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Once cleantech or greentech was regarded as something for the “tree huggers”. People said it wouldn’t generate any profit and would be more like philanthropy for investors rather than with a clear ROI and market opportunity.
“In 2017, meanwhile, the investments made in cleantech start-ups in Estonia totalled around €20 million, the figure for the first half of 2022 is €153 million,” Erki Ani, CEO of Cleantech Estonia
The cleantech sector in Estonia was formed by people with the ability to see further than profit, but who put impact first, accompanied by the profitability of technologies that are deemed to flourish in the future. In early 2016, the non-profit Cleantech Estonia was born. From day one, its clear goal was to be the umbrella organisation of cleantech start-ups. Or, when there weren’t too many of them, it took on the duty of doing everything those startups would appear to do in Estonia. “Partnering up with the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), this journey started on
From non-existing industry to partnership with top investors –in less than a decade
50 | INNOVATIONS
2014 and 2015 saw the “second coming” of cleantech – so-called cleantech 2.0 – and this sector changed significantly in Estonia
EstoniaCleantechphoto/PublicityPhoto:by ANDA ASERE , Labs of Latvia, exclusively for Baltic Business Quarterly
INNOVATIONS | 51 promising grounds and took on the goal of advancing and advocating the cleantech innovation’s potential in the economy”, remembers Erki Ani, CEO of Cleantech Estonia and co-founder of Beamline Accelerator.
From the Tesla fleet to programming microorganisms Ani remembers the intense times of constant funding hunger due to the peculiarities of projectbased operations and non-existent governmental interest. “But it just so happened that when a pay check “got lost”, another opportunity or idea arose”, he says. One of those came from the CEO of Estonian renewable developer firm Sunly, with whom Ani took a flight to the San Francisco Cleantech Forum and, on the flight back, they decided to launch an international accelerator program focused on cleantech. Fast forward to July 2022 and Beamline Accelerator has run 2 batches with 14 start-ups from 8 countries.
Since then, Cleantech Estonia has run hackathons, incubators, and accelerators dedicated to cleantech start-ups.
Today in Estonia, around 90-100 cleantech start-ups have raised some kind of investment. “Of course, the most popular sectors are energy and mobility, but also agriculture, food and novel materials. A good indicator in this start-up sector is the number of investments, as this indicates a rising trend for sustainability. In 2017, meanwhile, the investments made in cleantech start-ups totalled around €20 million, the figure for the first half of 2022 is €153 million”, says Ani.
Each year, Cleantech Estonia has helped around ten very early-stage start-ups and ten rookie teams to understand if their business idea will fly. The organisation helps to validate the ideas. Regarding funding those with the most potential, Cleantech Estonia had provided 56 start-ups with €1.3 million by mid-2021. “As a nonprofit, it’s not too bad”, Ani adds.
One of the earliest programs Cleantech Estonia started together with EIT Climate-KIC in 2015 was the ClimateLaunchpad. This intended to seek the potential idea-level teams that would like to turn their – as Ani sometimes says “ludicrous” – ideas into scaling impactful start-up companies.
“In short, that’s the next step after ideation with funding included. Next to these core programs are different variations of incubators and accelerators, hackathons and solution-seeking activities for local municipalities”, Ani explains. Most popular sectors –energy and mobility Ani remembers that there was little awareness of the cleantech sector and its possibilities, opportunities, and potential back in the day.
Another program that started in the same year is the ClimAccelerator, also organised together by Cleantech Estonia and EIT Climate-KIC. Here, the start-up companies get to polish their business models and seek industry contacts and investors.
There are already multiple successes from the first batches, one of them being the Beast – a software startup (these are, in fact, rare in the Beamline Accelerator portfolio) with their fleet of Teslas today in Estonia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, Latvia and Lithuania. They will soon also be on the market with their peer-to-peer Tesla sharing option as they’re advocating the uptake of electric mobility through solid branding and excellent agility.
“An example from the other end of the spectrum is Äio tech, a start-up that programs microorganisms to produce enzymes that could make organic matter edible for humans. In short; they make it possible for us to eat wood”, according to Ani. Maybe someday all businesses will be cleantech Beamline Accelerator team’s dayto-day work includes providing deal flow to pre-seed and seedstage angels, investors, seed and series A stage VCs, and lately, more growth stage investors from the US. The accelerator works only with cleantech investors that acknowledge the “whys” of investments in sustainability and innovation; in most cases it is hardware. “As a pre-filtered selection of start-ups to investors and vice versa, there is no reason to explain to investors that we cannot tackle today’s challenges with technologies invented 100 years ago”, argues Ani. He admits that there is much work to be done still to help scale earlystage start-ups into impactful businesses, and that is precisely the ambition of Beamline Accelerator Cleantech Estonia. “As Cleantech Estonia’s start-up’s developmentrelated activities have scaled to the EU level with Beamline Accelerator, our local cleantech sector development activities are also to scale, specifically in the Baltics. And let’s see then: perhaps there will be a time when all businesses are regarded as cleantech or sustainable – then our work is done”, Ani concludes.
“We’ve been actively working with the public, academia, and private sectors to increase those cleantech innovations’ knowledge and potential. Representing Estonia at the European Commission’s Circular Economy missions in Singapore, Malaysia and India, leading panel discussions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), and similar activities have led to building our team’s network firmly and resulted in the understanding of what a tremendous demand or even hunger there is for sustainable, innovative solutions”, he says.
Fast-forward to 2021: PVcase closed the largest solar software company fundraising round ever in Europe with a €20 million Series A. This year, the company was named one of the top 10 solar companies in the Baltic states by BestStartup.eu.
54 | BEST IN BUSINESS
Revolutionizing solar engineering The PVcase team chose Lithuania for their headquarters. The country affords a diverse talent pool and a startup-oriented mindset. In addition, with profound changes in the region’s economic and social landscape over the past In 2018, a team of solar engineers was looking for a modern engineering tool that would enable them to be more responsive to their customers’ requests. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find one. While other industries were becoming increasingly digitized, solar engineering was not keeping up with the rapidly evolving solar industry. This obstacle did not daunt the team.
PVcase Roof Mount builds on PVcase’s Ground Mount product to address the unique challenges of rooftop solar design. The software will be instrumental in advancing commercial-scale solar, a market sector with vast potential that must be realized to effectively fight climate change.
The company’s AutoCADbased solar design software PVcase Ground Mount is already used by some of the world’s largest solar energy players to design over 3 gigawatts of utility-scale solar projects. The software offers a high degree of precision that enables solar engineers to save time, reduce project costs, boost reliability, and improve solar plant performance.
PVcase Yield, a cloud-based energy modelling software, helps solar engineers and developers. S eeing an unmet need, they created their own software, PhotoVoltaic Computer Aided Solar Engineering — PVcase. PVcase has grown into a global solar technology company with more than 100 employees, serving customers in over 70 countries.
15 years, many Lithuanians have returned home after spending time abroad, bringing with them extensive international experience and knowledge. This ideal time for startups in Lithuania coincides with a surge in the popularity of solar energy in the Baltics and throughout Europe — driven by concern about climate change and the current political situation. As a result, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and many other countries are setting ambitious goals for large-scale solar deployment to gain energy independence. PVcase is advancing this exponential solar growth with software that helps developers rapidly scale their engineering capacity to deploy new plants quickly and efficiently. By connecting the entire solar planning workflow, PVcase is revolutionizing solar engineering.
New Products With a true startup mindset, PVcase constantly seeks ways to innovate further and support the rapidly accelerating solar industry. In addition, seeing the need to optimize and create efficiencies in other aspects of evaluating and planning PV projects, the company has new products in development.
PVcase management team: Adomas Pažarauskas, CPO, Toma Dilė, SOO, Douglas Geist, CSO and David Trainavičius, CEO. by RUSLANAS IRŽIKEVIČIUS
KučinskienėVitaPhoto:
A Lithuanian startup is helping unleash solar energy in the Baltics and beyond
Our interview partner and the Head of Export Rolands Birģelis recalls that the heating and air conditioning systems in an office building were cooling and heating at the same time. Clearly, this is not very energyfriendly, but without the software it would probably have gone unnoticed.
If you add up the outcomes of the measurements and the corresponding adjustments, a company can cut its energy costs by up to 30%. Will this solve our critical energy situation? Probably not. But it is a step in the right direction, believes R. Birģelis. Taking this topic to a meta dimension. Companies and businesses are becoming more aware of how they can save energy on a larger scale. And this increasing awareness leads to opportunities to move forward with new transformative ways of managing energy.
56 | BEST IN BUSINESS
supermarket chains, it can be a question of how long the refrigerated shelves are left open.
M easuring consumptionenergyisthe
first step. Executed with current transformers that are as easy to install as an Ikea kit, it is possible to express our daily working life in figures. You simply attach the devices to the cable and your electricity box, and they read and send data. All the data is transferred using LoRaWAN, which is similar to Wi-Fi although still a different piece of technology. It is a more stable frequency than Wi-Fi, which is why people at AdvanGrid say LoRaWAN walks on the ground.
The governments in some countries have already installed LoRaWAN everywhere, but in Latvia and some other states where AdvanGrid provides services they have to install LoRaWAN covering a region up to 5 kilometres in width. So, the company is also building its own network of LoRaWAN that is growing just like AdvanGrid’s customer base. Taking measurements constantly AdvanGrid’s current transformers take measurements all the time so they are constantly sending information to a platform that writes down the statistics. This is a platform which draws an accurate and detailed picture of the graphics and reports about electricity quality and equipment usage. For instance, it is possible to track the condition of the tools because more energy is consumed when the tools no longer function optimally. This enables customers to optimize the time when the inventory of the tools would be most energy efficient. Sometimes there are problems with the energy quality, which means there are spikes up and down. This is applicable to supply chains and production lines when they are interrupted. Human factors cause many errors However, many errors regarding energy consumption are caused by human factors. For instance, it is common for someone to forget to switch off a device. Working with
/AdvanGridphotoPublicityPhoto:
Saving energy is not optional When facing an urgent energy crisis, it is not enough simply to change our management of energy. Even with a multi-faceted policy approach, we must be prepared to make savings in various sectors. AdvanGrid provides an efficient savings program by JOHANNA CRAMER
Executed with current transformers that are as easy to install as an Ikea kit, AdvanGrid’s platform writes down the daily statistics.
