BSEIF’s Venture division has published its Initial Statement, the third piece of official divisional research released by the association, after the Digital Infrastructure and Infrastructure & Transport Logistics statements. Written by Riccardo Gilli, Head of Venture, it sets out the context, bottlenecks and areas of focus for the division’s work on early-stage companies developing the hardware, materials and software behind energy and infrastructure.
Its starting point is that the build-out increasingly depends on hardware that takes years and large sums to bring to market, and venture capital is one of the few channels that fund it at its riskiest stage. In 2025 that funding moved in an unusual direction. Climate tech venture and growth investment rose 8% to $40.5 billion, while the number of deals fell 18% and seed funding fell 20%. Europe went against the global trend, with investment down 13% to $10.1 billion as the United States grew 27%. Investors, the statement observes, are backing a small group of category leaders over new entrants.
From that context follow two bottlenecks. The first is physical supply chains: power transformers face a 15% market shortage in 2026, and in Italy projects with a connection agreement but not yet online equal 169% of the country’s installed capacity. The second is capital. Deeptech reached a record 32% of European venture capital in 2025, yet only 54% of the funding in European deeptech rounds above $15 million comes from within Europe, against 80% in the United States. The long road to exit acts as a filter on both, and since acquisitions made up 89% of climate tech exits in 2025, the division asks early who could buy a company, when and at what value. Policy and the pursuit of technological sovereignty shape all three.
The research will be organised around five areas: energy technology; industrial hardware and materials; digital and space infrastructure; software for physical assets; and, as a secondary area, growth-stage companies and transactions. Each paper follows the same five steps, from sector and macro context through the bottleneck, capital flows and start-up scouting to a view on exit. The first two papers apply them to heat management in orbit, as satellites and orbital data centres draw more power, and to Europe’s new nuclear fuel, where Russia still provided 22.6% of the enrichment services delivered to EU utilities in 2025.
The statement also records the division’s commitments. The first papers are due before BSEIF’s mid-November 2026 event. Work will be reviewed by other members and by the Head of Venture before publication; every figure will carry its source and date; estimates, forecasts and the division’s own assessments of start-ups will be labelled as such; and material errors will be corrected in a new, dated version. The papers present the analysis of their authors and the division, not the view of any company, fund, sponsor or guest, and do not constitute investment advice.
The full statement is available under Insights, in the Venture section. It can be read on the website, opened separately or downloaded as a PDF.