Welcome back to Changemakers, the newsletter for founders, storytellers and leaders shaping the future of climate, nature and impact-led innovation.
In May, The Decision Room (the climate capital convening I co-founded) put investors, founders, and operators from circular materials in a closed room in Zürich and asked a blunt question: if the technology is ready and the regulation is real, why isn’t this sector scaling?
The full diagnosis is now published, and I’d recommend every founder building anything physical reads it. But the essay was written for capital allocators. This is the founder version: what the room’s conclusions mean for how you raise, how you pilot, and how you tell your story.
1. You are probably pitching the wrong kind of capital.
The room’s core diagnosis: circular materials is an infrastructure problem being treated as a venture problem. Venture capital is not structured to fund first-of-a-kind production facilities. If your next milestone is a plant, the investors you need think in offtake coverage, debt service, and project risk, not in TAM slides and 10x narratives. The story that wins a Series A can actively lose a project finance conversation. Know which room you’re walking into, and build the deck for that room.
2. Signed customers are not a funded plant.
Carbios did everything the playbook demands. A decade of proven science. An offtake consortium most founders would kill for: L’Oréal, PepsiCo, Nestlé Waters, PUMA, On. In December 2024 it paused construction of its first industrial plant and cut up to 40% of its workforce anyway, because the capex financing wasn’t in place. Renewcell pre-sold capacity to major brands and still went bankrupt. Offtake is necessary. It is not sufficient. Budget your runway and your narrative for the gap between signed contracts and a financed facility, because that gap is where this sector’s companies die.
3. Study the Syre sequence.
One company in the essay got the order right. Syre secured a $600 million, seven-year offtake from H&M before it had a plant. TPG led a $100 million Series A on the back of that offtake. Offtake first, equity second, plant third. The offtake did the de-risking that the pitch deck alone never could. If a strategic buyer believes in you enough to pilot, the conversation to have is whether they believe enough to commit volume. Which brings me to the uncomfortable one.
4. Your pilot might be someone else’s negotiating chip.
A pattern named in the room by a founder who lived it: a startup develops a credible alternative, the pilot succeeds, an investment is announced, and the incumbent supplier suddenly returns to the buyer with better pricing. The buyer takes the improved terms, keeps the incumbent, and quietly drops the startup. The pilot worked perfectly, just not for the company that ran it. The defence is commitment structure: a pilot tied to a pre-agreed purchase pathway carries a price for walking away. If a buyer won’t discuss what happens after a successful pilot, that tells you what the pilot is for.
5. Your feedstock advantage is melting.
Used cooking oil went from $300 a tonne waste to over €1,100 a tonne strategic commodity the moment policy made it valuable. The same repricing is coming for whatever waste stream your model depends on. Cheap feedstock is a temporary state, not a business model input. Lock long-term supply agreements, exclusivity, or equity in your feedstock chain now, while your advantage is still invisible to everyone else.
The thread through all five: in this sector, the story you tell and the structure you build are the same work. The companies that scale are the ones whose narrative matches the capital they actually need.
Read the full essay, with the Michelin deep-dive, the €10 billion upstream number, and what the room committed to build:
Join the conversation. This one struck a nerve on LinkedIn, founders, government and investors are adding their own versions of the offtake-capex lock in the comments. Add yours: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aaroncleamanbrighterfuture_carbios-did-everything-right-and-it-still-share-7485302400636067841-uq_c/
And if the story is the problem: this is the work Brighter Future Studio does. Positioning, pitch, and investor narrative for climate and frontier-tech founders, including knowing which capital your story is actually for. Reply to this email and tell me what you’re raising.
Aaron C. Leaman
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