Your startup just fell out of CSRD scope. The questionnaire is still coming.
The omnibus cut CSRD's scope to companies with more than 1,000 employees and 450 million euros. You are out. The questionnaire from your biggest customers is still coming
Matt Kozak
Thoughts, stories and ideas.
Latest posts
Your charging network is probably stuck on OCPP 1.6, and the exit just got more interesting
Most of Europe's deployed chargers still speak OCPP 1.6, a protocol from a earlier era. New one has been ratified for years, it is now an IEC standard, and there is a newer version on top of it.
Edge AI for industrial: Jetson, YOLO, and the real cost of leaving the cloud
Edge AI sounds like a way to save on cloud inference bills. In practice, it usually is not. The right reasons to go to the edge are latency, privacy, and bandwidth, in that order, and if your reason is not one of those three, stay in the cloud.
Time-series at energy scale: TimescaleDB, InfluxDB, or ClickHouse?
Pick wrong and your data layer will crack at exactly the moment your fleet is interesting. The three credible options for energy and IoT time-series in 2026 are TimescaleDB, InfluxDB, and ClickHouse. Each is excellent for a slightly different shape of workload.
Series A engineering in the age of AI: stay lean, but know what still forces you to grow
The old Series A reflex was to raise the round and hire engineering up to twenty-five people. In 2026 that reflex is wrong. AI raises per-engineer output enough that you can stay lean far longer, but the organizational transition does not disappear. It relocates.
LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, Cat-M1: a 2026 connectivity decision tree
Picking your connectivity is picking your unit economics, and you only get to do it cheaply once. Here is the decision tree I would hand a founder shipping their first ten thousand devices in 2026, with the Polish coverage reality that most guides get wrong.
Demand-side flexibility: the grid asset hiding in your customers' basements
Every heat pump, EV charger, and home battery in Europe is already a grid asset. Most of them are just not aggregated, not addressable, and not paid. The companies that crack the aggregation layer in the next three years will own a category that does not have a name yet.
Balancing markets, explained for software builders
If you are building anything that touches the grid, you will run into FCR, aFRR, mFRR, BRPs, and BSPs within your first three meetings with a utility. The terminology sounds designed to keep software people out. The mechanics are simpler than a Stripe webhook flow.
Technical due diligence in climate tech: what VCs miss when they only read the deck
Climate tech due diligence is not the same as SaaS due diligence. The code base is usually fine. The risks live in hardware dependencies, certification timelines, regulated market access, and whether the team has ever shipped against a real grid operator.
Dynamic tariff customers are supposed to tune out. Ours open the app 23 times a month.
The conventional wisdom is that dynamic tariff customers check the app out of novelty and then forget it exists. Pstryk's data says the opposite. Here is what real engagement looks like and what it means for how you build.
EMS architecture: when local control beats the cloud round trip
An EMS that round-trips every decision through the cloud is going to disappoint someone, eventually, in a way that costs real money. The right split between edge and cloud is a latency budget question, and once you frame it that way the architecture writes itself.
MQTT at fleet scale: what a few thousand IoT devices and one bad Postgres password taught us
A misconfigured Postgres credential turned an ordinary EMQX cluster into a 50,000-connection-attempt-per-minute self-DDoS. Here is what we changed about authentication, observability, and runbook design after that night.
The fractional CTO playbook: what four hours a week actually buys you
Four hours a week is enough to fix architecture, hiring, and roadmap if you spend it on the right things, and useless if you spend it reviewing pull requests.
Green Energy in Europe: We Built It. Now Comes the Hard Part.
Sometime in 2025, Europe quietly crossed a line that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil fuels combined for the first time in EU history - 30% versus 29%, according to Ember's full-year review. Renewables overall hit 47.3%
Vertical Farming: Tech-driven solutions for sustainable food production
If you've spent any time in climate tech, you've probably noticed that energy and transport get most of the attention. Fair enough - they're massive emitters. But food production? It accounts for roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, eats up 50% of habitable