Tech Incubators Focus On Keeping Europe Green

Early last year, Mathijs de Meijer had an idea, one that started as a joke and turned into a company. After a construction mishap knocked out the heating system in the home of his friend, Boaz Leupe, on a cold day, Mr. de Meijer stopped by to visit, a laptop under his arm.

He said “‘Hey, why don’t we go to Dell.com, buy 100 laptops and then we’ll have some nerd heat,”’ Mr. Leupe recalled. “We had a bit of a laugh about that, and then we realized it wasn’t a bad idea.”

Now, Nerdalize, based in Delft, the Netherlands, is ramping up its plan to replace home radiators with disguised computer servers and sell data processing time to remote users while the excess heat warms the house for free. The company is valued at between 2 million and 3 million euros, or about $2.7 million and $4 million.

Along the way, Mr. de Meijer, Mr. Leupe and the company’s third co-founder, Florian Schneider, have gotten a helping hand from YES!Delft, a small-business incubator that, like others across Europe, offers advice, office space and connections to help environmentally focused tech start-ups get off the ground.

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Credit Raquel Marín

The incubators, many of them backed by government funding, are seeking both economic and environmental returns. At the same time, they hope to keep Europe competitive in the global sector known as cleantech, an area that includes everything from electric cars and “smartgrid” power transmission systems to high-capacity batteries and technologies to harvest energy from new sources like waves and tides.

Would-be entrepreneurs “come in with a nice technology,” said Frans Nauta, deputy director of entrepreneurship at Climate-KIC, a European Commission-funded effort that supports environment-focused tech start-ups through incubators at universities. “To get them in 18 months to the point where they know their stuff so well that an investor can be comfortable to invest a million, that’s my work.”

Between 60 and 70 incubators across Europe offer support to cleantech companies, said Stephan van Dijk, innovation program manager at the Delft University of Technology, who is researching the role of cleantech incubators for a European Union study. Most do so as part of a program aimed at promoting tech start-ups in general, he said.

The incubators often rent space to young companies in buildings that house dozens of start-ups, so the entrepreneurs can chat over coffee or meet in the hallways and exchange ideas. Often linked to a university — Climate-KIC’s sites include Imperial College in London, the Paris Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Berlin — they offer access to coaches who help with business issues, scientists with a wide range of technical expertise and networks of contacts, including suppliers, potential customers and private investors.

At YES!Delft, where about 20 of the 70 start-ups are cleantech-focused, Mr. Leupe, of Nerdalize, said the offices were brimming with energy and creativity.

“You do get engineers running through the building shaking their hands in victory every once in a while,” Mr. Leupe said.

“Recently, we had the entire executive board of one of the largest energy companies in Europe” in the office, sipping coffee, Mr. Leupe said. “It adds a lot of network, it adds a lot of knowledge.”

The cleantech sector, particularly its renewable energy segment, has been through a bumpy few years, particularly in the United States, where enthusiastic investors jumped in in droves in the mid-2000s, then took losses as falling prices and scaled-back government support hurt many companies. Many investors are now more cautious about a sector in which up-front capital requirements can be high, development periods long and technologies risky and complicated.

Progress has been smoother in Europe, where the cleantech frenzy was never as fevered as in California’s Silicon Valley, Mr. Nauta said. But because the Continent lacks the

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