• The Thesis: Verve’s updated Energy & Resources thesis, split into Energy, Resources, and Industrial Resilience.
• The Market Data: Why electricity demand, critical mineral dependence, and Europe’s industrial base are all under strain, and where that creates opportunity.
• The Builders: Metafuels and Encosa Energy on what it takes to build and scale in this space today

Why Resilience, and Why Now

Lorenzo Fabritius drives the practice together with partner Thomas Meier. He framed the thesis around resilience: a resilient industrial base is the foundation of Europe’s next growth strategy. Future computing and health & bio both depend on energy that is cheap, reliable, and secure, and on continued access to critical materials.

Europe still holds real advantages, in the team’s view: an existing industrial base, deep engineering talent, and a recent pickup in capital flowing into the space, from energy public listings to record robotics funding.

Energy: Generating, Storing, and Moving Power

The clearest driver is simply that electricity demand, after declining for years, is rising sharply again. European electricity demand fell until 2020 and is now expected to increase substantially through 2030, pushed by two forces in particular.

The first is electrification of mobility. EV sales across the EU surged 40% in the first half of 2026 alone and now hold roughly 20% market share, straining a grid that was not built for this pace of adoption.

The second is data centers. Bloomberg estimates power demand from data centers will quadruple by 2034. Data centers can be built in two to three years, while grid expansions take four to ten, a mismatch already producing severe grid connection queues. A growing share of renewables adds a further complication: more wind and solar means more intermittency, which is why battery storage and smart grid orchestration are becoming urgent investment areas. Ongoing conflicts affecting Russian and Middle Eastern hydrocarbon supply add a further layer of urgency, particularly for heavy industry and aviation, sectors that are hard to electrify.

Verve invests across energy generation, storage, distribution and grid management, and grid and electrification hardware. One portfolio example raised in the webinar was Turn2X, a Munich-based company producing renewable natural gas from water and CO2 that lets European industrial clients decarbonize processes without retrofitting existing gas infrastructure.

Resources: Securing Critical Materials

The second pillar is about the raw materials everything else depends on: lithium, copper, neodymium, and other critical minerals needed for electrification, AI infrastructure, and high-tech manufacturing. The concentration risk is stark. China controls over 70% of rare earth mining and over 80% of refining capacity, and has increasingly used export limits on specific rare earths as leverage, creating bottlenecks for clean energy, electronics, and defense applications. The EU’s Critical Raw Material Act is pushing in the opposite direction, toward domestic discovery, processing, recycling, and alternative materials.

Verve’s portfolio example here is Atana, which uses AI on unstructured geological data to identify overlooked mining deposits, starting with lithium brine, including sites in Germany and Poland, with plans to expand to other minerals.

Industrial Resilience: Automation and Robotics

The third pillar addresses Europe’s industrial backbone directly. The EU workforce is contracting by roughly 1.2 million people per year, which means productivity has to rise just to maintain current levels of wealth creation. At the same time, industrial robot hardware prices are falling fast, a trend most visible in humanoid robotics, and manufacturing is becoming increasingly connected and data-driven. Verve splits this opportunity into automation-native manufacturing, vertical robotics integration, high-performance components, and frontier industrial capacity, and points to Munich-based Luminovo, which automates electronics supply chains, as an example already in the portfolio.

Metafuels: Sustainable Aviation Fuel at Industrial Scale

Saurabh Kapoor, founder and CEO of Metafuels, joined to talk about decarbonizing mid- to long-haul aviation, flights of 2,000 kilometers and beyond that account for 70% of aviation’s CO2 emissions and cannot realistically be electrified. Metafuels’ methanol-to-jet pathway converts renewable methanol into drop-in sustainable aviation fuel compatible with existing aircraft and infrastructure. The company recently inaugurated its technology demonstration plant at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland and is developing its first commercial project at the Port of Rotterdam, targeting a final investment decision in Q3 2027 and operations from 2030. Verve has backed Metafuels since 2024, aligned with its Resilience in Energy & Resources investment topic.

Encosa Energy: Making Battery Storage Simple for Industry

Sascha Koberstaedt, co-founder and CEO of Encosa Energy, presented the company’s work reducing energy costs for commercial and industrial customers through battery storage, a segment that, unlike residential or utility-scale storage, has seen almost no deployment in Europe to date. Encosa provides an end-to-end platform covering hardware, financing, installation, and an AI-driven trading layer that combines internal cost savings with external energy trading on a single battery, more than doubling potential savings for customers. The commercial and industrial segment Encosa targets accounts for roughly 70% of Germany’s electricity consumption and over half of its CO2 emissions. The company, just over two years old, recently closed a €25 million financing round with Verve participating and has more than €200 million in signed customer contracts. Verve has backed Encosa since 2026, also aligned with its Resilience in Energy & Resources thesis.

The Bigger Picture

Both founders pointed to the same thing when asked what mattered most about working with Verve: sector expertise and network, not just capital. As Lorenzo Fabritius put it, Verve’s investment team is built primarily from people with STEM backgrounds, which lets it identify companies like Metafuels and Encosa earlier than more generalist funds typically do.

That pattern, backing technically deep, resilience-focused companies before the market broadly recognizes the opportunity, is the throughline across Verve’s Energy & Resources thesis, and one this webinar laid out clearly through the people building it.