastructure onto existing Texas electricity customers.

Mechanically, that makes sense.

Climate-wise, it creates a much harder problem.

“Just add solar” doesn’t solve this

Here’s where GW Ranch gets particularly interesting.

Because this isn’t actually a gas-only project.

Pacifico’s proposed system includes up to:

750 MW of solar and 1.8 GW of battery storage.

Those are huge numbers in almost any other context.

Next to a 5 GW data center, they’re not.

At peak output, 750 MW of solar could supply only 15% of a 5 GW load.

And that’s at peak solar production.

At night, obviously, it produces zero.

The battery number also sounds enormous until you separate power from energy.

Pacifico lists 1.8 GW of battery power and elsewhere describes around 2 GWh of battery storage.

Those are different units.

GW tells you how quickly the battery can discharge.

GWh tells you how long it can keep doing it.

If you had 2 GWh stored and the data center was consuming 5 GW, the maths is:

2 GWh ÷ 5 GW = 0.4 hours.

About 24 minutes.

That doesn’t make the battery useless.

Quite the opposite.

Batteries are excellent for responding almost instantly when a turbine trips, smoothing fluctuations, shifting short periods of electricity production and maintaining power quality.

But this particular scale of storage does not turn a 5 GW data center into something that can run overnight on solar.

It’s primarily a reliability tool, not a multi-day clean-energy solution.

That’s the scale mismatch that gets lost when projects are described simply as using “gas, solar and batteries.”

Amazon already operates large-scale AWS infrastructure globally. The challenge at GW Ranch is less the efficiency of the server building than the carbon intensity of the electricity supplying it. Image: Amazon.

There’s another uncomfortable detail: these are simple-cycle turbines

The Texas permit specifies simple-cycle natural-gas turbines.

Mechanically, a simple-cycle turbine works a bit like a very large jet engine.

1. Air is compressed.

2. Natural gas is burned.

3. The hot expanding gas turns the turbine.

4. The turbine turns a generator.

5. Electricity comes out.

But a lot of very hot exhaust also comes out.

A combined-cycle gas plant captures much of that exhaust heat and uses it to produce steam, which turns another turbine.

Same fuel.

More electricity.

According to the US Energy Information Administration’s 2024 data, natural-gas turbines had an average tested heat rate of about 11,000 Btu per kWh, compared with about 7,550 Btu per kWh for combined-cycle plants.

Lower is better.

On those national averages, the simple gas-turbine configuration requires roughly 46% more fuel input per unit of electricity. That is not a direct estimate of GW Ranch’s specific turbines, but it illustrates the efficiency trade-off between the two architectures.

So why use simple-cycle machines?

One likely reason is that they’re highly modular and well suited to a system being built rapidly around varying demand and battery storage. Simple-cycle turbines are also commonly used for flexible or peak generation, while more efficient combined-cycle plants tend to serve sustained loads.

Which again exposes the fundamental trade-off behind GW Ranch:

So what would a genuinely lower-carbon version look like?

Let’s try to help Amazon do something good for the planet.

Not a green roof.

Not some recycled concrete.

Not 750 MW of solar attached to 5 GW of gas.

The whole power architecture has to change.

Start with renewables at the same order of magnitude as the load.

If your data center needs five gigawatts, the clean generation strategy also needs to be measured in multiple gigawatts.

And probably significantly more than 5 GW of installed renewable capacity, because solar and wind don’t produce their rated capacity continuously.

West Texas is actually a remarkable place to attempt this.

The region has excellent solar resources and enormous wind development.

Combining the two is important because their production profiles are different.

Then storage has to be discussed in GWh, not just GW.

To supply a 5 GW load for four hours requires, before accounting for losses:

20 GWh of stored electricity.

Twelve hours requires:

60 GWh.

That doesn’t mean Amazon should simply build a 60 GWh lithium-ion battery.

It demonstrates why solving a multi-gigawatt 24/7 power problem exclusively with short-duration batteries becomes difficult very quickly.

You also want a grid connection.

Amazon says that’s eventually the plan: the site is designed to transition toward grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow.

That’s potentially a major decarbonization lever.

A large interconnected grid can combine electricity produced at different times and locations.

• Solar in one region.

• Wind somewhere else.

• Storage.

• Existing nuclear.

• Hydro where available.

• Gas when required.

• And eventually newer sources of firm low-carbon electricity.

Trying to solve every hour of the year using resources located behind one fence makes the problem much harder.

Then comes clean firm power.

• Nuclear.

• Geothermal.

Potentially other technologies capable of generating low-carbon electricity regardless of whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

Amazon is already investing in both nuclear and other forms of carbon-free energy as part of its broader electricity strategy.

The problem is timing.

A gas turbine can be deployed much faster than a new nuclear fleet, major transmission lines or many emerging geothermal projects.

And AI infrastructure is being ordered now.

That’s exactly why gas is winning…

Gas doesn’t necessarily have to disappear on day one

There’s a temptation to make the solution binary:

Gas or renewables.

Dirty or clean.

That’s not particularly useful for engineering the system.

A more realistic near-term architecture could still contain gas turbines.

The important question is:

=> How often do they run?

Imagine a system with enormous quantities of wind and solar, much more storage, a grid connection, some flexible computing demand and eventually clean firm generation.

Gas turbines could remain available.

But instead of supplying most of the electricity every hour of the year, they become insurance for periods when the rest of the system cannot meet demand.

Their capacity might remain large.

Their annual fuel consumption could become much smaller.

And that distinction ( nstalled capacity versus actual generation) is critical.

A 5 GW gas fleet that runs occasionally is a completely different climate problem from a 5 GW gas fleet that operates continuously.

That’s why the final emissions from GW Ranch matter much more than the headline capacity.

And Amazon is doing some things right

There’s another part of this story worth mentioning.

West Texas is not somewhere you want to casually introduce an enormous new source of potable water demand.

Amazon says the Pecos County campus will use water unsuitable for drinking or irrigation, employ cooling technology designed to minimize water demand and potentially make use of produced water from oil and gas operations.

That’s materially different from simply competing with residents or agriculture for fresh water.

It doesn’t solve the carbon problem.

But it demonstrates why “Amazon is building an environmental disaster” is too simplistic a description.

Some parts of the system have been engineered specifically around local environmental constraints.

The electricity remains the elephant in the room.

There’s also a strange accounting problem

Amazon says “100% of the electricity consumed by its operations was matched with renewable energy in 2025”, for the third consecutive year.

Notice the word:

matched.

Annual renewable matching does not necessarily mean every AWS server is physically consuming carbon-free electricity every hour.

A company can purchase or contract renewable generation elsewhere that produces an equivalent quantity of electricity over time.

That can absolutely help finance new renewable projects.

But physically, a gas turbine burning natural gas beside a Texas data center still emits CO₂.

And this distinction is going to become increasingly important as AI pushes electricity demand into the gigawatt range.

The harder standard isn’t:

Did we buy enough renewable electricity over the year?

It’s:

What actually supplied this facility at 2 AM on a windless Tuesday?

That’s an infrastructure question rather than an accounting one.

And GW Ranch brings it into focus.

This is bigger than Amazon

Amazon isn’t uniquely discovering this problem.

The reason GW Ranch matters is that it shows us what happens when the speed of computing infrastructure and the speed of electricity infrastructure diverge.

• A data center operator can buy land.

• Order GPUs.

• Build server halls.

• Install cooling.

• And potentially move from concept to operation in only a few years.

Transmission infrastructure can take longer.

New nuclear takes longer.

Emerging firm-power technologies are only beginning to scale.

And the electricity still has to come from somewhere.

In Texas, developers have found an answer:

=> Build the power plant yourself.

Right now, the technology capable of supplying several gigawatts quickly, reliably and at enormous scale is often natural gas.

That doesn’t mean gas is the inevitable long-term answer.

It means any serious alternative has to compete not only on carbon emissions and cost.

It also has to compete on deployment speed, reliability and scale.

That’s a much harder test.

The real AI climate problem

So no:

=> Amazon isn’t simply building “the most polluting building in America.”

The claim collapses several different things into one headline.

The 30-million-tonne figure is a maximum permitted emissions level, not expected annual emissions.

The pollution comes primarily from the power station, not the data center buildings.

And the project already includes solar, batteries, water-efficiency measures and plans for eventual grid interconnection.

But none of that makes the underlying problem disappear.

Amazon wants access to around 5 GW of reliable electricity, and clean electricity infrastructure currently cannot necessarily be deployed at the same speed as the computing infrastructure demanding it.

So gas fills the gap.

That’s the real climate challenge created by this new generation of AI infrastructure.

Not:

Can we build a greener data center?

We already know how to improve cooling, buildings and server efficiency….

The harder question is:

Can we build clean electricity infrastructure as fast as we’re building demand for AI?

Right now, the answer is often no…

And until that changes, GW Ranch probably won’t be the last project that looks like this….

If you like it, share it

Watch the YouTube channel and follow us on TikTok and Instagram for more content.

Also, if you want to go further with Reactor:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

Let’s keep building,
— Jérôme

🎧 Reactor — Tech for Good
We make the hard stuff simple — one founder, one story, one breakthrough at a time.

PS1: Lots of people asked me all the time where is the best place to invest into climate tech projects?

I always recommend keenest - French private investment club focused solely on profitable and scale climate tech businesses.

Check it out for free here

PS2: Other people ask me how I grow Reactor to dozens of thousands of followers. Here is one of the secret I have been using for 4 years now.

Struggling to keep your sales pipeline full?

Most startups fall into the same trap: you find leads, focus on closing them… and stop generating new ones. Then the pipeline dries up. And the cycle repeats.

My solution for the past 4+ years has been lemlist.

It lets you run multichannel outbound campaigns (LinkedIn, email, calls, WhatsApp), personalize at scale, and book meetings with up to 30% of cold prospects. Its email finder uncovers up to 80% of contacts, far more than most tools.

I’m now an official lemlist affiliate, and I genuinely recommend it to any climate tech startup with <50 sales reps.

👉 14-day free trial here: get.lemlist.com

Click on the image to go to the video on youtube! 2 min watch

Or Instagram or Tiktok if you prefer!

The mechanism

The concept is called a “superblock” — superilla in Catalan — and it’s simpler than it sounds. Take a 3-by-3 grid of city blocks. Reroute all through-traffic to the outer perimeter. Inside the grid, the speed limit drops to 10 km/h, and street parking moves underground. That freed-up space becomes public squares, playgrounds, and local markets.

The important distinction: this isn’t a redesign of a street. It’s a redesign of priority. Pedestrians first, cars last — enforced through geometry, not signage.

What the data actually shows

Measured across the first three superblocks — Poblenou, Sant Antoni, and Horta — pollution dropped by up to 25% inside the zone, according to Barcelona’s own “Salut als Carrers” (Health in the Streets) evaluation.

A separate health-impact study by ISGlobal modeled a more ambitious scenario: if the plan were rolled out to its full original scope of 503 superblocks across the entire city, it could prevent roughly 667 premature deaths every year — mostly by cutting nitrogen dioxide from car exhaust. That number is a projection for full rollout, not a result already observed — worth keeping that distinction clear, because it gets flattened in most coverage.

Where it gets complicated

This isn’t a clean win for everyone, and Barcelona hasn’t pretended otherwise.

A 2025 peer-reviewed evaluation in BMC Public Health found that residents reported real improvements — better sleep, less noise, more social interaction — but traffic calming worked in some parts of a given superblock and not others, even within the same zone. Some older residents in Poblenou said the redesign made their own mobility worse, not better. And in several zones, traffic didn’t disappear — it just relocated to the surrounding streets, meaning some blocks got quieter while their immediate neighbors got busier.

The political fight is real too: part of the Consell de Cent corridor was legally contested — not because the concept failed, but on procedural grounds. Barcelona is still working through pieces of this project block by block, in the public and legal arena.

Why it’s still worth building on

That’s actually the most useful part of this story. Barcelona isn’t hiding the tradeoffs or freezing the design after pushback — it’s adjusting block by block, using resident complaints and legal challenges to inform the next iteration. The city’s current expansion plan for the Eixample district calls for 21 new green streets (about 33 km) and 21 new public squares, adding 33.4 hectares of pedestrian-priority space.

A city willing to argue about its own streets in public is a city that’s actually serious about getting the redesign right — not just serious about the ribbon-cutting.

Sources

1. ISGlobal (Barcelona Institute for Global Health) — Health Impact Assessment, 2019: isglobal.org

2. Cities Today — “Barcelona ‘superblock’ sees 25 percent drop in pollution”: cities-today.com

3. Pérez K, et al. — “Environmental and health effects of the Barcelona superblocks,” BMC Public Health, 2025: DOI 10.1186/s12889-025-21835-z

4. 7 Wonders Future Cities — Eixample superblocks expansion plan: 7wondersfc.com

Watch the YouTube channel and follow us on TikTok and Instagram for more content.

Also, if you want to go further with Reactor:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

Let’s keep building,
— Jérôme

🎧 Reactor — Tech for Good
We make the hard stuff simple — one founder, one story, one breakthrough at a time.

PS1: Lots of people asked me all the time where is the best place to invest into climate tech projects?

I always recommend keenest - French private investment club focused solely on profitable and scale climate tech businesses.

Check it out for free here

PS2: Other people ask me how I grow Reactor to dozens of thousands of followers. Here is one of the secret I have been using for 4 years now.

Struggling to keep your sales pipeline full?

Most startups fall into the same trap: you find leads, focus on closing them… and stop generating new ones. Then the pipeline dries up. And the cycle repeats.

My solution for the past 4+ years has been lemlist.

It lets you run multichannel outbound campaigns (LinkedIn, email, calls, WhatsApp), personalize at scale, and book meetings with up to 30% of cold prospects. Its email finder uncovers up to 80% of contacts, far more than most tools.

I’m now an official lemlist affiliate, and I genuinely recommend it to any climate tech startup with <50 sales reps.

👉 14-day free trial here: get.lemlist.com

If “giant CO₂ vacuums” sound like sci-fi, welcome to 2025. From Iceland to Texas to California—and now Australia and Europe—startups are racing to pull carbon straight from the air. The twist: they’re not all building the same machine or the same business. Some bet on fans and filters, others on rocks, others on electrochemistry, and a few blend approaches. This guide maps the players, explains their strategies, and gives you a simple way to separate progress from hype the next time a splashy press release drops.

Why this field guide, and why now?

Direct air capture (DAC) is expensive today—think $600 to $1,000 to remove one ton of CO₂—yet deals are being signed, concrete is being poured, and first-of-a-kind plants are turning on. The only way that math works is a stacked business model: long-term contracts with corporates; policy incentives like the U.S. 45Q tax credit (up to $180 per ton for DAC stored underground, $130 for DAC used in products); sometimes California’s LCFS fuel credits; and, in a few cases, revenue from selling CO₂ into fuels, concrete, or chemicals.

Not all DAC is created equal, though. Different chemistries and business choices create very different risks, cost curves, and energy demands. This piece gives you:

• A quick tour of the Big 3 and the best-positioned challengers

• A simple strategy matrix to understand their bets

• A checklist for evaluating announcements: offtakes, policy, costs, clean power, durability

If you care about climate tech as a real industry—not vibes—you’ll want this map.

A 60-second primer on the tech

• Solid sorbents (filters): Materials that stick to CO₂ at room temperature and let go with gentle heat or vacuum. Modular, lower-temperature, but sorbents wear out. (Think Climeworks.)

• Liquid solvents: Alkaline liquids that absorb CO₂; a high-temperature step releases pure CO₂ and regenerates the solvent. Scales big, but heat-hungry. (Think 1PointFive/Occidental using Carbon Engineering tech.)

• Mineral looping: Speeding up how rocks naturally bind CO₂. Cheap feedstocks, but needs heat for regeneration and lots of surface area (land). (Think Heirloom.)

• Electrochemistry: Electrodes or membranes “grab” CO₂ using electricity and release it when the current flips. Promises lower energy per ton, but still early at scale. (Think Verdox, Mission Zero.)

• Hybrids: Mix electrochemistry with low-temperature heat and benign solvents to reduce both energy and cost. (Think Project Yama.)

The Big 3

Climeworks — Solid sorbent pioneer; premium removal brand

What they do (tech). Climeworks uses solid filters that capture CO₂ at low temperatures; gentle heat releases pure CO₂ for storage. Its Iceland plants leverage basaltic geology to mineralize CO₂ into rock—a strong durability story.

Why it matters (advantage). Climeworks has become the Apple of carbon removal: premium brand, clean design, and a reputation for durability and MRV (monitoring, reporting, verification). They’ve secured boldface buyers—Microsoft, JPMorgan, Frontier (the Stripe-led advance market commitment that pre-purchases removal to help startups scale). They even run a consumer program (Pioneers), which, while small revenue, builds trust and visibility.

What could go wrong (risk). Being first is expensive. The question is whether each new generation (Orca → Mammoth → beyond) shows real cost declines and higher, sustained throughput. Climeworks must also stitch together reliable clean heat and power at larger sites; Iceland is unique.

Credits - Climeworks

1PointFive / Occidental — Liquid solvent at megascale; capture → pipelines → storage

What they do (tech). Occidental’s DAC arm, 1PointFive, is building STRATOS in Texas using Carbon Engineering’s liquid solvent process. It’s designed for up to 500,000 tons per year at full tilt.

Why it matters (advantage). Oxy’s superpower is vertical integration: project engineering, CO₂ pipelines, and storage reservoirs—a carbon management business that goes beyond DAC credits. The revenue stack blends corporate offtakes (Amazon, Airbus, others), 45Q, and public funding (e.g., DOE hub support). If any company can treat DAC like refinery-scale infrastructure, it’s this one.

What could go wrong (risk). First-of-a-kind megaproject execution. STRATOS must deliver on time and within budget, then repeat. It also needs a lot of low-carbon heat and power; pairing gas with capture might work on paper but must be proven at the plant level, including lifecycle emissions.

Credits - 1pointFive

Heirloom — Mineral looping; hub-aligned partner

What they do (tech). Heirloom accelerates a mineral cycle: calcium materials absorb CO₂ from air, then a low-to-mid-temperature kiln releases it; the material goes again. Their first commercial U.S. site opened in Tracy, California.

Why it matters (advantage). Heirloom slots neatly into DOE DAC hubs and partners well with storage providers (underground or mineralized concrete). Microsoft is an anchor buyer—validation for durability and a runway to scale.

What could go wrong (risk). Land and heat. The process wants lots of surface area to breathe air and reliable, clean process heat. They must show fast cycles and material durability without constant replacement.

Credits - Heirloom

Rising Scale-Ups (and why they’re interesting)

CarbonCapture Inc. — Modular “Lego for CO₂”; upgradable boxes

What they do (tech). Solid-sorbent modules packaged like containers; as better sorbents appear, you swap them in. Scale comes from adding modules, not building one monolith.

Why it matters (advantage). Factory learning: you can iterate hardware fast, standardize manufacturing, and deploy where there’s space and storage access. Modularity also spreads capex.

What could go wrong (risk). Electrons. CarbonCapture paused a headline project when clean power was snapped up by data centers. That’s a broader warning: DAC must compete for renewables and grid capacity, not just dollars.

Credits : CarbonCapture Inc.

Verdox — Electro-swing capture; high upside, early stage

What they do (tech). An electrochemical approach where electrodes bind CO₂ when charged and release it when discharged—no kilns and minimal heat.

Why it matters (advantage). If Verdox can scale cheaply and keep electrodes durable, energy per ton could drop materially, especially in regions with abundant wind/solar.

What could go wrong (risk). Manufacturing and durability. Can they make high-performance electrodes at cost, and do they last thousands of cycles without fouling?

Credits - Verdox

Mission Zero — Electro + solvent; sell the machine, not just the credit

What they do (tech). A water-based solvent captures CO₂; an electrochemical step liberates it—an all-electric regeneration.

Why it matters (advantage). Business model innovation: sell/lease hardware to customers who already need CO₂ (synthetic fuels, beverages, building materials). That’s CO₂-as-a-product, not just carbon credits.

What could go wrong (risk). Adoption friction. Industrial buyers are conservative. Mission Zero must prove reliability and serviceability, while competing with cheap fossil CO₂ supply.

Credits : MissionZero

AspiraDAC — Solar-powered DAC in modular tents; distributed play

What they do (tech). Solid sorbents regenerated with solar heat/electricity in compact, off-grid modules—designed for sunny, remote sites.

Why it matters (advantage). Useful where grid build-out is slow or storage is near but transmission isn’t. Think distributed farms of small units that add up.

What could go wrong (risk). Throughput per module is small; you need a lot of them. Harsh conditions (dust, heat) will test uptime and maintenance assumptions

Credits - AspiraDAC

Project Yama — Hybrid membranes + low-temp heat; chasing <$170/ton at scale

What they do (tech). Membrane electrochemistry hybridized with low-temperature heat and non-toxic solvents, packaged in modular electrochemical machines.

Why it matters (advantage). The hybrid aims to cut total energy and leverage existing supply chains, targeting a credible sub-$200/ton trajectory (they cite < $170/ton at scale). That sits between today’s premium removals and the long-run $100/ton dream, and it may be reachable with current manufacturing.

What could go wrong (risk). Proof at scale. Yama must demonstrate durability, uptime, and delivered cost outside the lab. Hybrid systems also inherit the challenges of both worlds (membrane lifetime, heat integration).

Credits - Yama

The simple strategy matrix (and how to use it)

Let’s map the landscape on two axes:

• X-axis: Technology — Heat-driven ←→ Electricity-driven
  (Is the hard part mostly thermal regeneration or mostly electrochemical work?)

• Y-axis: Business model — Credits-first ←→ Integrated / Product-based
  (Do they mainly sell carbon removal credits, or do they sell CO₂/products/e2e storage?)

Placing the companies:

• Climeworks: Heat-driven + Credits

• 1PointFive/Occidental: Heat-driven + Integrated (capture → pipes → storage → fuels)

• Heirloom: Heat-driven (minerals) + Credits/Hubs

• CarbonCapture: Electric-leaning ops + Credits (modular factory model)

• Verdox: Electricity-driven + Credits (later licensing possible)

• Mission Zero: Electricity-driven + Products/Hardware

• AspiraDAC: Solar-heat + Credits

• Project Yama: Hybrid electro-heat + Credits, targeting <$170/ton

Why this framework matters. It predicts where constraints bite and what proof points to demand. For example:

• Heat-driven systems depend on cheap, clean heat (or clever heat integration) and materials that survive repeated thermal cycling.

• Electricity-driven systems depend on cheap, abundant renewables and scalable electro-manufacturing (membranes/electrodes that last).

• Credits-first businesses live or die by policy certainty and corporate demand; integrated/product models must show real end-markets and margins beyond credits.

How to read DAC news without getting spun

1) Offtake quality and size.
Is a buyer committing to delivery years and volumes (e.g., hundreds of thousands of tons over several years), or is it a pilot-sized pre-purchase? Are there milestones tied to plant performance? The stronger the offtake, the more bankable the project.

2) Policy exposure.
Does the economics rely heavily on 45Q or LCFS? That’s normal, but note the sensitivity: how would economics look if credit values dipped or rules changed? In Europe, watch the CRCF (Carbon Removal Certification Framework). It doesn’t pay you, but it sets the quality gate for future compliance markets.

3) Cost transparency and learning.
Are companies publishing delivered $/ton (not theoretical) and showing generation-over-generation improvement? “Gen-3 reduces O&M by 40%” is meaningful; a nameplate number without operations data is not.

4) Energy access and additionality.
Where does the power/heat come from? Is it new clean capacity (PPAs, on-site renewables, geothermal) or drawing from a mixed grid? DAC that leans on fossil electricity erodes net removal and risks losing MRV confidence.

5) Operational durability.
Are plants running for months to years with stable capture rates and low downtime? Early underperformance is expected; the key is a clear fix path and independent verification.

The tension at the heart of DAC: premium today vs. cheap tomorrow

Today’s high-durability removals often sell at $500–$800 per ton. Buyers—big tech, finance, aviation—are overpaying on purpose to create a market and push down costs, just like early solar and wind. The goal is to unlock learning curves: each doubling of capacity improves engineering, procurement, manufacturing, and operations. If the learning rate is decent (say, double-digit % cost declines per doubling), premium credits can bridge the early years.

Two hard truths coexist:

• We need premium, high-integrity tons now to build the industry.

• We need pathways to <$200/ton by the 2030s to matter at scale.

That’s why tech diversity is useful. A mix of heat-driven, electric, and hybrid approaches gives us multiple shots at a better energy-per-ton and better capex-per-ton. It also spreads supply-chain risk: minerals, membranes, sorbents, kilns, contactors, power electronics—each has different constraints.

Company cheat-sheets (what they do, why it matters, what to watch)

Climeworks

• Tech: Solid sorbents; low-temp regeneration; mineral storage in basalt.

• Why it matters: Brand trust + MRV + marquee corporates; tight quality narrative.

• Watch for: Generation-over-generation cost/throughput improvements; energy sourcing beyond Iceland.

1PointFive / Occidental

• Tech: Liquid solvent (Carbon Engineering); high-temp regeneration.

• Why it matters: Integrated capture-to-storage system; pipelines + reservoirs; project finance potential.

• Watch for: STRATOS execution; lifecycle emissions of energy inputs; replication #2, #3.

Heirloom

• Tech: Mineral looping with low-mid temp kilns; trays/surfaces to absorb CO₂.

• Why it matters: Hub-ready partner; strong anchor buyers; modular scale-out.

• Watch for: Cycle time and material durability; land/heat footprint per ton.

CarbonCapture Inc.

• Tech: Modular sorbent boxes; upgradeable; factory learning curve.

• Why it matters: Flexible siting and fast iteration; credits + policy stack.

• Watch for: Clean power access (avoid being outbid by data centers); delivering first commercial tons on schedule.

Verdox

• Tech: Electro-swing capture (charge to bind, discharge to release).

• Why it matters: No big heat; potential energy savings; fits high-renewables regions.

• Watch for: Electrode cost/scale/durability; field pilots moving from kg/day → tons/day.

Mission Zero

• Tech: Electro + solvent; all-electric regeneration.

• Why it matters: CO₂-as-a-product hardware model; customers make fuel, fizz, or materials.

• Watch for: Real-world uptime, service model quality, and buyer economics vs. fossil CO₂.

AspiraDAC

• Tech: Solar-powered solid sorbents; off-grid modular units.

• Why it matters: Distributed deployments in sunny regions; fast to start where grids lag.

• Watch for: Module throughput and reliability in harsh environments; scaling beyond pilots.

Project Yama

• Tech: Hybrid membranes + low-temp heat with non-toxic solvents; modular electrochem machines.

• Why it matters: Credible push toward sub-$200/ton using existing supply chains.

• Watch for: Durability, delivered cost, and scale-up from pilots to steady multi-kt/yr plants.

How to use this guide on the next press release

When a company announces a “record deal” or a “world’s largest plant”:

1. Locate them on the matrix (heat vs. electric; credits vs. integrated).
   That tells you which risks they’re likely to face first.

2. Scan the five signals (offtakes, policy, cost, energy, durability).
   If two or more are weak or missing, mark it “wait and see.”

3. Ask the only two questions that matter:

   • Will this reduce $ per ton meaningfully by Gen+1?

   • Is the energy source clean, secure, and affordable for the full plant life?

If the answers are “probably yes,” that’s real progress. If the answers are “ask me in 24 months,” file it under “promising, but unproven.”

Signals to watch (2025+)

• Big offtakes — Not just pilots: multi-year, multi-hundred-k-ton contracts with clear delivery windows and MRV.

• Policy durability — U.S. 45Q implementation and longevity; LCFS guardrails; the EU’s CRCF moving from paper to adoption in compliance markets.

• Transparent cost curves — Verified delivered $/ton and stated learning targets; watch for Gen-to-Gen improvements, not just nameplate claims.

• New clean power and heat — Signed PPAs, on-site geothermal/solar/thermal, or credible low-carbon heat integration; avoid tapping a dirty grid.

• Operational durability — Months-to-years of stable operation; low downtime; independent verification that captured tons are stored durably.

The bottom line (and your role as a smart observer)

The DAC race is wide open. Climeworks has the brand and MRV. 1PointFive has megaproject muscle and storage. Heirloom is the mineral/hub specialist. CarbonCapture is betting on modular factory learning. Verdox and Mission Zero bring electrochemistry. AspiraDAC is the solar-distributed play. Project Yama is a hybrid challenger aiming to close the gap to <$170/ton at scale.

Different muscles, same skeleton: corporate offtakes, policy credits, and clean power. The winners will be the teams that lock in energy, publish real costs, and sign serious buyers—then do it again at Gen+1.

Your cheat code: Follow the contracts, the costs, and the kilowatts. Everything else is marketing.

Your turn

Which bet makes the most sense to you in 2025—premium removals, megascale integration, minerals, modular, or electrochemistry hybrids? Hit reply or drop a comment—what did I miss, and which signal should we track in the next edition?

If this guide helped you see the DAC landscape more clearly, share it with a friend in climate or energy, and subscribe to Reactor for more no-nonsense deeptech explainers.

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Let’s keep building,



— Jérôme

🎧 Reactor — Tech for Good

Here are 5 innovations in less-than-3-minute videos that you have missed this week!

click on each image to watch the video

1. She found a way to stop paying for the water to grow crops. Steal her idea

click on the image to watch the video

The math on rainwater harvesting is more serious than most people realize.
The basic equation: 1 millimeter of rain on 1 square meter of roof equals 1 liter of collected water. That's not an approximation — it's the geometric definition of a millimeter of precipitation depth.
A typical 100 square meter roof in a region receiving 800 millimeters of annual rainfall delivers a theoretical maximum of 80,000 liters per year. After realistic losses for evaporation, first-flush diversion, and system inefficiency, you keep 60 to 75 percent of that. Metal roofs perform best at 90 to 95 percent runoff. Concrete tile drops to 60 to 90. Thatched roofs are around 20.
For a household, that captured volume is enough to cover roughly 40 to 50 percent of total water demand if used for non-potable applications — toilet flushing, laundry, irrigation. Payback periods on residential systems typically run 3 to 8 years depending on local water tariffs and system size.
The honest stress-tests:
Rainfall is seasonal. Most regions have rainfall peaks that don't align with water demand peaks, which is why storage sizing — not collection — is the actual engineering problem. Tanks need to bridge dry months.
Regulations are inconsistent. Rainwater harvesting is incentivized in some jurisdictions and restricted in others, often for water rights reasons that have nothing to do with technical feasibility.
And rainwater isn't drinkable without treatment. UV sterilization or filtration is required for potable use.
What this is, structurally: a residential-scale water storage system that competes economically with municipal supply in most regions with reasonable rainfall. Not a survivalist gimmick — a serious infrastructure choice for buildings designed today.
The cheapest version is a barrel under a downspout. The most efficient is an underground cistern with first-flush diversion and gravity-fed distribution. The decision is about scale, not technology.
📹 Credit: plantsandgardeningideas

2. French TELEVISION GAVE THE BEST EXPLANATION during live TV of how we will use QUANTUM in the future

click on the image to watch the video

France is winning a tech race the US dominates everywhere else.

A classical computer solves a maze by trying one path at a time. A quantum computer explores all paths at once — not by being faster, but by exploiting superposition, where a bit holds multiple states until measured. That's the mechanism.
Here's why France matters in this race.
Most countries made one bet on hardware. The US chose superconducting qubits — IBM, Google. France funded five different architectures in parallel through its €500 million PROQCIMA program.
Pasqal uses neutral atoms held by lasers — just announced going public at a $2 billion valuation. Quandela uses photons, operating at room temperature with no cryogenic cooling — their 12-qubit system Lucy was delivered to France's CEA national supercomputing facility in October 2025. Alice & Bob built cat qubits, designed to suppress errors at the hardware level — claiming 100 logical qubits from just 1,500 physical, an unusually efficient ratio. Quobly is in production at STMicroelectronics. C12 is doing carbon nanotubes.
The program is structured as a competition. After four years, only three survive. After eight, only two.
The honest framing: quantum isn't delivering yet. Fault-tolerant systems are a 2030 target. What's being built now is industrial positioning — whoever owns the quantum infrastructure of the next decade owns the simulation capacity that will shape semiconductor design, cryptography, drug discovery, and eventually energy materials.
France is positioning to be in that conversation. Not as a buyer.
📹 Credit: TF1 / Journal de 20h, infographics by Vincent Brossard

3. This bioplastic actually composts. Cosmetics brands are buying it.

click on the image to watch the video

Most “biodegradable plastics” don’t biodegrade. They fragment. They need industrial composting facilities at 60°C. Throw them in soil and they sit there.
Vivomer is different — and the difference matters mechanically.
It’s a polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA. Same family of compounds bacteria have been producing for billions of years as energy storage. Shellworks ferments microbes on second-generation feedstocks like used cooking oil, lets the bacteria produce the polymer inside their cells, then extracts and processes it into a workable material.
The performance claims: dishwasher-safe, shower-safe, stable on retail shelves for over three years, FDA and EU food-contact certified. They’ve run stability tests across 400 formulations.
The end-of-life claim is what makes it interesting: home-compostable. Marine-degradable. No microplastic residue. The material returns to elemental compounds because it was never synthetic to begin with — it’s just a biological molecule that bacteria recognize as food.
The honest stress-tests:
Cost is still the bottleneck. PHA fermentation is more expensive than petrochemical synthesis, and Shellworks just raised $15 million Series A specifically to scale production. They’re operating at around 5 million units annually — versus the trillions of plastic units produced globally each year.
Use cases are limited. Vivomer is currently opaque, which rules out clear bottle applications. It’s being adopted in cosmetics and personal care — Wild deodorant at Tesco and Target, Phil’s at Whole Foods — not in the high-volume food packaging that drives most plastic pollution.
And “compatible with existing manufacturing” is the strongest claim with the weakest public evidence. PHA processing has different temperature and handling requirements than PET. How seamlessly it integrates into existing factories at scale is still being proven.
The thesis is right: longevity is the actual problem with plastic, not plastic itself. A material that performs like plastic in use and disappears completely afterward is the right design target.

📹 Credit: Abhishek Agrawal

4. They've pulled 1,260,000 kilograms of plastic from rivers. Help them do 1 million more.

click on the image to watch the video

Quick note on something I rarely do here.
I met one of the Sungai Watch founders. The work is real, and the model is sharper than most.
What they're doing, mechanically: low-tech floating barriers installed across rivers in Bali and East Java, designed to intercept plastic before it reaches the ocean. Fish pass through. The barriers withstand rainy-season floods that raise water levels by 3 meters or more. Each one costs a fraction of open-ocean cleanup infrastructure.
The numbers from their 2025 report:
— Over 300 barriers operating across Bali and Java
— 1.26 million kilograms of waste recovered from rivers in 2025 alone
— A 17.6% year-over-year increase, with East Java jumping 53.8%
— 77-fold growth in barrier-captured waste since 2020
Why the model works: it's not just cleanup. It's three layers stacked. Barriers intercept the flow. Community programs reduce what enters rivers in the first place. Advocacy work pushes local governments toward decentralized waste management — the structural fix.
They're running 1,200 km from Bali to Java to raise $1 million. At their current cost-per-kilogram of waste recovered, that funding has a defensible return.
If you're looking for an environmental project where the unit economics actually hold up, this is one of them.
Run for Rivers — https://runforrivers.sungaiwatch.com/
📹 Credit: Sungai Watch / Make A Change World
Disclosure: I'm not affiliated. I'm posting this because I met the team and the work checks out.

5. He turned cow manure into clean fuel. It works.

click on the image to watch the video

Manure briquettes look like something you'd throw away. That's exactly the point.
The process is straightforward: animal dung mixed with agricultural waste — straw, dry grass, crop residues — compressed into blocks, then sun-dried. Biomass briquettes burn longer, make transportation easier, and compared to fossil fuels produce low net greenhouse gas emissions because the carbon they release was already part of the biological cycle.
The combustion performance is what surprises most people. Biomass briquettes show higher calorific value and significantly lower CO₂ and SOₓ emissions compared to kerosene, while also reducing particulate matter relative to firewood.
Briquettes have lower ash content than coal — 2 to 10% versus 20 to 40% — and combust more efficiently.
The market context matters too. In Cameroon, fuelwood represents 72% of total energy consumption, driving deforestation and desertification. Briquettes made from farm waste don't require cutting a single tree. In the African Great Lakes region, NGOs have been scaling briquette entrepreneurship across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania — creating local manufacturing jobs from a waste stream that previously had no value.
The business model is simple: the raw material is free, the production is low-tech, and the demand is structural. Cooking fuel isn't a luxury — it's a daily necessity for billions of people with no grid access.
Waste into fuel. Farm residue into energy independence. The chemistry was always there.
📹 Credit: unknown

***

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Let’s keep building,

— Jérôme

🎧 Reactor — Tech for Good

We make the hard stuff simple — one founder, one story, one breakthrough at a time.

PS1: Lots of people asked me all the time where is the best place to invest into climate tech projects?

I always recommend keenest - French private investment club focused solely on profitable and scale climate tech businesses.

Check it out for free here

PS2: Other people ask me how I grow Reactor to dozens of thousands of followers. Here is one of the secret I have been using for 4 years now.

Struggling to keep your sales pipeline full?

Most startups fall into the same trap: you find leads, focus on closing them… and stop generating new ones.
Then the pipeline dries up. And the cycle repeats.

My solution for the past 4+ years has been lemlist.

It lets you run multichannel outbound campaigns (LinkedIn, email, calls, WhatsApp), personalize at scale, and book meetings with up to 30% of cold prospects. Its email finder uncovers up to 80% of contacts, far more than most tools.

I’m now an official lemlist affiliate, and I genuinely recommend it to any climate tech startup with <50 sales reps.

👉 14-day free trial here: https://get.lemlist.com/2n2c3jbmoxy8

One of the quiet privileges of being part of Reactor is getting an early look at investment opportunities that are genuinely aligned with what we cover — not just climate-adjacent, but structurally climate-relevant.

Today, I want to share one of those.

Through our ongoing partnership with Keenest — a climate-focused investment platform I’ve been supporting for over a year — Reactor readers have priority access to Avatar Mobilité’s live fundraising campaign, which opened on April 9th. First come, first served.

→ Access the Avatar Mobilité campaign on Keenest

The problem isn’t electrification. It’s the wrong vehicle.

Evolution of CO2 emissions in the EU by sector (1990-2019)

Transport emissions in the EU

Here’s a number worth sitting with: 95% of car trips in France cover less than 80km. The average daily trip involves 1.4 people, traveling 13km, at under 30km/h.

ULIVE model just for illustration - see below for a real prototype

Now consider what vehicle most people use to make that trip: a 1,500kg machine engineered for motorway cruising, capable of five seats and 130km/h, built around a battery pack that requires dedicated charging infrastructure and consumes 15kWh per 100km.

The mismatch is structural. The car was designed for the exception — long distances, full loads — and deployed for the norm. When we electrify that design, we inherit all of its inefficiencies: the weight, the material intensity, the infrastructure dependency, the cost. A Renault Zoé, one of the most efficient EVs on the market, still emits around 80g of CO₂ equivalent per kilometer over its full lifecycle.

Carbon Emissions in the Transportation Sector

This is the problem Avatar Mobilité set out to solve. Not “how do we electrify the car we already have?” but “what vehicle would you build if you designed it around actual daily usage from scratch?”

The answer is the ULIVE — Ultra Low Impact Vehicle for Everyday.

ULIVE prototype

What the ULIVE actually is

The ULIVE is a 4-place electric quadricycle weighing under 400kg. It reaches 90km/h, carries 150km of range via four swappable batteries (plus 20km from rooftop solar panels), and recharges from any standard wall outlet. No dedicated charging infrastructure required. No waiting for a public terminal. You pull out the battery pack, plug it in at home, and swap it back in seconds.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. One of the persistent barriers to EV adoption in rural and peri-urban France — where 15 million people (just in France) face what the deck calls “mobility precarity” — is the absence of charging infrastructure. The ULIVE sidesteps that problem entirely by design. Keenest will walk you through the full deck, financials, and legal documentation once you’re registered on their platform

ULIVE model jut for illustration - see above for a real prototype

The vehicle is built primarily from ARPRO (expanded polypropylene) — the same material used in motorcycle helmets and car bumpers. It’s lightweight, highly shock-absorbent, 100% recyclable, and already recycled at 30%. The chassis integrates a full safety roll cage. The result is a vehicle with roughly 10x fewer parts than a conventional car, which directly translates to lower maintenance costs, simpler repair, and longer usable life.

The lifecycle CO₂ numbers are striking: under 20g CO₂ equivalent per kilometer, versus ~80g for the Zoé and significantly more for combustion vehicles. Over a full year, replacing one conventional car with an ULIVE avoids approximately 1 tonne of CO₂. The energy consumption is 5kWh per 100km, vs 15kWh for the Zoé — three times more efficient.

Energy cost per 100km: €1. That’s not a rounding error.

Why the weight argument is the real thesis

The auto industry’s implicit assumption has always been that more capability = more value. Bigger battery, higher range, faster acceleration. The Zoé is a good car by that logic. But that logic is precisely what Avatar is rejecting.

Battery model jut for illustration

Weight is the master variable in vehicle energy consumption. Physics doesn’t negotiate. A 400kg vehicle moving 1.4 people 13km requires a fraction of the energy of a 1,500kg vehicle doing the same trip. The ULIVE isn’t making compromises — it’s making a different set of design choices optimized for a different problem statement.

This is also why the competitive moat is real, and not just claimed. The deck compares ULIVE against Twizy, Weez, AMI, and Zoé. (Keenest will walk you through the full deck, financials, and legal documentation once you’re registered on their website). ULIVE is the only vehicle in that comparison with 4 places, 90km/h, solar charging, swappable batteries, wall-socket recharge, and a lifecycle carbon footprint under 20g/km. No other player combines all of those. The incumbent manufacturers won’t build this — not because they can’t, but because it requires abandoning the design culture that produced everything they currently make. Frugal, low-tech, locally assemblable: these are not concepts that emerge naturally from companies with thousands of engineers optimizing for existing platforms.

That said — let’s be honest about where Avatar actually is.

The honest stress test

Avatar Mobilité generated €40k in revenue in 2025 from a first pilot. They have 2 vehicles homologated and in circulation, one under construction for the pre-series launch. The team is 7 people. The company was founded in 2021.

This is early. Very early.

The business plan projects a ramp from 2 vehicles delivered in 2026 to 4,000 per year by 2031 — a 2,000x increase over five years. That is the kind of curve that looks inevitable in a spreadsheet and brutal in a factory. The Keenest analysis explicitly flags the Series A raise (€5M) planned for end of 2027 as an amber-risk factor: industrial startups historically struggle with timing-sensitive fundraising, and the business plan leaves little slack for production delays.

The dependency on a single motor supplier (GEMmotors, Slovenia) is a real supply chain exposure, though it’s partly mitigated by the fact that 70%+ of other components are off-the-shelf. The transition from prototype to certified series production — including European homologation targeted for early 2027 — is the most critical execution risk in the near term.

So why does this still hold up as an opportunity?

Several reasons. The demand signal is real: 35 firm preorders already cover production through mid-2027, with 380+ purchase intents behind them totaling over €6M in potential revenue. The SNCF pilot for rural car-sharing near train stations is a credible first institutional customer. The Keenest analyst score is 17.5/20 — their highest threshold is 15 to proceed. An independent expert resilience assessment by Reinv gives the project a B rating, noting the frugal design approach as a core structural strength. And the vehicle design itself is optimized for manufacturability: standard tooling, low qualification requirements for assembly workers, and a parts count that is 10x lower than conventional automotive.

The €4M pre-money valuation, with €500k allocated to the Keenest community out of a €1.5M total raise, puts this in a range that is accessible (minimum ticket ~€500) while pricing the upside conservatively. The 5-year target multiple is 4x (32% IRR), rising to 5.6x (41% IRR) with the IR-PME 30% tax deduction available to French investors — and Keenest’s methodology notes they applied a 50% haircut to management projections before calculating that target.

Why this fits the Reactor thesis

We cover companies where the mechanism is the story. Avatar’s mechanism is: reduce vehicle mass → reduce energy consumption → reduce lifecycle emissions → reduce cost of ownership → expand access. Each arrow in that chain is structural, not aspirational.

The vehicle also addresses what I’d call the second layer of the EV problem: the social dimension. Electric vehicles have been tools of exclusion more than inclusion — €30k+ price points, charging infrastructure concentrated in urban cores, range anxiety affecting those who drive the most. ULIVE targets €12k TTC in B2C pricing by 2029, charges from any wall socket, and is being piloted first for mobility-precarious populations through social worker channels and rural shared fleets. That’s not a marketing angle. It’s built into the go-to-market.

How to invest

Avatar Mobilité is raising on Keenest — a climate-investment club with 3,500+ members and a track record of vetting industrial-stage climate startups. The campaign went live April 9th. There’s a fixed allocation for the Keenest community, and it’s first-come, first-served.

→ Access the Avatar Mobilité campaign via Reactor

Using that link identifies you as a Reactor community member.

The minimum investment is approximately €500. This is a high-risk, illiquid, early-stage industrial venture. This investment is blocked for a period of 5 to 7 years. Only invest what you can afford to hold — and lose. Keenest will walk you through the full deck, financials, and legal documentation once you’re registered.

Reactor is not an investment advisor. This is not a recommendation. It’s a signal that I’ve read the materials, I think the thesis is sound, and I wanted you to have access to it before the allocation fills.

If you invest, let me know — I track how our community engages with these opportunities so I can keep surfacing the right ones.

📖 Go deeper — Sources & Further Reading

On Avatar Mobilité & the ULIVE directly

🔗 ULIVE hands-on test — voiturelectrique.eu drove the prototype and published a detailed technical review (Oct 2025): voiturelectrique.eu/ulive-avatar-mobilite

🔗 Usine Nouvelle — one of France’s leading industrial press outlets covered the ULIVE’s lifecycle CO₂ claims and design approach (May 2024): usinenouvelle.com

🔗 La Rochelle Technopole interview — long-form Q&A with Frédéric Mourier and Carmen Blanchard on the founding story and technical choices (Oct 2024): larochelle-technopole.fr

🔗 Port de La Rochelle pilot — the port’s own account of their ongoing experimentation with Avatar as an operational fleet (Sep 2025): portlarochelle.com

On the VELI market & structural context

🔗 ADEME eXtrême Défi — final report — the official ADEME wrap-up of their 3-year intermediate vehicle program, with data on the 3.5M vehicle potential and 5MtCO₂/year impact (Jun 2025): ademe.fr

🔗 ADEME Infos — “The missing link between the bike and the car” — a clear editorial on why VELIs could cover 60% of daily mobility needs, especially in rural areas (Apr 2024): infos.ademe.fr

🔗 La Gazette des Communes — “Is ADEME too optimistic on VELIs?” — a useful counterpoint questioning the adoption timeline. Good for calibrating your expectations: lagazettedescommunes.com (paywall after intro)

🔗 Fabrique des Mobilités — Avatar project file — the open-source innovation community’s full technical sheet on the ULIVE, including experimentation status and partners: wiki.lafabriquedesmobilites.fr

🎥 Videos worth watching

🎬 Keenest live session with the founders — Frédéric Mourier and Carmen Blanchard answer investor questions without a filter. The replay is linked in the Keenest campaign page via invest.keenest.co/u/reactoravatar

🎬 “La Nouvelle Aventure Mobile” — ADEME-produced 56-min documentary following a journalist who drove 4,000km across France in intermediate vehicles, including stops with VELI builders. Hard to find a more visceral argument for the category: canopee12.org

Until next time — build on what works, question what doesn’t.

Jerome

Risk Disclaimer: The information presented in this message is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, personalized recommendation or a solicitation by a bank or financial institution. This communication is part of an offer to the public of unlisted financial securities that has been the subject of a synthetic information document (SID) filed with the Autorité des Marchés Financiers. The proposed investment opportunities carry high risks, notably a risk of partial or total loss of invested capital, an illiquidity risk as well as a lack of guaranteed return. These investments are aimed at sophisticated investors with a long investment horizon and capable of sustaining a capital loss. Past performance does not prejudge future performance. Prior to any investment decision, it is recommended that all available regulatory documentation be reviewed, including the DIS.

Bonjour à toutes et à tous,

Pour cette première newsletter Reactor de l’année, j’ai envie de commencer par un sujet central pour beaucoup d’entre vous :
👉 comment investir de manière cohérente avec ses convictions écologiques, sans renoncer à la performance financière.

Face aux bouleversements économiques, climatiques et énergétiques en cours, 2026 s’impose comme une année charnière pour repenser sa stratégie patrimoniale.

C’est dans ce contexte que Hectarea et Keenest organisent un webinar exclusif sur l’investissement à impact à l’horizon 2026, que j’aurai le plaisir d’animer en tant que Journaliste Climate Tech chez Reactor.

🧠 Thème du webinar

Les stratégies d’investissement pour structurer un portefeuille aligné avec ses convictions en 2026

Comment :

• identifier des opportunités à fort impact réel ?

• construire un portefeuille diversifié, résilient et robuste ?

• aligner durablement argent, valeurs et avenir ?

🎙️ Avec :

• Adime Amoukou, cofondateur de Hectarea

• Jérémie Sicsic, fondateur de Keenest

🎤 Webinar animé par :
Jérôme Gilleron, Journaliste Climate Tech chez Reactor

📅 Informations pratiques

🗓️ Vendredi 23 janvier 2026
🕐 13h00
📍 En ligne – Livestorm

🎟️ Webinar gratuit – inscription obligatoire
⚠️ Places limitées

👉 S’inscrire au webinar https://app.livestorm.co/hectarea/opportunites-investir-impact-2026

📌 Au programme

• Les grandes tendances de l’investissement à impact à l’horizon 2026

• Les opportunités clés pour conjuguer rendement financier et impact positif

• Comment structurer un portefeuille cohérent avec ses valeurs

• Le rôle de l’investissement dans la transition écologique et énergétique

• Regards croisés et complémentarités entre Hectarea et Keenest

Que vous soyez en phase de découverte ou déjà engagé dans l’investissement à impact, ce webinar vous apportera des clés concrètes et actionnables.

🌱 À propos de Keenest

Keenest est le premier club d’investisseurs dédié à la transition écologique et à la souveraineté énergétique.

Depuis 2023 :

• +4 000 investisseurs

• +11 millions d’euros investis

• 14 innovations à fort impact financées

🌾 À propos de Hectarea

Hectarea permet d’investir dans l’agriculture durable sans acheter directement de terres.

La plateforme rend l’investissement responsable accessible, avec des tickets d’entrée abordables, et permet de diversifier facilement son capital sur plusieurs projets agricoles.

Les investisseurs bénéficient d’un suivi transparent : avancement des projets, revenus générés et indicateurs environnementaux ou sociaux.

Avec Hectarea, vous soutenez une agriculture plus durable, contribuez à la préservation des terres et visez un rendement aligné avec vos convictions.

Je serai ravi d’échanger avec vous pendant le webinar et de porter les questions de la communauté Reactor.

Envie de plus d’infos sur les technologies au service du bien commun ?

🔹 Abonnez-vous à la newsletter Reactor :

Subscribe now

Regardez et écoutez plus de contenu Reactor : YouTube, Instagram, Podcast - Reactor, TikTok

Vous souhaitez aller plus loin ? Participez à mon podcast, me sollicitez pour une conférence ou autre chose ? Collaborez avec Reactor.

💬 Vous avez une histoire à partager ? Contactez-nous pour apparaître dans une prochaine édition !

À très vite,
Jérôme
Journaliste Climate Tech – Reactor

🇬🇧 EN

🎙️ Starting 2026 with purpose: investing in line with your values

Hello everyone,

For this first Reactor newsletter of the year, I want to focus on a question many of you are asking yourselves:
👉 How can we invest in line with our ecological convictions—without sacrificing financial performance?

With ongoing economic, climate, and energy disruptions, 2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year to rethink how we structure our investment portfolios.

That’s why Hectarea and Keenest are hosting an exclusive webinar on impact investing looking toward 2026, which I’ll be moderating as Climate Tech Journalist at Reactor.

🧠 Webinar theme

Investment strategies to build a portfolio aligned with your values in 2026

We’ll explore:

• How to identify high-impact investment opportunities

• How to build a diversified, resilient portfolio

• How to sustainably align capital, values, and long-term vision

🎙️ Speakers

• Adime Amoukou, Co-founder of Hectarea

• Jérémie Sicsic, Founder of Keenest

🎤 Moderated by:
Jérôme Gilleron, Climate Tech Journalist at Reactor

📅 Practical information

🗓️ Friday, January 23, 2026
🕐 1:00 PM (CET)
📍 Online – Livestorm

🎟️ Free webinar – registration required
⚠️ Limited seats

👉 Register here https://app.livestorm.co/hectarea/opportunites-investir-impact-2026

📌 Agenda highlights

• Key impact investing trends toward 2026

• How to combine financial returns with measurable impact

• Structuring a portfolio aligned with your values

• The role of capital in the ecological and energy transition

• Complementary perspectives from Hectarea and Keenest

Whether you’re just discovering impact investing or already actively involved, this session will provide practical insights to refine your strategy.

🌱 About Keenest

Keenest is the first investor club fully dedicated to the ecological transition and energy sovereignty.

Since 2023:

• 4,000+ investors

• €11M+ invested

• 14 high-impact innovations funded

🌾 About Hectarea

Hectarea enables responsible investment in sustainable agriculture without direct land ownership.

The platform offers accessible entry tickets and allows investors to easily diversify across multiple agricultural projects.

Investors benefit from transparent monitoring, including project progress, revenues, and environmental or social impact indicators.

With Hectarea, you support sustainable farming, help preserve agricultural land, and pursue returns aligned with your values.

Looking forward to seeing many of you there and bringing the Reactor community’s questions into the discussion.

Want More Tech for Good Insights?

🔹 Subscribe to Reactor Newsletter:

Subscribe now

Watch and listen to more Reactor: YouTube, Instagram, Podcast - Reactor, TikTok

Want more? Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? : Work with Reactor.

💬 Have a story to share? Please message us to be featured in a future edition!

Best,
Jérôme
Climate Tech Journalist – Reactor

PS: Struggling to keep your sales pipeline full?

Most startups fall into the same trap:
you find leads, focus on closing them… and stop generating new ones.
Then the pipeline dries up. And the cycle repeats.

My solution for the past 3+ years has been lemlist.

It lets you run multichannel outbound campaigns (LinkedIn, email, calls, WhatsApp), personalize at scale, and book meetings with up to 30% of cold prospects. Its email finder uncovers up to 80% of contacts, far more than most tools.

I’m now an official lemlist affiliate, and I genuinely recommend it to any climate tech startup with <50 sales reps.

👉 14-day free trial here: https://get.lemlist.com/2n2c3jbmoxy8

One of the perks of being part of Reactor is getting an early look at mission-aligned investment opportunities.

Today, I’m excited to share a deep climate tech deal that we’re getting to see ahead of the wider public.

I’ve been supporting the growth of Keenest – a climate-focused investment platform – for over a year, and thanks to that relationship, Reactor readers have a first-come, first-served chance to learn about the project and invest in Konboi.

Konboi is a startup offering a plug-and-play eco-driving kit and an AI driver training app that can dramatically reduce fuel consumption and emissions for commercial vehicles. It’s exactly the kind of “deeptech for a sustainable world” that Reactor is all about.

Let’s dive into why this opportunity is special and how you can get involved.

If you speak French, here is a video:

Subscribe now

Before I talk more about the climate tech investment opportunity…

Struggling with filling your sales pipeline constantly?

When you are a startup, you look for leads.

You find some. You’re happy. You start taking care of them.

But you’ve neglected lead generation while you were taking care of them. There is no one left in the pipeline.

You get back to lead generation, but you don’t take care of your existing customers. And the cycle starts again…

Do you see the problem?

The solution: lemlist.

I have been using lemlist for 3+ years, and it enables you to build multichannel lead-generation campaigns using LinkedIn, email, calling, and WhatsApp.

With lemlist, you can book meetings with up to 30% of your cold prospects.

While most email finding tools on the market only locate 40 to 50% of contact information, the lemlist email finder and verifier can help you discover up to 80% of contact information.

lemlist has been revolutionizing sales as a leader in outreach tools since 2018. The tool allows you to build your lead list with verified emails, write and personalize at scale, and send multichannel campaigns that reach. All in one tool.

With lemlist, you can transform in seconds a generic template into a personalized email with lemlist text variables, personalized images, or custom videos

Use advanced filters to gather leads from lemlist’s database of 450 million+ contacts — or pull info directly from LinkedIn profiles with lemlist Chrome extension.

Access Lemlist’s AI-powered B2B database of 450 million+ contacts and reach out to highly relevant leads 2x faster.

I have been lucky enough to have been selected as an official Lemlist affiliate. I highly recommend it to any climate tech startups out there. Click here to start using it. 14-day free trial.

I personally vouch for Lemlist as I have been a daily user for 3+ years. I’d recommend it to any team with fewer than 50 sales reps.

Now back to the investment opportunity:

Meet Konboi: AI + Hardware to Cut Fuel Emissions

Konboi’s mission is to decarbonize trucking with technology. Freight trucks may be just 2% of vehicles on the road, but they produce about 25% of road transport’s climate emissions in Europe– a huge climate challenge. In fact, road freight accounts for ~7% of all CO₂ emissions in Europe (about as much as an entire country like Spain). Konboi is tackling this problem head-on with a two-part solution: an AI co-pilot that actively trains and assists the driver, and a plug-and-play hardware module installed in the vehicle. Together, these turn a regular truck into a smart, eco-driving machine.

The first product, called Hypermile, is like a “superhuman” cruise control that uses AI to optimize how the truck is driven. It monitors the road and traffic in real time, predicting the behavior of other drivers and adjusting the truck’s acceleration and speed more intelligently than a human alone could. The result is smoother, more efficient driving – saving fuel and reducing wear on the vehicle. On average, Hypermile has shown about 11% fuel savings per truck, which translates to around 22 tons of CO₂ emissions avoided per truck each year. Those are immediate, tangible reductions in pollution and fuel costs, just from better driving!

The second product, called Marcel, takes things even further. Instead of optimizing the driver, Marcel can take over the driving itself on long motorway segments, enabling trucks to travel in tightly synchronized convoys — a bit like a cyclist peloton, but with AI at the wheel.

In this mode, one human-driven lead truck can guide 10+ autonomous follower trucks, all spaced perfectly to cut drag, stabilize speed, and minimize unnecessary braking. The result is a dramatic leap in efficiency: fleets can achieve up to 30% fuel savings per truck, unlocking even deeper cuts in CO₂ emissions. And because Marcel handles the most monotonous and fatigue-heavy stretches of the route, it improves safety while allowing trucks to operate at night, easing congestion and boosting overall logistics performance.

Together, Hypermile + Marcel are a rare example of deeptech that delivers immediate operational benefits and measurable climate impact.

Why This Fits the Reactor Audience

As Reactor readers, you love to see deeptech with real-world impact, and Konboi delivers on that:

• Climate Tech: At its core, Konboi is an emissions reducer. Every percentage of fuel saved has a direct climate impact. For companies, it means hitting sustainability targets (and even getting ahead of regulations) by cutting their fleet’s CO₂ footprint measurably. Hypermile can save ~22 tons CO₂ per truck yearly – scale that across a fleet and it’s huge. This is exactly the kind of solution that moves the needle on decarbonization.

• Deep Technology: This isn’t a trivial app; it’s a sophisticated AI system born from autonomous vehicle R&D. Konboi’s founders and team are AI and automotive pioneers, and it shows in the tech. The system uses advanced machine learning, perception, and prediction algorithms (think computer vision and AI models anticipating traffic) to achieve fuel optimization that a human driver alone just couldn’t do. It’s a great example of cutting-edge tech applied to a pressing environmental problem.

• Behavioral Science + Hardware: Konboi smartly combines software and hardware to influence behavior. The AI “coach” aspect is essentially behavioral science in action – helping human drivers adopt more efficient driving habits by giving real-time feedback and automated adjustments. And by packaging it into a hardware kit that any truck can use, Konboi bridges the gap between technology and actual physical impact (lower emissions, safer driving). We often talk about changing human behavior for sustainability; Konboi does it through AI augmentation, which is a fascinating approach for those of us interested in human-tech interaction.

• Real-World Results (Not Just Theory): Many deeptech projects stay in lab tests for ages. Konboi, however, has been quietly deploying and testing in the real world. They’ve run pilots with some of the largest trucking fleets in Europe and even partnered with major truck manufacturers to ensure the system works seamlessly. The early results are very promising: across 5 large pilot fleets, Konboi’s Hypermile consistently delivered the expected fuel savings (on varied routes, in different weather and terrain). In one pilot, they saw an estimated €340,000 in annual fuel savings for the fleet, and projected 4,400 tons of CO₂ emissions eliminated per year. Importantly, drivers approved – 94% of drivers in the trial gave a thumbs-up, noting less fatigue thanks to smoother driving. This kind of traction – technical validation and user (driver) acceptance – suggests Konboi’s solution really works in practice. As deeptech investors, that mix of innovation + impact + user buy-in is exactly what we look for.

In short, Konboi hits the sweet spot for Reactor: it’s climate-positive, deeply technical, cleverly addresses human behavior, and has shown evidence of success on real highways. 🚛✨

How to Invest via Keenest

Now, let’s talk about how you can participate. Konboi is raising funds on Keenest, which is a curated investment platform focused on climate and sustainability projects. If you haven’t heard me mention Keenest before, it’s basically an investment club for the ecological transition – enabling individuals to invest in vetted climate tech startups (often alongside professional investors). Keenest was launched in 2023 and has already grown to 3,500+ members investing in climate startups, with minimum tickets as low as €500 to make it accessible. This platform has supported high-impact deeptech companies such as:

• Monomeris Chemicals — transforming captured CO₂ into chemical building blocks

• Leviathan Dynamics — high-efficiency industrial cooling using water instead of harmful refrigerants

• Fenix Energy — thermal energy storage for decarbonized heating and cooling

These are not “nice-to-have apps.” They are industrial-grade climate technologies solving structural problems.

And now, Konboi joins this cohort.

A cool twist: Keenest even offers “climate dividends,” meaning part of the return can be tied to the actual tons of CO₂ avoided by the project. The more impact (emissions saved), the greater the potential return – aligning profits with planet. It’s a novel way to reward impactful startups like Konboi. (In fact, with Konboi’s tech avoiding ~22t CO₂ per truck/year, you can imagine how those dividends might add up if it scales!).

So how do you get in on the Konboi deal? Here’s a quick guide:

1. Visit the Konboi deal page on Keenest – use the dedicated Reactor link I’ve provided (this ensures you’re identified as part of our community, getting early access). 👉 Check out Konboi on Keenest (Note: you will need to create a free Keenest account to view details.)

2. Sign Up / Log In: If you’re new to Keenest, you’ll need to sign up (it’s quick, and there’s no membership fee). Existing members can just log in.

3. Get Whitelisted: Because this is an early preview, you might see a “Get Whitelisted” button on Konboi’s deal page. Click that to register your interest. This doesn’t obligate you to invest; it just reserves your spot so you can access the investment as soon as it opens. Think of it as lining up early for a limited offer.

4. Review the Details: Take your time to read Konboi’s pitch deck, impact metrics, terms of the raise, etc. - All available on the Keenest platform once you’re in. You’ll see info about Konboi’s team, business model (they plan to share fuel savings 50/50 with clients, etc.), and growth plans. Make sure it aligns with your investment goals.

5. Invest (if it’s right for you): Once whitelisted (or once the investment officially opens), you can choose an amount to invest (again, minimum ~€500). Keenest will guide you through the payment and share subscription process. Keep in mind any investment risks (Keenest will likely remind you: these are startups – there’s risk, and liquidity is limited). Only invest what you’re comfortable with in a high-risk, high-impact venture.

Importantly, this opportunity is limited – there’s a cap on how much Konboi is raising on Keenest, and it’s first come, first served. It’s not an exclusive deal (eventually others will see it too), but by sharing it now I’m giving you a head start. If the thesis excites you, I encourage you to at least sign up on the Konboi page sooner rather than later. That way you won’t miss out if it fills up quickly.

Subscribe now

Keenest organized a live session in French with the founder Pejvan on Youtube. Here is the link to the replay:

Reactor’s Early Signal Advantage

Why am I sharing this, and why now? As you know, Reactor’s mission is to boost deeptech for a sustainable world. Part of that mission is not just telling stories, but also connecting our community with ways to support those stories – including investment opportunities. I’ve been closely following Keenest’s journey (and even lending a hand in its growth) because I believe in empowering people like us to fund climate innovations. Keenest is essentially democratizing climate tech investing, and Konboi is a shining example of the kind of startup that deserves attention.

By virtue of Reactor’s relationship with Keenest, we get this early look. It’s a bit of an “inside track” that I’m thrilled to extend to Reactor subscribers. We’re not talking about hype or vaporware; we’re talking about a company that’s been in stealth since 2019, built a world-class team, proved its tech quietly with industry partners, and now is ready for the next step. This is an opportunity to back a deeptech climate solution at an early stage – with the knowledge that you heard about it through a trusted, mission-aligned channel.

I want to emphasize:

Ready to Jump In? 🌱🚀

If this has piqued your interest, check out the Konboi deal on Keenest now. The link above will take you to the Reactor-specific landing page, where you can register and see all the details. Take advantage of this early access window – it’s not every day we as individual investors get to hop on a deal before it goes public.

And if you do decide to invest, please let me know! Reply to this email or drop me a note – I’d love to hear that a Reactor reader became a Konboi investor. It also helps me track how our community is engaging with these opportunities so I can bring you more of them. 💚

Finally, whether or not you invest, I hope you found this peek into Konboi exciting. It’s companies like these that make me optimistic about the climate fight – where cutting-edge tech meets real-world impact in the here and now. As always, thanks for reading and being part of the Reactor journey.

Until next time – keep exploring, keep innovating, and let’s push for that sustainable world.

Jerome

Risk Disclaimer

Investing in unlisted companies involves significant risks, including issuer default risk, partial or total loss of invested capital, illiquidity of the securities, the absence of dividends, and specific risks related to the nature of the project’s activities.

The investment opportunity presented for Konboi is not subject to the preparation of a prospectus within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129.

In accordance with Article L. 411-2-1 1° of the French Monetary and Financial Code, this offering is for an amount below €8,000,000 over twelve months and is therefore subject to the preparation of a Key Investment Information Document (Document d’Information Synthétique).

This document has been filed with the AMF (Autorité des Marchés Financiers) and is available on invest.keenest.co, in the dedicated investment section.

Exciting news — this Friday, November 7th at 2:15 PM CET, I’ll be live on YouTube with Jonas, Partner and Host at 🎙️Visit also https://thefootprintfirm.com/.

Together, we’ll dive deep into what it really takes for deeptech and climate tech founders to raise capital and scale their companies in today’s market.

Before I talk more about the episode…

Struggling with filling your sales pipeline constantly?

When you are a startup, you look for leads.

You find some. You’re happy. You start taking care of them.

But you’ve neglected lead generation while you were taking care of them. There is no one left in the pipeline.

You get back to lead generation but you don’t take care of your existing customers. And the cycle starts again…

Do you see the problem?

The solution: lemlist.

I have been using lemlist for 3+ years, and this enables you to build multichannel lead generation campaigns - using LinkedIn, emails, calling, and WhatsApp.

With lemlist, you can book meetings with up to 30% of your cold prospects.

While most email finding tools on the market only locate 40 to 50% of contact information, the lemlist email finder and verifier can help you discover up to 80% of contact information.

lemlist has been revolutionizing sales as a leader in outreach tools since 2018. The tool allows you to build your lead list with verified emails, write and personalize at scale, and send multichannel campaigns that reach get. All in one tool.

With lemlist you can transform in seconds a generic template to a personalized email with lemlist text variables, personalized images or custom videos

Use advanced filters to gather leads from lemlist’s database of 450 million+ contacts — or pull info directly from LinkedIn profiles with lemlist Chrome extension.

Access lemlist’s AI-powered B2B database of 450 million+ contacts and reach out to highly relevant leads 2x faster.

I have been lucky enough to have been selected as an official Lemlist affiliate. I highly recommend it to any climate tech startups out there. Click here to start using it. 14-day free trial.

Now back to the episode with Jonas

💬 What we’ll cover

• When not to raise — and when you absolutely should

• What a real LOI looks like (and why most don’t count)

• How to sell before you build

• The mindset shift from scientist → CEO

• What early proof makes investors lean in

• Europe vs. US: where climate founders actually win

🧠 Why this one matters

Fundraising in 2025 looks different. Investors are more selective, cycles are longer, and deeptech teams need sharper storytelling and proof.
Jonas brings the investor view from inside The Footprint Firm, and I’ll share what I’ve learned coaching founders through early sales and pilots.

Whether you’re a founder, investor, or builder, this session is for you.

📅 Friday, November 7th — 2:15 PM (CET)

👉 Join live here: YouTube Live Link

Do not miss to SUBSCRIBE and HIT THE BELL 🔔 to get notified when we get started!

Can’t make it? No worries — the full replay will be available on Reactor’s YouTube channel right after the event.

Also, if you want to go further with Reactor

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

Let’s keep building,
— Jérôme

🎧 Reactor — Deeptech for a Sustainable World
We make the hard stuff simple — one founder, one story, one breakthrough at a time.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Keep innovating

Jerome

If you have missed the first edition, you can watch it:

or read it:

👋 Capturing carbon out of thin air costs between $600 and $1,000 per ton. So how do DAC companies even stay alive? Who pays the bill, and what does a “business model” look like for an industry that’s basically industrial-scale air filters?

Let’s break it down.

But wait, if you want to go further:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn

💵 The Revenue Streams

DAC companies stack revenue from a mix of markets and incentives:

1. Corporate offtakes (the voluntary carbon market).

   • Big buyers like Microsoft, JPMorgan, Amazon, and the Frontier coalition (Stripe, Shopify, Meta, Alphabet, etc.) sign multi-year contracts to buy tons of removal.

   • Example: Microsoft × Heirloom (up to 315,000 tons). JPMorgan × Climeworks (~25,000 tons, >$20M).

   • Why they pay: reputational value, net-zero targets, and durability — DAC credits are among the highest-quality offsets available.

2. U.S. 45Q tax credit.

   • Up to $180 per ton for DAC CO₂ stored underground, or $130/t if used in products.

   • Credits can be sold (transferred), which makes them financeable.

3. California LCFS (Low Carbon Fuel Standard).

   • If captured CO₂ is tied to fuels (e.g., for aviation), DAC can generate LCFS credits.

   • Value fluctuates but often >$100/t.

4. EU CRCF (Carbon Removal Certification Framework).

   • Europe’s “nutrition label” for removals. Doesn’t pay directly, but sets up quality and certification rules so removals can plug into future markets.

5. Utilization products.

   • Captured CO₂ can be used in synthetic fuels, concrete, chemicals.

   • This brings in product revenue, but only counts as a removal if the CO₂ is stored durably.

📊 The Unit Economics

Let’s do the math together.

• Say a plant’s cost is $700 per ton today.

• Subtract $180 from the U.S. 45Q tax credit.

• That still leaves $520 per ton that must come from corporate offtakes, LCFS, or product sales.

That’s why early DAC credits are selling in the $500–$800 per ton range. Buyers know it’s expensive, but they’re paying to help scale.

🏭 The Business Model Archetypes

Here’s the truth: all DAC companies today rely on the same core business model — stack corporate offtake contracts with policy incentives (like 45Q in the U.S.) and add product revenue if possible.

The real differences lie in how they approach that same model:

• Climeworks (Switzerland/Iceland/US) — Corporate-first with brand.

  • Pioneer in long-term offtakes (Microsoft, JPMorgan, Stripe/Frontier).

  • It also offers consumer subscriptions (“Pioneers”), making it the most visible B2C-facing DAC brand.

  • Still expensive, but building trust as the “premium removal” provider.

• 1PointFive / Occidental (US) — Integration with storage & fuels.

  • STRATOS in Texas (up to 500,000 t/yr).

  • Leverages Oxy’s existing business in pipelines and storage.

  • Focused on scaling mega-plants, with 45Q + corporate deals (Amazon, Airbus) + potential LCFS credits.

• Heirloom (US) — Government-aligned scale-up.

  • First U.S. commercial DAC plant (Tracy, CA).

  • Anchor buyer: Microsoft.

  • Also part of DOE’s Project Cypress hub — positioning itself as the “hub-ready” partner for federal funding.

• CarbonCapture Inc. (US) — Modular technology bet.

  • Containerized sorbent units designed for flexibility and scale-out.

  • Same revenue stack: offtakes + policy incentives.

  • Pitch to investors: lower risk and faster scale-up by mass-producing units rather than building giant plants from scratch.

Subscribe now

⚠️ The Risks (Why It’s Hard to Scale)

• Policy risk. If 45Q or LCFS are weakened, U.S. economics collapse.

• Energy bottlenecks. DAC competes with data centers, hydrogen, and EVs for cheap, clean power. No clean energy to power DAC = no net removal.

• Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) Trust. MRV must be bulletproof. If buyers lose faith, demand collapses.

• Capital intensity. Plants cost hundreds of millions upfront. Investors need long-term certainty.

Huge final Climeworks fundraising

📝 Key Takeaways

• DAC companies don’t make money on “cheap credits.” They survive by stacking corporate offtakes + U.S. policy incentives + sometimes product sales.

• Unit economics today mean losses or break-even, but buyers are deliberately overpaying to push the tech down the cost curve.

• Different players have different bets: subscriptions, integration, mineral cycles, and modularity.

• The risks are real — but so are the early revenues.

Subscribe now

👉 Closing Tease

So now you know how DAC companies make money — at least for now. But who’s actually building this future? Next edition: a field guide to the startups and scale-ups racing to vacuum carbon out of the air.

📚 Resources for visuals & further reading

• Climeworks Technology & Business

• Occidental / 1PointFive STRATOS Project

• Heirloom DAC explainer

• CarbonCapture Inc. Project Bison

• DEVELOPING A BUSINESS MODEL FOR A GERMAN DIRECT AIR CAPTURE COMPANY: A CASE STUDY

✨ That’s Reactor #2 — unpacking the money side of DAC.
Next up → Who’s who in the DAC race: the startups and scale-ups.

Subscribe now

Struggling with filling your sales pipeline constantly?

When you are a startup, you look for leads.

You find some. You’re happy. You start taking care of them.

But you’ve neglected lead generation while you were taking care of them. There is no one left in the pipeline.

You get back to lead generation but you don’t take care of your existing customers. And the cycle starts again…

Do you see the problem?

The solution: lemlist.

I have been using lemlist for 3+ years, and this enables you to build multichannel lead generation campaigns - using LinkedIn, emails, calling, and WhatsApp.

With lemlist, you can book meetings with up to 30% of your cold prospects.

While most email finding tools on the market only locate 40 to 50% of contact information, the lemlist email finder and verifier can help you discover up to 80% of contact information.

lemlist has been revolutionizing sales as a leader in outreach tools since 2018. The tool allows you to build your lead list with verified emails, write and personalize at scale, and send multichannel campaigns that reach get. All in one tool.

With lemlist you can transform in seconds a generic template to a personalized email with lemlist text variables, personalized images or custom videos

Use advanced filters to gather leads from lemlist’s database of 450 million+ contacts — or pull info directly from LinkedIn profiles with lemlist Chrome extension.

Access lemlist's AI-powered B2B database of 450 million+ contacts and reach out to highly relevant leads 2x faster.

I have been lucky enough to have been selected as an official Lemlist affiliate. I highly recommend it to any climate tech startups out there. Click here to start using it. 14-day free trial.

Watch and listen to more Reactor: YouTube, Instagram, Podcast - Reactor, TikTok

Want more? Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? : Work with Reactor.

Join the Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, discussions

Subscribe now

💬 Have a story to share? Please message us to be featured in a future edition!

Let’s keep building the future of deeptech and climate tech. 🚀

Keep innovating,
Jérôme

This is Episode 3/6 of our series on turning deeptech climate tech into real revenue.

Why listen to me (30-second reminder)

I’ve coached dozens of deeptech/climate tech founders, launched a startup (made plenty of mistakes), and ran a deeptech accelerator where 50% of companies are still alive (well above average). I also interview scale-up CEOs and distill what actually works. My goal: give you actionable, zero-fluff steps you can use this week.

🎥 Prefer video? Watch the full episode on YouTube here:

Struggling with filling your sales pipeline constantly?

When you are a startup, you look for leads.

You find some. You’re happy. You start taking care of them.

But you’ve neglected lead generation while you were taking care of them. There is no one left in the pipeline.

You get back to lead generation but you don’t take care of your existing customers. And the cycle starts again…

Do you see the problem?

The solution: lemlist.

I have been using lemlist for 3+ years, and this enables you to build multichannel lead generation campaigns - using LinkedIn, emails, calling, and WhatsApp.

With lemlist, you can book meetings with up to 30% of your cold prospects.

While most email finding tools on the market only locate 40 to 50% of contact information, the lemlist email finder and verifier can help you discover up to 80% of contact information.

lemlist has been revolutionizing sales as a leader in outreach tools since 2018. The tool allows you to build your lead list with verified emails, write and personalize at scale, and send multichannel campaigns that reach get. All in one tool.

With lemlist you can transform in seconds a generic template to a personalized email with lemlist text variables, personalized images or custom videos

Use advanced filters to gather leads from lemlist’s database of 450 million+ contacts — or pull info directly from LinkedIn profiles with lemlist Chrome extension.

Access lemlist's AI-powered B2B database of 450 million+ contacts and reach out to highly relevant leads 2x faster.

I have been lucky enough to have been selected as an official Lemlist affiliate. I highly recommend it to any climate tech startups out there. Click here to start using it. 14-day free trial.

Deeptech climate tech feels “crazy”… until it looks “obvious.”

Your job is to move the market from what is this? → wow, we need this. That happens when you show up consistently with simple, useful messages.

Why it matters

• Visibility beats stealth. If buyers never hear from you, they can’t buy from you.

“If you haven’t annoyed people by 12pm everyday, you are not making enough noise.” I don’t know who said that but it’s very true.

• Education reduces fear. The more prospects understand, the faster they say yes.

You need to educate continously. People who do not know about your thing will never buy. They will need to go through that education phase. So embark them fast!

• Consistency compounds. 20 small posts beat one perfect white paper nobody reads.

Yes, it’s volume. And you never know which post will work so keep trying. Pro tip: the post where you put the biggest effort will not bring the biggest results. Don’t stay too emotionally attached.

What to talk about (keep it simple)

• Problem: “Steel plants lose $XM/yr to heat waste.”

• Outcome: “We cut that by 30–50% in pilots.”

• Proof: one graph, one quote, one clip.

• Behind the scenes: a 10-sec lab demo, a milestone, a lesson learned.

• Use cases: “Works in brownfield plants without shutdowns.”

I don’t know how I can try to explain this in a simpler way :)

30-Day “Show-Your-Work” Sprint (copy/paste)

Daily (5–10 min):

• Post one thing: a chart, a photo, a metric, a 2-sentence insight.

• Reply to 3 comments/DMs.

• Send 2 value DMs to prospects (article, case note, invite).

Weekly (1–2 hrs):

• 1 short customer story (problem → outcome).

• 1 mini demo (30–60 sec, phone vertical).

• 1 FAQ you keep hearing (answer in plain English).

• 1 call-to-action (book a 15-min discovery, join waitlist, pilot slots).

5 post templates that work

1. Before/After: “Manual inspection: 6 hrs → Our sensor: 45 min.”

2. Myth/Fact: “Myth: Heat pumps can’t do X. Fact: Here’s a site that does.”

3. Graph + One Line: “Efficiency up 18% in 6 weeks (pilot #2).”

4. Customer Quote: “We saved €120k/line/yr.”

5. Process: “How we go lab → pilot → plant in 90 days.”

Where to post (pick 2 and stick with them)

• LinkedIn (your profile + company page)

• Short video: YouTube Shorts / Instagram / TikTok

• Newsletter (monthly recap → turns into an asset for sales)

  • It also benefits your visibility on Google or ChatGPT searches

Metrics to track (weekly)

• Inputs: posts published, replies sent, DMs started

• Signals: saves, shares, inbound DMs, demo requests

• Pipeline: new leads added, meetings booked

Pro Tip: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator option to see “who viewed my profile” WITHOUT liking. They don’t know that you know. ;)

Common pitfalls

• Jargon soup. If a 15-year-old can’t repeat it, simplify.

• Perfection paralysis. Progress > polish.

• Ghosting after one week. Give it 30 days minimum. Call, text, email, LinkedIn. Don’t ever give up between 7 to 11 touch points. Unless you got a plain “No”, don’t harass people…

Your action this week

• Draft 10 tiny posts (use the templates above).

• Book 2 demo recordings (30–60 sec each, phone vertical).

• Email your list: “We’re opening 3 pilot slots in Q4—reply ‘PILOT’.”

What’s next

Tip #4 is coming up: Measure and Track Your Sales Pipeline (so you know what’s working and what to fix).

Also, if you want to go further with Reactor

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

Let’s keep building,
— Jérôme

I am always making research about new deep climate tech technologies and I thought that I thought that I would share my discoveries with you.

This is the first part of a series of 3 newsletters (and youtube videos) about Direct Air Capture technology and businesses.

You don’t know what that is? That’s the all point of this newsletter. Buckle up.

👋 Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner, but instead of dust, it pulls carbon dioxide straight out of the sky. Sounds like science fiction? It’s not. It’s called Direct Air Capture (DAC), and real plants are running today in Iceland, Texas, and California.

But how does it actually work? Why wasn’t it possible 50 years ago? And is it really as “green” as it looks? Let’s dive in.

☝️ Climeworks’ Mammoth plant in Iceland

But wait, if you want to go further:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn

Leave a comment

🌬️ Step 1: How DAC Works

DAC is basically a four-step industrial machine:

☝️ Carbone Engineering explainer illustration

1. Move air. CO₂ makes up just 0.04% of the atmosphere. Fans push huge volumes of air through the system.

2. Capture CO₂. This is where the magic happens. Different companies use different “sponges”:

   • Solid sorbents — filters that stick to CO₂.

   • Liquid solvents — alkaline liquids that scrub CO₂.

   • Minerals — crushed rocks that naturally reabsorb CO₂.

   • Electrochemicals — materials that use electricity to grab/release CO₂.

3. Release CO₂. The sponge has to be wrung out. That means applying heat, vacuum, or electricity to get pure CO₂ gas.

4. Store or use. The concentrated CO₂ is either pumped underground (where it can mineralize into stone in a few years) or used to make fuels, chemicals, or concrete.

5. 
   

☝️ Climeworks explainer illustration

Share

🧪 The Four Flavors of DAC

Let’s compare the four flavors of DAC:

• Solid sorbents, like Climeworks in Iceland. They use low-temp heat, simple modules, but the filters wear out.

• Liquid solvents, like Carbon Engineering and 1PointFive in Texas. These scale huge, but need kilns at 800–900 °C — that’s a lot of heat.

• Mineral looping, like Heirloom. Cheap rocks, but they need land and time to soak up CO₂.

• Electrochemical methods, like Verdox or Mission Zero. All-electric, no big heat step — but still early stage.”

⏳ Why Now, Not 50 Years Ago?

We could have soaked up CO2 from the atmosphere in 1975… The chemistry was understood decades ago.

Why is it important in 2025?

What changed are the enablers:

• Cheap clean power. Renewables dropped ~90% in cost over 20 years. Running DAC on coal makes no sense; running it on wind, solar, or geothermal does.
  

  

• Better materials. New sorbents, engineered minerals, and membranes last longer and capture more CO₂ per cycle.

• Policy support.

  • U.S. 45Q tax credit pays up to $180/ton for DAC CO₂ stored underground.

  • EU CRCF (Carbon Removal Certification Framework) is creating a “nutrition label” for removals, setting the stage for future markets.
    👉 DOE DAC Hub press kit

• Corporate buyers. Microsoft, JPMorgan, Amazon, and the Frontier coalition (Stripe, Shopify, Meta, etc.) are already signing multi-year contracts for carbon removals.

⚡ But Is It Really Scalable?

• Energy appetite. Capturing 1 ton of CO₂ takes ~1–3 MWh of energy. A 1 million ton/year DAC plant consumes 1–3 TWh annually—the electricity of 200k–600k French homes.

  

• Storage. Geology isn’t the bottleneck: scientists estimate thousands of gigatons of storage worldwide. Permits and pipelines are.

• Cost. Current cost: $600–$1,200 per ton. Ambitious players aim for $200–400/t by the 2030s. Still expensive, but possible with scale + innovation.

📝 Key Takeaways

• DAC is industrial chemistry, not magic.

• It’s only viable now because of cheap renewables, new materials, policy incentives, and corporate demand.

• It’s still very expensive, but plants are already operating:

  • Climeworks Mammoth in Iceland (solid sorbent).

  • Heirloom’s first U.S. plant in California (mineral looping).

  • 1PointFive’s STRATOS under construction in Texas (solvent).

• DAC isn’t a silver bullet. But it’s becoming a new tool in the climate tech arsenal, especially for emissions we can’t avoid.

📚 Resources & Visuals to Pull From

• Climeworks Technology Overview (illustrations + plant photos)

• Carbon Engineering “How it Works” (animation + schematics)

• Heirloom DAC explainer (visuals + diagrams)

• DOE DAC Hub resource hub

• IRENA Renewable Cost Database

• Carbfix on CO₂ mineralizing into rock underground

✨ That’s your first Reactor deep-dive: educational, visual, approachable.
Next edition → How DAC Companies Make Money.

Watch and listen to more Reactor: YouTube, Instagram, Podcast - Reactor, TikTok

Want more? Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? : Work with Reactor.

Join the Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, discussions

💬 Have a story to share? Please message us to be featured in a future edition!

Let’s keep building the future of deeptech and climate tech. 🚀

Keep innovating,
Jérôme

There’s a contest: the person who gets the most people to register wins the chance to record a podcast with him.

✅ It’s totally free — takes 5 seconds via the QR code or this link: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/register?via=reactor-podcast

🏆 You’ll also enter to win a $5k training in Vegas with millionaire entrepreneurs + an exclusive business e-book.

Every registration counts. Let’s make this happen and bring Hormozi to the Reactor podcast! 🎙️💥

Jerome

Let me get straight to business:

🚀 What if we could ask Alex Hormozi...

"How would you scale a rocket business to $1 billion?"

No fluff. No filters. Just the real frameworks.

Well — we can ask him. But I need your help to get in the room.

🎤 Hormozi is launching his new book, $100M Money Models, live on August 16 at 9am PT / 12pm ET.

It’s a free webinar — no payment, no credit card, and you don’t even have to attend (just register).

If enough people sign up through my link, I get to join him in person at his Vegas HQ.

That’s where I’ll ask him your questions.
On how to scale hard tech.
On selling to tough customers.
On building profitable media.
And more — for deeptech and climate tech founders like you.

👉 Click here to register (free)

🧩 Here's what happens when you register:

✅ Get his “4 Money Models” breakdown — the same ones that scaled Acquisition.com

✅ Get his secret project (only shared live)

✅ 5 surprise headliners join him

✅ You help me reach Alex Hormozi to ask deeptech-specific questions — and I’ll publish everything on Reactor

👉 Click here to register (free)

🎁 BONUS:

Thanks to 33 early supporters, we hit our first milestone! They (and you, when you register) will receive the Profit Tactics Audiobook and an entry in the Vegas-trip draw.

We’re currently 766 strong in the Reactor community… and just 500 referrals away from the Top 10.

That means I need your help! 👉 Click here to register (free)

Let’s do this together.

👉 Click here to register (free)

🧠 When we make it to the top 50: I get a guaranteed Q&A day with Alex.
🔥 When we hit the top 10: We get a 30-minute fireside chat — I’ll livestream it, record it, and make sure it’s gold for all of you.

PS: By registering you lock in the exclusive Profit Tactics Audiobook (not sold anywhere) and a shot at Vegas.

🤝 Tell Me What to Ask Alex Hormozi

If you could ask Hormozi one thing about scaling a deeptech or climate tech company — what would it be?

Reply to this email. I’ll compile the best and bring them with me.

Thanks again for being here. I’m betting we can pull this off. Let’s put deeptech on the map — together. 👉 Click here to register (free)

See you August 16th,

— Jérôme

Welcome back to our second newsletter from the 6-part series on how to generate revenue as a deeptech or climate tech founder. If you're new here – no worries. You can always catch up on the full video on YouTube (linked above).

And remember, this series exists because I’ve seen far too many brilliant founders build game-changing tech… and still struggle to land paying customers. Deeptech is hard – but selling it doesn’t have to be mysterious.

Why listen to me? I’ve coached dozens of deeptech and climate tech founders, launched my own startup (made tons of mistakes), and led an accelerator where 50% of companies are still alive years later – well above average. I’ve done the homework so you don’t have to.

But wait, if you want to go further:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

Send Reactor to VEGAS (Yes, Really) - still active.

First: thanks for ALL of you who have already registered, eternally grateful. Plus, I’m 1000% sure that you’ll learn so much with Alex on Aug 16th, 2025.

Second, for the others: I’ve been learning from Alex Hormozi online for over 3 years. He’s shaped how I think about sales, media, and business — and now, I have a shot to meet him in person. But I need your help.

He’s hosting a free book launch webinar — and if enough people register using my referral link, I’ll be invited to Vegas to attend.

No payment. No credit card.
You don’t even have to attend the webinar — just register, and I’ll receive the credit.

👉 Click here to register

If I get in, I promise you this:

Then I’ll publish everything on Reactor. For all of us.

Let’s now jump into Tip #2:

🚀 Sell the Vision and Outcome, Not Just the Product Features

Here’s the truth: Tech alone doesn’t sell. Outcomes do.

You might have the most advanced reactor, sensor, material, algorithm… but what customers and investors really want to know is:

👉 “What does this do for me?”

Your job as a founder is to make the end result irresistibly clear and valuable.

Instead of:

“We use nano-structured dual-phase membranes to...”

Try:

“We help data centers reduce energy bills by 60% in under 3 months.”

See the difference?

In deeptech, we often talk about offering a 10x improvement – not 10%, not slightly better – 10 times better. That’s what it takes to get people to switch.

🔍 The Rule of Thumb

"Customers don’t buy features. They buy outcomes."

That means your sales pitch should be:

• Tangible: Use numbers ("cut costs by 80%", "3x faster delivery", etc.)

• Clear: No jargon. Even your grandma should get it.

• Bold: Sell the vision – the better future you're enabling.

💡 Bonus: Use ESG & Sustainability to Your Advantage

If your solution has environmental or social benefits (and I bet it does), make that part of your pitch.

Don’t just say, "We're helping reduce emissions." Say:

“We help chemical manufacturers hit their net-zero targets 5 years ahead of schedule, while saving millions.”

For many of your B2B clients, those ESG metrics are under the spotlight. Help them shine – and they’ll love you for it.

🛠 Quick Exercise

Ask yourself:

1. What is the best-case outcome my customer gets from using my product?

2. Can I describe it in one sentence – without any tech jargon?

3. Is it at least 10x better than what they’re doing today?

🚪Next Up:

In the next newsletter, we’ll talk about how to educate and evangelize your deeptech idea so the world stops ignoring it.

Let’s keep building,

— Jérôme

This edition dives into $250M+ in deeptech fundraising across wind robotics, energy-efficient AI chips, and green supercomputers. Plus: a new Corporate Venturing Report, France’s Top 50 VCs, job opportunities, and a chance to send Reactor to Vegas. If you’re serious about building or backing breakthrough tech, this one’s packed with signal, not noise.

This newsletter is published every other week and explores the many dimensions of building profitable deeptech and climate tech businesses.

If you want to go further:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok, and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

Subscribe now

Overview

Reactor news in 2 minutes 12 seconds:

• The biggest live entrepreneurship event of the year - PS: it’s free

• 5 news of the week:

  • Aerones raises $62M to scale robotic wind turbine maintenance and inspections, boosting efficiency in green energy.

  • Arago lands $26M for its light-powered AI chip “JEF,” offering GPU-class performance with 10× less energy use.

  • Hello Tomorrow publishes its Corporate Venturing Report, highlighting how 120+ companies are bridging startup–corporate collaboration gaps.

  • CB Insights ranks the Top 50 VC firms in France – with Partech, ISAI, Frst, and Jeito Capital leading in performance and outcomes.

  • SiPearl secures €130M to develop a low-energy chip for Europe’s next-gen supercomputers, offering a sustainable alternative to GPU giants.

• Best piece of content from the previous weeks.

• Fundraising campaigns in progress

• Deeptech & Climate Tech Entrepreneurship book club - book #2

• Jobs in deeptech and climate tech

Send Reactor to VEGAS (Yes, Really)

I’ve been learning from Alex Hormozi online for over 3 years. He’s shaped how I think about sales, media, and business — and now, I have a shot to meet him in person. But I need your help.

He’s hosting a free book launch webinar — and if enough people register using my referral link, I’ll be invited to Vegas to attend.

No payment. No credit card.
You don’t even have to attend the webinar — just register, and I’ll receive the credit.

👉 Click here to register

If I get in, I promise you this:

Then I’ll publish everything on Reactor. For all of us.

Share

1️⃣ Aerones Raises $62M to Scale Robotic Wind Turbine Maintenance

Aerones, a Latvian startup specializing in robot-enabled maintenance for wind turbines, has secured $62 million in an oversubscribed round. Their robotic systems perform cleaning, inspection, and repair tasks on turbine blades—reducing downtime, increasing safety, and boosting energy efficiency.

CEO Dainis Kruze highlighted the push to meet global demand for AI-powered robotic infrastructure tools. The round includes backing from Activate Capital, S2G Investments, Carbon Equity, Overlap Holdings, and existing investors like Lightrock, Blume Equity, Metaplanet, Change Ventures, and Extantia.

“We're expanding faster than ever to meet the urgent demand for intelligent, robot-enabled, AI-powered solutions.” — Kruze

Subscribe now

2️⃣ Arago Secures $26M for Light-Powered AI Chip "JEF"

Less than a year after launching, French startup Arago raised $26 million in seed funding to bring JEF, its light-powered chip, to market. JEF promises GPU-level performance at 10x lower energy consumption using photons instead of electrons.

The round was co-led by Earlybird, Protagonist, and Visionaries Tomorrow, and the funds will accelerate R&D, team growth, and commercial deployment. Crucially, the chip is compatible with existing AI stacks and fabrication pipelines.

A future where energy-efficient AI becomes plug-and-play.

Subscribe now

3️⃣ Hello Tomorrow Releases 2025 Corporate Venturing Report

Arnaud de la Tour (CEO, Hello Tomorrow) announced the release of the new 2025 Corporate Venturing Report, based on insights from 120+ companies across Europe. The report dives into the complexities of startup-corporate collaborations in deeptech, exploring how to:

• Bridge timelines

• Build trust across cultures

• Scale new solutions inside legacy organizations

Built in partnership with EIC, Dealflow.eu, Erasmus University, and Hello Tomorrow. A must-read for corporates seeking to successfully engage with radical innovation.

🔗 Deep Tech Observatory

Subscribe now

4️⃣ CB Insights Ranks Top 50 VC Funds in France

CB Insights released its 2025 ranking of the most influential VC investors in France, combining deal volume, portfolio quality, and exit success. Key highlights:

• Partech leads with 59 deals and 28 exits

• ISAI and Frst supported two future unicorns: Liquid AI ($2B) and Poolside ($3B)

• Jeito Capital leads biotech performance, backing NMD Pharma and Augustine Therapeutics

The report signals a maturing French VC landscape, with funds better equipped to support startups through internationalization and scaling.

Subscribe now

5️⃣ SiPearl Raises €130M to Power Europe's Green Supercomputers

European processor maker SiPearl has raised €130 million to scale Rhea1, an energy-efficient chip for high-performance computing (HPC). It features 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, 61 billion transistors, and is optimized for the EuroHPC initiative.

By cutting energy usage without compromising performance, SiPearl positions itself as a challenger to GPU-heavy competitors like Nvidia—with a sustainability edge.

The funding will accelerate manufacturing and deployment of processors critical to scientific research, industrial workloads, and European digital sovereignty.

Best content from the previous weeks

For any deeptech founder out there, I just shared my most advanced video on Youtube on how to transform tech into real business.

Hope that it's worth your time.

Happy to get feedback 🫶🏻

Fundraising campaigns in progress - Deeptech - Climate Tech

None this week!

Want to feature yours? Contact us! It’s free 💌

DEEPTECH CEO BOOK CLUB

Book 2 - $100M Offer

Second book of the list - switch your mind from PRODUCT to VALUE.

Jobs in deeptech and climate tech

🥵 🏭 Jobs at ExtraJool (France, sustainable industrial heat): technicians, engineers

🛰️ 📡 Jobs at deltaVision (Germany, Hydraulic pump for Space): Project Manager, Commercial roles…
👩‍🚀 🧑‍🏫 Jobs at Spaceflight Institute (France, Astronaut Training): internships

💾 🛰️ Jobs at Coros Space (France, Space datacenters): embedded electronic / avionic systems engineer

🤖 🏭 Jobs at Inbolt (USA, France, Japan, Poland, Italy, Industrial Automation with Robots):

Want to feature yours? Contact us! It’s free 💌

📩 Want More Deeptech & Climate Tech Insights?

🔹 Subscribe to Reactor Newsletter:

Reactor

Boosting climate tech and deeptech startups with practical advice and insights.

By Jerome Gilleron

Watch and listen to more Reactor: YouTube, Instagram, Podcast - Reactor, TikTok

Want more? Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? : Work with Reactor.

Join the Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, discussions

💬 Have a story to share? Please message us to be featured in a future edition!

Let’s keep building the future of deeptech and climate tech. 🚀

Keep innovating,
Jérôme

This is the first episode in our 6-part series to help you go from zero customers to real revenue as a deeptech or climate tech founder.

Quick reminder of why you should trust this:

I've coached dozens of deeptech founders. I’ve launched a tech startup (and made all the mistakes). I’ve led a deeptech accelerator where half the companies are still alive today. And I’ve interviewed the best of the best. TLDR: I’ve been where you are.

If you like that format, let me know! I tried to give a lot of value per second. I hope that you’ll like it!

Share Reactor

But wait, if you want to go further:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

Subscribe now

Reactor is on Instagram

Did you know that Reactor is on Instagram? 2 videos are published everyday.

💼 Tip #1 – Founder-Led Sales from Day One

No sales team. No CRM. Just you, a dream, and a cold LinkedIn DM.

The mistake I see 90% of founders make? They wait too long to sell. They're still "refining the product" while their runway burns.

But your first job as a CEO is not to build. It’s to sell.

📌 Why YOU need to do it:

• No one can sell the vision like you.

• Customers buy YOU, not just the tech.

• You get priceless unfiltered feedback.

• It's your only path to product-market fit.

📞 When to start? Day one. Before incorporation. Before the MVP. Literally when it’s just a sketch on a napkin.

Think this is premature? Here’s what the best founders do:

• 50–100 conversations before they build

• Ask about the pain, not just pitch

• Get letters of intent or pilot commitments

Stop hiding behind your terminal. Stop writing whitepapers. Get out there and talk to real humans who might pay you.

Because if they won’t talk now, they won’t pay later.

Remember: the myth of “build it and they will come” kills more deeptech startups than anything else.

Give a gift subscription

📌 Your action this week:

1. Make a list of 10 target customers

2. Reach out – cold email, LinkedIn, network

3. Ask: "What’s your biggest pain around [X]?"

Don’t pitch yet. Just listen.

Reactor

Boosting climate tech and deeptech startups with practical advice and insights.

By Jerome Gilleron

Share

Watch and listen to more Reactor: YouTube, Instagram, Podcast - Reactor, TikTok

Want more? Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? : Work with Reactor.

Join the Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, discussions

💬 Have a story to share? Please message us to be featured in a future edition!

Let’s keep building the future of deeptech and climate tech. 🚀

Keep innovating,
Jérôme

This week, we’re kicking off something new, fast, and global. This is a special edition and this going to be short!

It’s about visibility. It’s about energy.

And it’s about telling your deeptech story — in just 15 seconds.

But wait, if you want to go further:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

Subscribe now

Share

Reactor is on TikTok

Did you know that Reactor is on TikTok? One video published everyday.

The REACTOR SUMMER CHALLENGE is here.

This summer, we’re inviting deeptech and climate tech startups and scale-ups from around the world to pitch... in 15 seconds or less.

🎥 Send us your portrait video

🎯 Tell us what you do and why it matters

💥 We’ll share it across every Reactor channel — LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Insta, Podcast, Newsletter — over 1.5 million impressions and growing.

✅ Conditions

• 15 seconds max

• Must be a deeptech or climate tech startup

• Speaker = CEO, CTO, or any C-level founder

• Shot in portrait (TikTok format)

• Deadline: July 31, 2025

🌍 Why do this?

Because too many great startups are still invisible.

And because you shouldn’t need a budget, PR agency, or award to earn a spotlight.

We're opening our entire media reach to showcase founders building the hard stuff. If that’s you — we want to hear from you.

🎥 Record it. Be bold. Be clear. Be brief.

📩 Send your video → https://form.typeform.com/to/ZUJ6lDiW

📩 Want More Deeptech & Climate Tech Insights?

🔹 Subscribe to Reactor Newsletter:

Reactor

Boosting climate tech and deeptech startups with practical advice and insights.

By Jerome Gilleron

Watch and listen to more Reactor: YouTube, Instagram, Podcast - Reactor, TikTok

Want more? Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? : Work with Reactor.

Join the Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, discussions

💬 Have a story to share? Please message us to be featured in a future edition!

Let’s keep building the future of deeptech and climate tech. 🚀

Keep innovating,
Jérôme

This week, it’s all about bold moves: founders fixing broken systems, fusion startups rewriting physics, and impact platforms opening global doors. Here’s your weekly dose of ambition, velocity, and vision.

This newsletter is published every other week and explores the many dimensions of building profitable deeptech and climate tech businesses.

But wait, if you want to go further:

• Sponsor this newsletter or one of my LinkedIn posts.

• Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? Work with Reactor.

• Listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel, the TikTok and the Instagram

• Join the free Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, and discussions.

• Follow me on LinkedIn.

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Overview

Reactor news in 1 minute:

• The biggest live entrepreneurship event of the year - PS: it’s free

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• Reactor Corporate Pioneer Program: do you know a great large company who works well with startups? I want to interview them.

• 5 news of the week:

  • 🚆 Night trains are broken — so Thibault Constant is building his own
    → Introducing NOX Mobility: private, affordable, on-time overnight trains launching in 2027.

  • ⚛️ Proxima Fusion raises €130M to lead Europe’s stellarator fusion race
    → Largest fusion round in EU history to bring clean, continuous power to life.

  • 📬 Reactor becomes a Lemlist Ambassador
    → Our go-to outbound tool just became an official partnership.

  • 🌎 SprintUY 2025 opens for LATAM expansion
    → Soft landing program in Uruguay for science-based startups.

  • 🌍 ChangeNOW 2026 call for impact innovators is now live
    → Apply to pitch, exhibit, host, or hire at the world’s biggest impact summit.

• Deeptech & Climate Tech Entrepreneurship book club - book #1

• Jobs in deeptech and climate tech

• Fundraising campaigns in progress

• My newsletter recommendations to learn more

Reactor is on Youtube

Did you know that Reactor is on Youtube? One video published everyday.

Most businesses lose money on ads. Here's why.

They spend more getting customers than they make. The fix? Money Models.

A money model attracts more customers to spend more money, faster, repeatedly. It's how Alex Hormozi built his companies.

If you know Reactor, you know that the previous 2 books and Alex’s videos were of great influence in the construction of Reactor.

Join his live book launch on August 16th, 9 am PT / 12 pm ET, to learn the 4 types of Money Models that work in any business.

Save your spot here or click on the image! 👇

Operation - Reactor Corporate Pioneer Program

“Corporates don’t pay startups.”
“Corporations and startups can’t work together.”
Let’s move past the blame and spotlight those doing it right.

There are large companies that work with startups and pay them for contracts.

I want to know, share and highlight those companies who work well with deeptech and climate tech startups. Write to me on LinkedIn.

If you have successfully worked with a large company that treats startups well, write to me.

If you work for a large corporation that works well with startups, you've got it: write to me.

Forget the bad ones: Let’s shine a light on the good ones.

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1️⃣ Reactor becomes a Lemlist Ambassador

If you're in deeptech or climate and doing outbound, you’ve likely heard us rave about Lemlist.

Now it’s official: Reactor is a Lemlist Ambassador 🚀

Why we love it:

• 🧠 Built-in AI icebreaker generator

• 🧰 Huge template library (copy/paste + iterate)

• 📲 Email + phone + LinkedIn workflows

• 🧼 Clean, simple UI your team will actually use

We use it daily — and we recommend it to every founder in our network.
🎁 Try it free for 14 days

Subscribe now

2️⃣ Expand into Latin America? SprintUY Is Your Launchpad

Thinking of going global? SprintUY 2025 in Uruguay is now open for applications — a soft-landing program for science-based and tech-driven startups ready to scale into Latin America.

📍 What you get:

• 1 week of founder immersion in Montevideo (Sept 29–Oct 7)

• Travel + accommodation covered

• Exposure to the LATAM startup and investor ecosystem

🗓️ Deadline: July 10
🔗 Apply here

Subscribe now

3️⃣ Apply to Be Part of ChangeNOW 2026

ChangeNOW 2026 — the world’s largest event for planet-positive innovation — is calling for applications. If you’re building for impact, this is your global stage.

Here’s what you can apply for:

• ✨ Exhibit your solution

• 🎤 Pitch to investors in 3 minutes

• 🧠 Host a workshop

• 💼 Join the Impact Job Fair

Whether you're early-stage or scaling, they offer tiered pricing to keep it accessible.

📅 Summit Dates: March 30–April 1, 2026
📝 Apply now

Subscribe now

4️⃣ Night Trains Are Broken. He’s Building His Own.

Thibault Constant has slept in over 400 night trains across Europe. He built Simply Railway to share the magic. But the reality? Tiny cabins. Pricey tickets. Delays. Disappointment.

So… he’s fixing it.

Nox Mobility is his answer: a new night train company launching in 2027 with:

• 100% private rooms (no strangers)

• Fares from €79

• Simple, on-time routes — no shunting, no surprises

“This isn’t just nostalgia,” says Thibault. “It’s a real alternative to planes. And it should work.”

🚄 Join the waitlist

Subscribe now

5️⃣ Proxima Fusion Raises €130M to Bring Stellarator Power Plants to Life

The largest fusion round in European history just closed. Munich-based Proxima Fusion raised €130M Series A, led by Cherry Ventures & Balderton, with a long list of top-tier deeptech investors backing its stellarator-based fusion platform.

Why this matters:

• Builds on Europe’s decades of public fusion research

• Uses QI-HTS stellarators — a safer, continuous, engineering-friendly path

• Simulation-led, hardware-driven, and aiming to achieve Q>1 by 2031

🧲 From the Max Planck Institute to a 3-site team working across Germany, the UK and Switzerland, Proxima isn’t just chasing fusion — it’s racing to build it.

🔗 Read more

Fundraising campaigns in progress - Deeptech - Climate Tech

⚡ Sonaid - France - Sound-based Emergency Alert System - seed - 1.5 m€

☀️ UNDA - France - Electricity From The Power of Waves 🌊 - Pre-seed - 500 K€

Want to feature yours? Contact us!

DEEPTECH CEO BOOK CLUB

Book 1 - The Hard things about Hard Things

I could not recommend more this book about the reality of being a CEO. This is the first book I’ve sent out to CEO I have ever mentored.

Jobs in deeptech and climate tech

Jobs at Yacon & Co (France, sustainable sirop): CMO https://www.linkedin.com/posts/raphaellanolleau_lundi-8h-certains-cherchent-un-caf%C3%A9-moi-activity-7342798018162700288-Hp7Y/

Jobs at UNIVITY (France, Space): Telecom Payload Engineer
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shola-efunshile-981561a7_activity-7341740723383201792-1y1k?

Jobs at Blusink (Remote, Ocean): social media manager https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anjana-aravind_social-media-manager-notion-activity-7346886068828311573-sIPD

Jobs at Quindar (US, Space): several positions https://www.linkedin.com/posts/quindarspace_quindar-is-growing-and-were-focused-on-activity-7344403847114625025-yV_e/

Want to feature yours? Contact us!

Newsletter Recommendation

has been helping deeptech startups for decades. He has built his entire expertise on how to build those without raising money - or at least the very minimum. He has developed his own methodology called “The Coachroach Strategy” or “La stratégie du cafard”.

Today, he has a strong community around him, leaders who have fully embraced his advice to grow their deeptech business. It’s worth reading.

It’s in French by the way.

La stratégie du cafard 🐞

Comment lever 15 millions d'euros sans se diluer. La méthode du CCA.

Ça fait longtemps que je ne vous avais rien envoyé. Oui, c’est vrai. J’ai dépensé pas mal d’énergie ces derniers temps pour la communauté des cafards pour laquelle je prépare plusieurs surprises (si vous n’avez pas idée de ce que peut être une startup cafard…

Read more

2 years ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · Serge Kinkingnéhun

📩 Want More Deeptech & Climate Tech Insights?

🔹 Subscribe to Reactor Newsletter:

Reactor

Boosting climate tech and deeptech startups with practical advice and insights.

By Jerome Gilleron

Watch and listen to more Reactor: YouTube, Instagram, Podcast - Reactor, TikTok

Want more? Be a guest on my podcast, book me for a conference, or something else? : Work with Reactor.

Join the Reactor community on WhatsApp: deep tech and climate-tech entrepreneurs, events, discussions

💬 Have a story to share? Please message us to be featured in a future edition!

Let’s keep building the future of deeptech and climate tech. 🚀

Keep innovating,
Jérôme