Spotlight
From research to industrial scale
We invest for technologies to reach industrial scale in future markets: rolled out as platforms or built out as critical infrastructure. We back the entrepreneurs who build it, we fund the first plants and networks, and we help them scale up in Europe and globally.
From a proven technology to a European platform
Europe is tightening what industry may discharge, and for many plants water now determines whether they can keep operating. fluvicon, an Austrian company, spent more than a decade turning forward osmosis into plants capable of treating wastewater that conventional processes cannot handle. We took a strategic stake and built a platform around the company, to deliver industrial water treatment as a service across Europe, and to scale it toward more than EUR 100 million in industrial applications.
The first plant of the platform is being built in Poland for a leading global food producer. It improves the production process and turns the wastewater into two outputs: a recovered product that goes straight back into the client’s production, and water clean enough to meet EU discharge standards, at a fraction of the energy and cost of conventional treatment.
Securing critical communications for the quantum era
The encryption protecting most communication today will not survive quantum computing, and data intercepted now can be stored until it can be read. Quantum key distribution removes that exposure: the key travels on entangled particles of light, and any attempt to intercept them can be detected. We identified the leading European team that turned this Nobel-recognized physics into a product, and invested to take it to scale.
Together with zerothird we are building pan-European quantum-secured infrastructure connecting Europe’s financial centers and digital hubs.
The first corridor connects Vienna and Frankfurt, a distance no quantum network has yet bridged. zerothird’s systems already run inside the fiber network of Erste Group, making it the first European banking group to pilot the commercial use of entanglement-based quantum encryption on critical financial infrastructure.
