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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

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Supported by:

Leonard: The innovation and foresight platform of the VINCI Group, to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing VINCI’s businesses: the digital revolution, the accelerating pace of innovation, and the environmental transition.

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🌊 Can Iron Replace Natural Gas?

How a rechargeable metal fuel could reshape high-temperature industrial heat, and Europe’s energy sovereignty.

We’re joined by Driss Laraqui, CEO and co-founder of Fenix Energy, a deeptech founder turning iron powder into a circular fuel for industrial heat.

The premise sounds almost like science fiction: burn iron powder, capture the iron oxide, recharge it with electricity, and use it again.

But for Driss, this is not a lab experiment.

Fenix is building industrial boilers designed to generate high-temperature heat — up to roughly 900°C, for sectors that remain heavily dependent on natural gas and difficult to electrify.

In this episode, we dive into one of climate tech’s hardest problems: how to decarbonize industrial heat without asking every factory to rely on constant access to cheap electricity and massive grid connections. And we unpack what it really takes to turn a scientific breakthrough into an infrastructure business that customers can actually deploy.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why industrial heat is becoming a geopolitical problem — from gas-price volatility to security of supply

→ Why direct electrification does not solve everything — especially for continuous industrial processes and sites without sufficient grid capacity

→ How iron works as a rechargeable fuel — burning into iron oxide, then regenerating the material with electricity

→ Why mobility changes the storage equation — Fenix can move energy in the form of iron powder instead of keeping storage stationary

→ The economics of heat-as-a-service — and why taking CapEx off the customer’s balance sheet can accelerate adoption

→ Why modularity matters in deeptech — finding the right reactor size, stacking systems, and avoiding endless re-engineering

→ How first customers finance emerging industrial technologies before banks and infrastructure funds are ready

→ Why Driss believes Europe is still one of the best places to build climate deeptech

One idea stayed with me.

Most conversations about industrial decarbonization search for the winning technology.

Driss sees the opposite.

The future energy system will be a mix: direct electrification where it works, biomass where it makes sense, nuclear in some contexts — and new energy carriers like iron for industrial sites that cannot simply plug into more power.

Fenix is betting that iron can become one of those missing bricks.

And perhaps the most interesting part is that the core challenge is no longer purely scientific.

As Driss puts it, the company is increasingly in development, not research.

The question now is execution: engineering the boiler, coordinating suppliers, sourcing cheap electricity, building the regeneration infrastructure, moving powder between sites, financing first-of-a-kind deployments — and making the full system competitive with natural gas.

That is where deeptech becomes a business.

✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.

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🌊 Building Deep Tech at Software Speed

What separates the best hardware founders, and why conviction matters more than consensus.

We’re joined by Clara Ricard, investor at Transition, focused on hardware and industrial deep tech, to explore what it really takes to build and back the next generation of climate and frontier technologies.

Hardware startups don’t follow the neat trajectories investors became accustomed to during the SaaS era. Their paths are messier, more capital-intensive, and often require a fundamentally different way of thinking about risk, talent, and execution.

In this conversation, we unpack why the best venture investments often begin with disagreement, how elite engineering cultures create outsized companies, and what founders can learn from organizations like SpaceX, Tesla, and ASML.

In this episode, we covered:

→ Why hardware investing requires a different mindset than SaaS

→ Why great VC partnerships shouldn’t always agree

→ How SpaceX, Tesla, and ASML created cultures that move hardware at extraordinary speed

→ Why operator networks outperform impressive résumés

→ The role of luck—and how investors try to recognize it

→ Why accepting more failures may actually produce better venture returns

→ Whether Europe can compete with China’s manufacturing advantage

✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.

Brought to you by:

Heights: a design agency founded by Gabri Grassi, helping impact-driven tech companies sharpen their brand, attract investors, and scale their reach. Grab your free brand checklist here or reach out to Gabri to elevate your brand.

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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

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🌊 Building Concrete That Stores Carbon

Can the world’s most essential building material become a climate solution?

We’re joined by Andreas Saari, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Paebbl, a company developing carbon-storing materials that can be blended directly into concrete.

Cement is responsible for roughly 8% of global CO₂ emissions. The challenge isn’t just the energy required to produce it, half of the emissions come from the chemistry itself. In this conversation, Andreas explains why decarbonizing cement is one of climate tech’s hardest problems and why entirely new materials may offer a path forward.

We also explore what it takes to bring a novel industrial material to market, how risk is shared across the construction value chain, and why Europe could play a defining role in the next industrial era.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why cement remains one of the toughest sectors to decarbonize

→ How Paebbl turns captured CO₂ and abundant minerals into a carbon-storing construction material

→ Why customers increasingly demand low-carbon concrete—and who’s willing to pay for it

→ The challenge of proving performance when buildings and infrastructure are on the line

→ How Paebbl brought companies like Holcim and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund onto its cap table to align incentives

→ Why scaling industrial climate technologies requires a completely different financing model

→ Europe’s opportunity to lead a new wave of industrial innovation

→ The emerging software, AI, and materials technologies transforming the construction industry

✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.