Programmes, Partners, and the Institutional Ask

This chapter is the operational close of the memorandum. The preceding eight chapters have established the architectural premise of the platform, the climate-performance methodology under which it operates, the three-layer economic engine through which it captures value, the structural risk architecture engineered against the failure modes of the preceding investment cycle, and the operational competence of the founder team that has constructed the platform to its current state. The present chapter addresses the institutional arrangements through which the platform proceeds: the existing programme engagements on which the present commercial trajectory rests, the strategic supply-partner architecture through which the deployment phase is structured, the corporate-venture and strategic-investor landscape against which the round is positioned, the financial structure of the round itself, and the direct institutional request that the platform extends to World Fund.

1.  Submitted and In-Process Institutional Programmes

The platform's institutional-financing engagement is structured across three parallel tracks at the date of this memorandum, each at a documented stage of formal process and each contributing complementary capital and validation to the deployment trajectory the Series A round is positioned to anchor.

The first track is the EIC Accelerator 2026 application submitted under the 4 March 2026 cycle, proposal identifier 101331934, applicant Geschäftsträger Tech GmbH under the participant identification code 867086008, applicant acronym “iONE ENERGY”. The proposal requests EUR 2.35 million in non-dilutive grant funding under the EIC Accelerator funding instrument, supporting the certification, Validation Programme deployment, and platform-scaling milestones documented across the present memorandum. The proposal is at the date of this memorandum in evaluation under the standard EIC Step 2 review process, with cycle results expected to issue under the published EIC 2026 evaluation timetable. The EIC Accelerator participation is structurally complementary to the Series A capital structure: the EIC grant component, if awarded, directly substitutes for the equity-funded share of the certification and Validation Programme allocation, improving the capital efficiency of the Series A round and extending the deployment runway against the same equity dilution.

The second track is the engagement with the High-Tech Gründerfonds, the German federal early-stage technology fund, where the platform is in process for a financing contribution of up to EUR 1 million under the fund's seed-stage co-investment mandate. The HTGF participation is structurally aligned with the present Series A round under the co-investment model through which HTGF typically participates alongside an institutional lead climate investor — a model that materially eases the documentation and due-diligence overhead on the lead investor by leveraging the parallel diligence conducted by the HTGF investment team.

The third track is the engagement with Investitionsbank Berlin, the federal-state development bank of the Land Berlin, where the platform is in active conversation under the IBB instruments structured to support Berlin-headquartered deep-technology platforms. The IBB participation contributes capital and institutional standing into the regional and municipal-counterparty layer through which the platform's Berlin operational presence is supported.

Each of these three tracks is documented in the data room appended to this memorandum, with the underlying applications, correspondence, and contractual instruments available for institutional verification. The aggregate non-Series-A capital structure these tracks contribute, in the central case where the EIC application succeeds and the HTGF and IBB participations confirm, is approximately EUR 3 to 3.5 million in non-Series-A funding complementing the present Series A round.

2.  The European Power Electronics Validation Programme

The strategic supply-partner architecture documented in Chapter IV operates through the European Power Electronics Validation Programme, the platform's mechanism for translating the trilateral supply thesis into operational engagement with the European industrial-power vendor ecosystem. The Programme is structured around the deployment of approximately eighty to one hundred iONE platform shells across the climatic and operational deployment zones documented in Chapter IV — the Baltic operational corridor, the Arctic deployment zone, the Polish eastern flank, the MENA thermal-cycling envelope, and the Central European baseline — under a structured twelve-month telemetry-validation engagement under which European power-electronics manufacturers contribute modular inputs in kind in exchange for cell-level operational telemetry on their components under real-world extreme-environment deployment conditions.

The strategic value the Programme captures for the European power-electronics vendor ecosystem is the structurally unavailable field-deployment validation that no individual vendor can construct at acceptable cost — empirically generated degradation curves, thermal-cycling signatures, electrical-protection behaviour under demanding operating envelopes, and the broader operational performance dataset that the European tandem-cell pipeline and the European battery-management ecosystem require for institutional procurement qualification. The strategic value the Programme captures for the iONE platform is the corresponding in-kind input that materially reduces the bill-of-materials cost of the Validation Programme deployment fleet while simultaneously establishing the partner-vendor relationships through which the assured-supply track of the trilateral architecture is operationally constituted.

The vendor-engagement layer of the Programme is currently structured around four primary European industrial-power vendors — CE+T Power, Eltek, Benning, and Vertiv — operating across the assured-supply position in the iONE bill of materials, with the Programme architecture engineered for expansion across the broader European industrial-power vendor ecosystem (Schneider Electric, ABB, Eaton, Salicru, Studer Innotec, Victron Energy, EnerSys, Merus Power, and the parallel set of vendors operating across the European industrial-power category) under the same in-kind contribution framework. The Programme is positioned for activation against the certification and validation milestones the present Series A round is structured to deliver, with the eighty-to-hundred-unit deployment scaled to the post-Series A first production series of the iONE platform.

The institutional logic of the Programme aligns directly with the agenda of the Energy Resilience Leadership Group, co-chaired by Christian Bruch, Chief Executive Officer of Siemens Energy, and Ann Mettler, former Vice President for Europe at Breakthrough Energy and Board Member of the European Innovation Council. The Group’s mandate — to accelerate European technological resilience against the structural vulnerabilities exposed by the 2022 to 2026 period — is the institutional context within which the iONE Validation Programme operates as a material implementation: foundation-free, rapid-deployment, telemetry-equipped distributed-energy infrastructure constituted under European protocol architecture, deployable across the operational envelope the Group’s resilience thesis identifies as the structural priority.

3.  The Corporate-Venture and Strategic-Investor Landscape

The platform's positioning across the European corporate-venture and strategic-investor landscape is informational rather than as a parallel ask: the present round is constructed for institutional climate-tech leadership, not for fragmented multi-corporate engagement at the seed stage. The corporate-venture engagement layer is identified for institutional reference and for the post-Series A growth-round architecture, not for the present round.

Three tiers of corporate-venture engagement are identified across the European industrial-energy and infrastructure-technology landscape. The first tier is Siemens Energy Ventures, operating from the Berlin corporate-venture office across the broader Siemens Energy platform, structurally positioned at the intersection of distributed energy resources, grid-scale infrastructure, and the institutional industrial-energy customer base that overlaps directly with the iONE deployment categories. The second tier is the parallel set of European industrial-conglomerate venture arms — ABB Technology Ventures and Bosch Ventures — operating across the broader European industrial-and-automation category and positioned to participate in growth-stage rounds against demonstrated commercial deployment. The third tier is SE Ventures, the venture arm of Schneider Electric, operating across the distributed-energy-management and orchestration-platform categories that overlap with the iONE platform's protocol-and-orchestration architecture documented in Chapter IV.

Each of these corporate-venture engagements is positioned for the post-Series A growth-round architecture rather than for the present round. The strategic logic of this sequencing is institutional: a climate-tech platform led by a category-leader climate fund in the Series A round, with corporate-venture participation entering at the growth round under the institutional governance structure established at the Series A close, operates under a different — and structurally healthier — governance architecture than a platform that mixes climate-VC and corporate-venture capital at the seed stage. The present round is structured for institutional climate-tech leadership; the corporate-venture engagement enters at the appropriate later stage.

4.  The Series A Round: Structure and Milestone Tranches

The present Series A round is structured at EUR 2.5 million in total commitment, deployed across three milestone-based tranches that align capital release with documented operational delivery against the development plan. The structure is engineered to support the certification, Validation Programme deployment, and series-ready operational scaling that the post-Series A trajectory requires, while preserving the institutional governance discipline that milestone-tranche architecture provides to the lead investor across the deployment cycle.

The first tranche, at EUR 800,000, supports the completion of the platform's certification and validation milestones across the present prototype generation and into the European Power Electronics Validation Programme launch, including the IEC 62619, UN 38.3, CE/LVD/EMC/RoHS certification completion and the formal qualification of the platform's bill of materials against the EU Battery Regulation 2023/1542 due-diligence framework documented in Chapter II. The tranche is released at Series A close against confirmed deployment of the Series A capital structure and the institutional governance arrangements established at the close.

The second tranche, at EUR 900,000, supports the supply-chain governance and Validation Programme deployment phase, including the activation of the GT Energy Family international partnership architecture across the pre-contracted Bulgarian and Ukrainian jurisdictions documented in Chapter VII, the operational onboarding of the European Power Electronics Validation Programme partner vendors, the recruitment of the senior commercial leadership and the production-scaling executive identified in Chapter VIII, and the contract-manufacturing engagement against the European automotive-corridor industrial-assembly capacity documented in Chapter VI. The tranche is released against documented delivery of the first-tranche milestone set and against confirmation of the operational deployment infrastructure that the second-tranche allocation funds.

The third tranche, at EUR 800,000, supports the series-ready operational scaling phase, including the first commercial production series deployment, the operational activation of the iONEOS subscription layer documented in Chapter VI, the commencement of the grid-flexibility revenue layer at the grid-connected fraction of the early-deployed fleet, and the institutional governance and reporting infrastructure that the post-Series A growth-round architecture requires. The tranche is released against documented delivery of the second-tranche milestone set and against the operational metrics that the institutional governance structure established at the Series A close defines as the series-ready operational threshold.

The aggregate Series A capital structure, taken together with the EIC Accelerator EUR 2.35 million grant component in the central case where the application succeeds, the HTGF EUR 1 million in process, and the IBB Berlin participation in active conversation, delivers the platform to the post-Series A growth-round threshold under a documented operational and institutional governance trajectory. The milestone-tranche architecture is the institutional discipline through which the lead investor's capital deployment aligns with the operational delivery the platform commits to across the round horizon.

5.  The Institutional Ask: Position Extended to World Fund

The platform extends to World Fund the formal request to lead the Series A round at the structure documented above. The request is made on the institutional basis that the platform's category positioning, climate-performance profile, risk architecture, capital-efficiency structure, and founder-commitment depth correspond directly to the institutional thesis on which World Fund is constituted and on which the firm's institutional limited-partner base evaluates the firm's portfolio construction.

The platform's category positioning is European climate-infrastructure at the architectural and protocol layer, the position documented in Chapter III as the structural answer to the cell-versus-architecture failure pattern of the preceding investment cycle. The platform's climate-performance profile passes the World Fund 100 megatonnes per annum institutional threshold by a factor of 2.1 under the conservative case of the methodology documented in Chapter V, with the underlying assumptions, counterfactuals, and emissions factors aligned with the methodology the firm has publicly committed to in its institutional communications. The platform's risk architecture, documented in Chapter VII, is engineered against the four structural failure modes of the preceding cycle through documented multi-channel, multi-segment, trilateral-supply, and component-validation diversification. The platform's capital-efficiency structure, documented in Chapter VI, is built on capital-light contract-manufacturing scaling on the existing European industrial base, foregoing the gigafactory-construction trajectory that has demonstrably failed in the European battery-manufacturing category. The founder commitment, documented in Chapter VIII, is at a depth that materially exceeds the founder-experience and founder-capital profile typically engaged at the Series A stage of the European climate-tech category.

The strategic value the platform offers to World Fund as lead investor is, in the institutional climate-tech investment framework, threefold. The platform is a multi-segment, multi-jurisdiction, multi-revenue-layer climate-infrastructure asset operating at the architectural layer where European energy sovereignty is structurally won, and its early-deployment trajectory is positioned for the same regulatory-inflection commercial-capture pattern the founder has executed once at industrial scale. The platform's operational architecture is engineered for capital-light scaling on the European industrial base, producing the institutional return profile climate-tech leadership requires without the capital intensity of the gigafactory category that has been institutionally rejected by the European capital markets. The platform's distributed-fleet data architecture, accumulating across the deployment trajectory under the protocol-and-telemetry layer documented in Chapter IV, constitutes the structural data asset that the institutional thesis on long-horizon climate-infrastructure value compounds against.

The strategic value World Fund offers to the platform as lead investor is the institutional climate-tech leadership and the institutional limited-partner base — the European Investment Fund, KfW Capital, the East Anglia Pension Fund, PwC Germany, and the broader institutional climate-capital ecosystem — through which the platform's post-Series A growth trajectory is constructed. A climate-infrastructure platform led by World Fund at Series A is institutionally positioned for the growth-round corporate-venture engagement, the strategic-integration architecture documented in Chapter VI, and the post-Series A institutional-capital trajectory through which the platform's deployment to category leadership is delivered.

The request is made without dependence on further preliminary engagement. The memorandum constitutes the institutional documentation the platform extends to the firm for the formal evaluation under the firm's investment process. The data room appended to this memorandum contains the operational, financial, regulatory, and technical documentation the firm's investment process requires for institutional diligence. The founder team is available for the engagement structure the firm constructs for the evaluation.

The request is positioned at the category-creating stage rather than at the category-participant stage of climate-infrastructure investment: the platform constitutes a category for which the European customs taxonomy has not yet established dedicated tariff classification, with current declaration falling under HS 8543 70 90 — electrical apparatus “not specified or included elsewhere” — the formal regulatory artefact of category novelty.

We ask. You decide.

Closing

The memorandum is constructed on the principle that the institutional decision the firm is engaged to make is best supported by the institutional documentation that the firm requires, presented at the analytical register and operational depth the institutional climate-tech category operates under, with the founder team's posture toward the engagement structured around the institutional discipline that the firm and its limited-partner base expect.

The platform is constructed. The thesis is documented. The capital is sought. The ask is extended. The decision is yours.