The main outcomes from speaking at CLUJ Innovation Day 2021
Recently Polina Vasilenko, founder and CEO was invited as a keynote speaker and participants on #CleanTech panel at Cluj Innovations Days 2021.
We would like to share main outcomes of the discussions and lifehacks from HelioRec’s experience.
Brief introduction of our CEO
Polina is a passionate entrepreneur, with two master’s degrees in Chemistry and Renewable Energy (ocean) and as well a mentor in Women in Tech.
As an active traveller (68 countries) and scuba-diver, she saw many beautiful places ruined by negative anthropogenic impacts and based on her personal experience and internal feelings, she decided to change her career’s path from “black” side of fossil fuel to “green” side of renewable energy. In the past, Polina was cementing engineer and constructed oil&gas wells in Siberia, Far East of Russia, North part of Russia and in the USA. After a successful 14-year career in the oil and gas, she decided to make a fundamental career change and to do something useful for the planet.
Both her trainings and working experience led Polina to found HelioRec. HelioRec is an innovative technological startup, in a field of floating solar technologies.
What we think about Clean Tech startups
In the last years people awareness about climate change was increased significantly. 93% of EU citizens see climate change as a serious problem. This is what happened with Polina in 2016 when she decided to change her career and dedicate herself to renewables.
As people more conscious about climate change, more entrepreneurs want to work in clean tech field as per PWC report — The growth rate of climate tech from 2013 has been sizable, with more than 3750% increase over the 7 year period (2013–2019).
When people are thinking to open own company, they see unicorns and few success stories, they think that for them it will be also possible. But in reality 90% of new start-ups fail due to number of reasons and the main reason is NO MAREKT NEEDS FOR THE IDEA. Polina did very careful marketing research and few customer development campaigns were conducted before opening the company.
HelioRec was incorporated in France, in 2019 by solo-female-founder and we would like to share main difficulties during our startup’s experience.
1. Team — it is extremely hard to find like-minded people, with proper set of hard and soft skills. Our advice is:
o Do not start the company alone and do it with co-founder.
o Be in the right eco-system — accelerators, incubators. It helps to find a good people for your startup development.
2. Lack of finance — typically, if you want to get grants, you need to have co-financing, own money or from business angel. Polina found the investor from her network. We would not recommend to search VCs money if you do not generate revenue yet.
3. Difficult to find paid customers and my advice is to search customers all the time, before even opening the company. It will help to validate your idea and start to generate revenue and after you can raise money with VCs.
4. Long term development process and you can run out of cash very fast, especially for hardware startups, typically it takes 5–10 years to be commercial ready. In our case, we could make a good progress and after 1.5 year of our development we could build our first prototype and validate idea. Couple of words about this prototype. We built the first in the world hybrid– floating solar and aeration system, the main goal of the project is to bring more oxygen to the water and make the lake alive again. And we even got National Ecological Award for this installation.
And now we are preparing for the pre-commercial pilot in Oostende port, Belgium. The main goal is to reduce CO2 emissions in the port, save land space and test our system in the sea conditions.
What are the problems in Europe for startup development?
- Very expensive to run company — accounting, lawyers, taxes; For example, the accounting service cost in Russia is 6 times lower than in France.
- Difficult regulations and bureaucracy;
- Difficult to collaborate with universities and corporates, very long negotiation processes, typically, goes in to nowhere.
- Venture capital investment in the EU amounted to $8 billion, compared to about $35 billion in the US. And additionally, the amount invested in clean tech is still significantly lower than that invested in other areas, such as software and e-commerce.
Hopefully, €1tn from Green Deal will improve the situation for cleantech startups.
And to conclude, please, think twice before you open your company, if you still want to open it:
o Do it in cleantech;
o Believe in yourself;
o Nothing can break you, till you decide that you are broken.
CleanTech panel discussion
What we understand under slogan “Green Tech”?
GreenTech is a technology which mitigate or reverse the effects of human activity on the environment. It is clean electricity production, recycling and clean air and water purification, carbon dioxide removal technology etc.
Additionally, very important is to reduce consumptions as well.
Where Europe is going with the Green Tech?
In Europe, in 2018, emissions were 23% below the 1990 level, while the GDP had increased by 61%.
Why Green Tech is so important?
Using Greentech help to reduce emissions and have better quality of life, using fossil fuel will not help to keep stable temperature on the planet. If temperature will raise, we will spend billions on recovering and most probably it will not be sufficient.
How to finance Green Tech implementation (best practices)?
In our case, we received pre-seed investment from business angel in our network and got BPI grant in France, we did co-financing of 25% for grant 45000 euro and also we received Marine energy alliance grant-voucher.
o Best practice for startups — do not try to raise money with VCs before you have revenue.
o Your most valuable recourse is your network, everything what we got it came from people who believed in me.
It is good to see, that some European programs started to work without co-financing, for example, GALATEA challenge or DigiCirc. But typically, startup has to find co-financing and it is not easy.
What else we need for Green Tech growing?
Different sectors have different needs. For example, wave and tilde energy at R&D stage and they need more government support because they do not generate revenue;
More mature technologies as wind and solar need more conscious customers who are willing to go green and also government can help with this on regulatory level.
What is missing?
As Europe has good practices for CO2 reduction in the last decades, we think Europe should be a leader in the climate change combat, because if global warming will happen, it will happen everywhere. Check global CO2 emissions since Kyoto protocol in 1992 — 356 ppm and now it is 420 ppm. It is still increasing globally even with CO2 emissions reduction in Europe.
Even if Europe will be carbon neutral, China, the USA, India and Russia will do negative impact on the whole world.
Contact us savetheplanet@heliorec.com if any questions.
