- Northvolt (Sweden, industrial/cleantech): Europe’s flagship battery start-up raised 15 billion EUR through heavy reliance on state guarantees, EU and pension fund-backed financing (ATP, EIB, EIFO, etc.), and corporate anchor customers like Volkswagen. However commercialisation and reaching industrial grade production proved more difficult than anticipated, leaving it to get bought out of bankruptcy proceedings for just 200 million USD by a US-based startup.
- Stegra / H2 Green Steel (Sweden, industrial/cleantech): Europe’s big bet in terms of creating a green-steel plant launched with 6.5 billion EUR in planned financing, backed by EU and state support, pension funds, and corporate offtakers such as Mercedes-Benz and Scania. Its Boden, Sweden plant was designed to deliver 2.5 million tonnes of near-zero carbon steel annually by 2030, powered by green hydrogen and renewable electricity. However, escalating costs, delays, and a shortfall in expected state aid have forced the company to seek another 975 million EUR in emergency funding, while media reports suggest it faces acute financial distress and potential insolvency.
- Skeleton Technologies (Estonia, ultracapacitors): A deeptech hardware player with strong potential in energy storage. It has raised significant VC funding but repeatedly flagged that European growth financing is shallow compared to the US or China, slowing down industrial rollout.
- Nilar (Sweden, batteries): Developed innovative nickel-metal hydride storage systems but has struggled to secure the scale-up capital needed to compete internationally, underlining Europe’s gap in patient industrial capital.
- Addressing the hard-tech scale-up challenge by mastering hypertransformation.
Industrial and hardware-based technologies rarely fail because of the product – they fail because of the overwhelming complexity that emerges when trying to scale technology, operations and capital in uncertain regulatory regimes across multiple geographies and value chains. This phase demands a level of governance, speed, and integration that most early-stage companies – and their investors – are unprepared for. There are several ways to teach skills necessary to navigate this. One is by building and incorporating bespoke executive programmes. One such programme that NAP has already built is the “Global Re-Industrialisation Programme” in partnership with the Danish Technical University (DTU).
- Giving access to systematic value creation powered by proven toolkits.
Nordic Alpha Partners has already prepared to release its full value creation and management toolkit in book form. Covering the creation, de-risking and management of hypergrowth at the earliest stages while bringing institutional-grade structure, strategy, and data discipline to young industrial technology companies.
- Offering flexible and secure liquidity models, meaning predictable return pathways for investors.
Such a platform could introduce a new level of liquidity visibility and structural flexibility to the business angels as it would set up structural partnerships with conventional VC and growth funds. Funds that are looking for de-risked assets and are eager to buy secondaries to secure them. At the same time, each company’s journey would be fully mapped from the outset, defining the expected strategic trajectory and the liquidity (exit) options available at key milestones. This ensures investors are never locked into a binary exit scenario but instead benefit from multiple, pre-engineered outcomes—including full exits to later-stage investors, partial exits to realise early returns, or continued ownership and co-investment alongside a growth fund. By combining disciplined planning with optionality, a platform like this could provide a predictable, de-risked liquidity profile. Something that is very uncommon in early-stage investing otherwise, allowing angels to balance short-term return potential with long-term value participation.
- Europe is facing a new normal and the current early-stage investment model is evidently ill-equipped to boost European resilience technologies and competitiveness overall.
- We need to rethink Europe’s early-stage model if we want to keep up with the US and China, as well as new and emerging economies such as India.
- Right now, Europe’s “army” of business angels needs to be utilized much better. They are the key to unlocking Europe’s commercialisation potential.
- All the components are available to us, and if we are able to set it up in large enough scale, we can enable the rest of the financial ecosystem to enter into the hardware sector and support the emergence of critical new industrial technologies. This way, we can ultimately boost GDP growth and secure stronger returns to Europe’s pensions funds, and increase resilience across the market.
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About Nordic Alpha Partners
