Chemistry start-ups hot in Paris

It might not have been obvious from the exhibition floor at the vast Centquatre-Paris center last month, but Europe’s innovation ecosystem is wobbling. Exciting chemistry-based technologies seemed to fill every corner of Hello Tomorrow’s Global Summit. But the breadth of emerging technology on display there obscured the fact that the exhibitors were all after funding to help them succeed.

Outside of the event itself, with its €100,000 ($110,000) prize, European funding opportunities for these firms are drying up. European investment in deep-tech start-ups—companies that are developing solutions to substantial scientific or engineering problems—totaled $16.3 billion in 2024, a drop of 28% compared with 2021, according to a report released during the event by Hello Tomorrow and its partners Dealroom, Lakestar, and Walden Catalyst.

Europe has the potential to be a global deep-tech hub, with six of the world’s top 20 research universities and nine of the top 25 research institutes, the report found. But the region is missing an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture.

“We don’t have the same mindset as the US,” lamented Arnaud de la Tour, Hello Tomorrow’s CEO, during a press conference at the event. The US has built “a flywheel powerhouse” for cleantech and deep-tech start-ups, de la Tour said. While ample funding is available in Europe, around half of the money going into European deep-tech start-up companies now comes from outside of the region.

Among the firms at the Paris event looking for funds to advance their technologies was ReCatalyst, a Slovenian firm with a technology it claims cuts by 60% the amount of platinum required in catalysts for hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers. The technology can drop the cost of a fuel cell or electrolyzer by 45%, CEO Tomaz Bijek said. He outlined the firm’s technology in a 3 min pitch to Hello Tomorrow’s judges in a bid to win the title of the event’s best start-up and the accompanying cash prize.

Today’s catalysts feature clumps of platinum molecules, which reduce their effectiveness. ReCatalyst instead spreads out platinum nanoparticles on a carbon support “like growing apples on a tree,” so less platinum is needed for the same performance, Bijek explained. The company has raised seed funding and is now seeking series A funding to scale its technology for the emerging clean hydrogen industry. “The momentum is currently massive, and we want to exploit it,” Bijek said.

Plenty of start-ups from outside Europe were also Hello Tomorrow finalists. Among them was Australia’s ElectraLith, which extracts lithium from brine using electrodialysis coupled with a novel ceramic-polymer membrane. At scale, the technology could be among the cheapest on the market, CEO Charles McGill claimed. ElectroLith plans to test its technology in Argentina in the next 12–24 months.

Unlike many start-ups at the Paris summit, ElectraLith has just secured a major cash injection: $20 million in series A funding from companies including Intel and Rio Tinto. “There is a catch. And that is we need a year to develop the technology,” McGill said. ElectraLith can make a 64 cm² membrane, “but we need that to go to 1,000 cm².”

Also seeking to make lithium-ion batteries cheaper is COnovate, a US company set up in 2016 to commercialize graphene monoxide, a drop-in replacement for the graphite used in lithium-ion battery anodes. Discovered at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and named eCOphite, the graphene monoxide is derived from lignin recovered from the wood industry. “It is a solid, stable form of carbon monoxide with a carbon backbone,” said Carol Hirschmugl, a UWM professor emerita who coinvented the technology and is now the firm’s CEO.

The material has the capacity to store more than twice as much energy as graphite—the most widely used anode material—and at a lower cost, Hirschmugl said. “eCOphite outperforms graphite in lithium-ion batteries in cold conditions and requires 1% of the energy to produce compared with graphite.”

Hirschmugl was in Paris as a finalist in the start-up competition. She was also looking to form new connections and raise funds. Under President Donald J. Trump, the US is pulling back on funding for sustainable technology, she said. But graphite has been identified by the US government as a critical material. Hirschmugl is looking for US or private funding that will help COnovate demonstrate it can scale its production process to 100 kg per day. “My audience in Europe is interested in sustainability. My audience in the US is interested in national security,” she said.

The South Korean firm nanoLambda has had less difficulty attracting attention. More than 500 firms are testing out its technology: the world’s smallest spectrometer, which is less than 0.1% the size of standard laboratory devices, CEO Bill Choi said.

Such a small optical spectrometer can’t be built using the standard prism approach because a prism is too big and needs adequate distance to disperse the incoming light. Instead, nanoLambda has developed a digital approach that combines a nano-optic filter array with spectral reconstruction software.

Beyond electronics, there were plenty of other intriguing applications of chemistry on show in Paris, including those for aerospace, food, and personal care. In aerospace, the French start-up Alpha Impulsion was showcasing a novel rocket propulsion system for carrying satellites and other payloads into space. The Hello Tomorrow finalist’s autophage rocket features a high-density polyethylene fuselage that is melted in flight by waste heat and then fed into the engine’s combustion chamber as additional fuel. “It burns like a candle until only the satellites and rocket engine remain,” CEO Marius Celette said in his 3 min pitch to judges.

The approach is designed to reduce the weight of the rocket as well as space waste. The company aims to make its orbital rocket test in 2028. To do so, the company will need to raise €100 million ($110 million), but Celette did not seem intimidated. “We are preparing a revolution,” he said.

Back on Earth, the Slovenian start-up L-Blend has developed what it reckons is the first zero-alcohol powdered wine made using a spray-dryer. The technology is the brainchild of Odon Planinšek, a professor at the University of Ljubljana. Planinšek’s background in pharmaceutical formulation gave him insights into spray-drying technology, which he has adapted for L-Blend’s prototype drink, he said during a conversation at the company’s exhibition booth, which was festooned with bread, cheese, and sachets of the powder.

Making some powdered zero-alcohol wine products can require lengthy and energy-intensive boiling or reverse osmosis. In contrast, spray-drying takes less than a second and ensures that many of wine’s flavor compounds, such as polyphenols, are retained, Planinšek said. Ethanol is removed, and cyclodextrin is added prior to spray-drying to ensure that the wine compounds do not clump together, he said.

Planinšek’s next move is to tweak the formula to reduce foaming when the powder is added to water, but money is an issue. “It’s difficult to get funding. We don’t get any support. We are here to get funding,” he said.

The specialty chemical firm Syensqo may not be investing in wine powder, but it was in Paris to check out start-ups, especially those developing technologies for aerospace and health and beauty, said Matt Jones, head of Syensqo’s investment arm. “We want to be in this ecosystem to see entrepreneurs and what breakthroughs they’re coming out with,” he said. Another 10 or so Syensqo colleagues were at the meeting “to engage with—and learn from—the entrepreneurial community,” Jones said.

The Paris event featured pitches by 80 finalists, selected from 4,600 entrants, vying for the €100,000 prize. The winner was the French firm Nūmi, which has a process for making milk from human mammary cells cultivated in the lab. Unlike standard baby formula, Nūmi says, its product contains more than 1,500 bioactive molecules that are present in human breastmilk.

The investment environment could be better, but the sheer breadth of technologies on show in Paris suggested that, for now, the European start-up ecosystem remains buoyant. For 120 years following its opening in 1874, the Centquatre-Paris building housed the city's undertakers and up to 6,000 coffins. Start-ups at the Hello Tomorrow event were hoping to raise the funds they need to keep their companies very much alive.