Emin Askerov
Cleantech FOAK Advisor

Corporate Venture Capital can help you with building a FOAK - much earlier than you think.

Today is the first monthly check-in on the 23 FOAK climate tech projects  I said I’d track publicly in 2026! FOAKs get talked about more and more, which is definitely a good thing! I’m following up on the developments of the largest and most interesting FOAK projects in climate tech. I first go over the good news, then the bad, and you’ll get an updated table at the end! The good news (actual execution happened) H2 Green Steel (now Stegra)  signed a long-term supply agreement

I’ve put together a list of 23 FOAK climate tech projects that are supposed to prove something in 2026 — not in decks, not in announcements, but in steel, concrete, electrons, molecules, and regulatory filings.

An intro to short fantasy novella.

Every time someone says software-defined vehicle, I imagine driving 250 km/h on the Autobahn and seeing: “System has unexpectedly crashed. Reboot in progress.” That thought led me to dig into SDVs, money, and who actually benefits.

How BP and Shell abandoned their green ambitions

This is a review of key successful and key failed FOAKs in 2025

Nothing tests a founder’s sanity like having too many “very interested” customers. It’s like speed dating with homework. A few days ago, I spoke with an early-stage founder whose product was attracting a lot of interest. On paper, it looked like a dream: inbound requests from consumer electronics, defence, industrial automation, and even a few overseas corporates. In reality, it was a trap. The team had five people, no sales function, and most of their time was devoted to dev

Why AI power demand won't materialise at the scale imagined.

Adaptation and mitigation are often viewed as competing for capital. In fact, they are not.

Takeaways from FOAK panel at VDS 2025

We need more capital to bridge the FOAK “valley of death” in climate tech — but not at any cost. Lately, I’ve seen two worrying ideas gaining ground: crowdfunding that asks ordinary people to “invest like VCs,” and proposals to channel pension money into the riskiest stage of startup growth. Both sound democratic. Both are dangerous.

The military has always been the earliest adopter of new tech. Dirk Singer noted that today it’s also one of the biggest investors in e-fuels — not for climate goals, but for energy security. Like solar panels in the 1990s, disruption often starts on the battlefield.

I stumbled across Martin Gallardo’s post and decided that it would be worthwhile to rewrite my comment into a full post. The consulting business has never been so good, but with the advent of AI, people were predicting that it would soon go out of business. I believe that these comments are made by people who either had a very negative experience hiring consultants (I had that experience, too) or have no idea what they are talking about. I’ve seen three very different ways

This was my second Battery Day in the Netherlands. Last year I came for the first time and was surprised at how much battery innovation is happening here. This year the event was bigger, much better organised, and had over 600 participants. It also gained an international dimension — with Matthieu Hubert from ACC giving a keynote on the French sector, and a dedicated session on cooperation with China. A few takeaways: 1) Scaling Dutch startups means going international. The g

Climate VC funding fell more than 3x from its peak in 2021

The lessons of Natron Energy collapse

In the end, it had to be a political decision. After half a year of sifting through more than twenty locations and countless meetings with local officials, our future 8 GWh factory came down to two options. Tatarstan: a highly industrialised region east of Moscow, with a strong industrial park, permits ready, and—most importantly—right next to our main customer, Kamaz. Kaliningrad: a Russian exclave in Europe, wedged between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea, on the unfini

What is the future of electric mobility?

We don’t have a cleantech innovation problem — we have a FOAK execution problem. Over the past year, I’ve been building something I wish I had when I started scaling my first climate tech venture: a practical, experience-based framework for getting First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) projects off the ground. In my latest article, I’ve pulled together my 50+ posts into a structured overview that maps the FOAK journey—from the moment you decide to leave the lab to the day your NOAKs are r