Subscribe to the newsletter:

New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

****

🌊 No Green Premium, The 2026 Climate VC Playbook

Why price parity, resilience, and market-rate returns are the only strategy that works now.

In 2022, climate was hot. Capital was cheap. ESG was mainstream.

Today? The pendulum has swung.

In this episode, with Fabian Heilemann, General Partner at AENU, we dive into what has fundamentally changed in climate investing, and what founders and GPs must do now if they want to build real businesses that survive political cycles and LP scrutiny.

Fabian doesn’t mince words:

“If you ask for green premium, go home.”

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why the voluntary carbon market thesis stalled, and what AENU got wrong

→ Why climate funds must now prove market-rate returns (30%+ IRR)

→ The shift from “climate tech” to energy security, efficiency & resilience

→ Why adaptation and systemic resilience may be the next wave

→ Europe’s structural crisis between the US and China

→ The rise of “Green Infra 2.0”, hardware-led electrification plays

→ The real exit pathways for energy companies (hint: mostly trade sales)

→ What LPs actually think, and why tourist capital is gone

→ Fabian’s founder survival framework: routines, meditation, and long-term legacy

Fabian’s thesis for 2026 is clear:

If your product cannot compete on price parity and feature parity, it will not scale. Climate benefit must be interlocked with commercial ROI, not sold as moral persuasion.

Because the market right now rewards:

Energy resilience

Industrial efficiency

Adaptation

Clear customer economics

Not virtue signaling.

And yet, the physics of the climate crisis hasn’t changed.Only the narrative has.

Subscribe to the newsletter:

New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

****

Listen now:Apple // Spotify // YouTube

🌊 The Inflection Point Nobody Noticed

Why electrification, materials innovation, and better unit economics are reshaping climate VC.

We’re joined by Sarah Sclarsic, General Partner & Co-Founder at Voyager Ventures, a transatlantic VC firm backing foundational innovations across energy, materials, and machines.

Sarah has spent decades building companies in climate, crafting federal policy, and investing across cycles, from Cleantech 1.0 to today’s electrified, AI-accelerated industrial wave. In this episode, we dive into what LPs really think about climate right now, and why the fundamentals have never been stronger, even when headlines suggest otherwise.

Because while sentiment swings, physics doesn’t.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ The LP perception gap, why institutional investors see long-term fundamentals while headlines focus on short-term noise

→ The quiet inflection point, electricity is now the dominant global energy form (~34%)

→ Why falling battery costs (90%+ in a decade) change everything

→ What emerging managers must prove to LPs beyond “the thesis”

→ Why deeptech no longer can hold a green premium

→ The electro-tech stack advantage (and why fossil-based models are structurally weaker)

→ How to evaluate hardware startups in 2026

→ Why teams, not tech, build billion-dollar companies

→ The compounding gains of electrification + AI + advanced manufacturing

→ Rebuilding 1,000-year-old industrial processes with modern tools

Sarah’s core lens is simple:

If it can’t win on price and performance, without subsidies, it won’t dominate a global market.

Voyager backs companies that:

Replace fossil-based processes with inherently superior systems

Benefit from declining input costs (electrification, automation, AI)

Have durable innovation engines, not one-off breakthroughs

We also explore two fascinating examples:

A company reinventing alloy production using high-powered energy waves

A rare-earth refining startup using nature-derived proteins instead of fossil heat

The pattern?

Massive industries built on outdated industrial assumptions are being reimagined from first principles.

If you’re building or investing in climate, this episode is a masterclass in thinking long-term while executing fast.

Subscribe to the newsletter:

New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

****

🌊 Mining Without Mines

How plants could unlock the next wave of critical metals.

We’re joined by Fabien, Co-Founder & CEO of Genomines, a company rethinking how the world sources nickel, not by digging deeper, but by growing smarter.

In this episode, we dive into a radical idea at the heart of the energy transition: what if we could produce critical metals using plants instead of mines?

Fabien walks us through hyper-accumulator plants, the brutal economics of mining, and why biology might be the most under-appreciated extraction technology of our time.

This is a conversation about cost curves, patience, and why sustainability only scales if it wins on unit economics.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why electrifying everything doesn’t work if metals stay carbon-intensive

→ How hyper-accumulator plants pull nickel straight from soil

→ The brutal reality of mining economics — and why most deposits aren’t viable

→ Why nickel isn’t rare, just inaccessible

→ Raising deep-tech capital when everyone thinks you’re crazy

→ Why winning on cost matters more than winning the climate argument

→ Transitioning from an R&D lab to an operating company

→ How cheap nickel could reshape batteries, EVs, and geopolitics

If you’re building in deep-tech or mining innovation, Fabien is someone worth listening to.