Hard2Scale: designing and piloting a European accelerator for cleantech startups

Context

Digital and deep-tech startups working on the decarbonisation of energy-intensive and hard-to-abate industries face a double challenge: long sales cycles with industrial buyers, and capital-intensive scaling that local ecosystems often cannot finance alone. Access to markets and funding also remains very uneven across Europe.

Hard2Scale is a 30-month Horizon Europe project, funded by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA), that brings together 8 innovation partners from Greece, France, Austria, Romania, Italy, Finland, Slovakia and Portugal. Its purpose is to design and run a cross-border acceleration programme connecting these startups with industrial players and investors in Europe’s leading ecosystems.

Missions

• Programme design: Studying how successful European deep-tech scaleups grew, and running focus groups with Series A investors to understand their investment thesis. These insights shaped, with the other partners, an accelerator organised in 4 thematic cohorts: transport and logistics, materials and resources, molecular transformation industries, and agriculture and land use.
• Go-to-market: Collecting concrete challenges from industrial players, organising portfolio reviews and open innovation workshops, and matching each startup with relevant corporates to build pilot and demonstrator projects.
• Go-to-funding: Leading the investor readiness track: review of business plans and financial hypotheses, pitch coaching, matchmaking with seed and Series A investors, and thematic pitch events, complemented by access to non-dilutive European funding.