I’m very excited to introduce you to our speaker, Ross Bruton. He’s a Commercial Director at Eigen Ventures. He brings over a decade of experience in consulting, large-scale innovation, and he’s advised over hundreds of cleantech companies globally.
So today, he’s going to walk us through the shifting landscape of UK government support for cleantech — what’s changed, what it means for early-stage ventures, and how founders and investors can and should be thinking about it. So, I’ll pass it over to Ross to begin the session.
About Eigen Ventures
Ross Bruton: Thank you so much, Alberta. And thanks to Green Angel Ventures and to everyone joining today.
Quick introduction to myself: my name is Ross Bruton, Commercial Director at Eigen Ventures. I head a lot of the work that we do in structuring and designing new challenge-based programmes, as well as facilitating the different forms of commercialisation support and scale-up support that we provide innovators, as well as our engagement with investors.
For the past decade, prior to Eigen Ventures, I worked as Head of Ventures at the Carbon Trust. Along with Eigen Ventures as a Lead Partner, we designed some of the leading UK cleantech accelerator programmes — the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP), the Energy Catalyst Accelerator programme, amongst others, a few of which Eigen Ventures continues to support in leading.
Eigen Ventures is an organisation that focuses on commercialising and scaling cleantech. We do that in direct support to SMEs and innovators themselves: one-to-one mentorship-based support, delivering specific pieces of strategic work to ultimately deliver upon whatever commercial milestones they’re looking at to secure Series A, Series B, and series-based funding, and then be able to achieve the commercial traction they need and scale within the sector.
We also structure different forms of innovation challenge and accelerator programmes across government, universities, and increasingly, corporates.
Eigen Ventures as a team is a group of very experienced practitioners — either existing or ex-founders, venture capital investors, financial managers, or industry experts themselves — that have really been there and done that when it comes to scaling, either scaling themselves, adopting, or investing in early-stage cleantech ventures.
Some of the programmes we’ve run: the NZIP, a billion-pound portfolio run by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), previously BEIS, from 2020 to the end of 2024. Eigen Ventures was the lead partner with the Carbon Trust in delivering the acceleration programme, supporting over 200 SME innovators in piloting and then eventually securing finance to commercialise their tech.
We continue to be a lead partner on the Energy Catalyst Accelerator programme — commercialising early-stage UK cleantech within Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, focused largely on energy access-based technologies.
And we designed and piloted the initial programme that resulted in the development of the Energy Launchpad programme on the Energy Systems Catapult, which has supported over 350 SMEs to date.
How We Engage with Startups
Ross Bruton: In terms of how we engage with startups: direct one-to-one mentorship, covering market targeting, value proposition, business model design, techno-economic assessments, partnerships and teams, business case development, and investment materials — most areas in which you need to progress through different commercialisation milestones.
We do that on an ad-hoc basis, on a longer-term basis, and on an embedded basis in terms of fractional C-suite executives, where we have a time-bound period in which one of our expert practitioners can join your team and support you in a very hands-on manner. We also have a particular focus area around investment raising, with a themed three-month approach to support you in securing seed and Series A investment.
UK Cleantech: The Good News
Ross Bruton: Let’s start off with a status check of where we are today. Starting with the good news: the UK cleantech ecosystem remains one of the leading and largest cleantech ecosystems in the world. Startups attracted £15 billion of funding from 2020 to 2025, 2,700 deals. Around 10% of all UK growth-stage funding in that period was also into clean technologies. We have around 3,300 high-tech startups within the UK.
Even despite economic and political headwinds that I think we’re all quite conscious of, the UK venture funding environment for cleantech has remained pretty robust over the years — varying between £2.5 billion and £2.8 billion since around 2022, but ultimately ending at around £2.5 billion in 2025. So, on paper, when we look at seed, Series A, Series B, and growth-stage funding, the UK ecosystem has remained broadly resilient at a top-level factor.
The Challenges Below the Surface
Ross Bruton: The challenges come when you dig a little below the surface. When we do look below the surface, we see a significant amount of that funding being driven by growth-stage equity. We also see a lot of that funding moving into sectors that are more mature — that have a more solid and visible policy environment, more structured supporting infrastructure as well as supply chains — and therefore a de-risked or less risky bet for different forms of investors.
So we see energy and power, advanced materials, and transport being the largest sectors of investments in 2025, with the losers being agriculture, resource environment, and management, which has decreased quite a bit.
When we look at the stage of investment, there is a very particular challenge in the seed to Series A stage. We’ve seen a 50% drop — roughly half of the funding in 2025 compared to 2024, based on cleantech group data. And when you look below the figures, project-based funding reduced by about two-thirds in 2025 compared to 2024.
Why the drop in seed to Series A? Certainly, some influencing factors are the economic environment, high interest rates, and economic uncertainty. We have geopolitical issues — the new US administration’s pullback in terms of a lot of the spending they had been looking at in terms of early-stage cleantech has had an impact. But we’ve had our own political change within the country. In 2024, we had a change of government. The NZIP, which had really driven innovation and provided non-dilutive funding as a bit of an engine to seed and Series A investment over the past four years, came to an end with no clear funding environment for innovation going forward.
Broader than that, the new government was putting in place their modern industrial strategy, their clean power missions, and providing transparency that only really started to crystallise within later 2025 and coming into 2026.
The Series B and FOAK Gap
Ross Bruton: Series B funding and first-of-a-kind (FOAK) funding has been a challenge in the UK for quite some time. You would have seen this in any form of government strategy: the UK is brilliant at creating early-stage tech, early-stage IP, but not so good at scaling that tech.
An interesting stat from a recent McKinsey report: the US has three times the ecosystem of startups than the UK, but they have nine times the unicorns within the sector. When it comes to FOAK, the UK accounted for about 10% of the largest cleantech deals in seed and Series A. That halves when you look at Series B and first-of-a-kind funding — dropping to around 5% to 6%.
So Series B is a recognised issue, and first-of-a-kind funding is a recognised challenge within the sector.
Core Barriers Facing Innovators
Ross Bruton: Useful to touch on some of the challenges that we’ve seen come out of the companies themselves. We worked across the NZIP across 200 different innovators, and at the end of that programme, we ran workshops where we really tried to tease out what some of the biggest barriers were.
First and foremost, access and bankability for first-of-a-kind scale-up funding is a significant issue. There’s a company challenge to this too: it is around the skills and structure of the organisation to transition from a VC-based, high-risk organisation to a situation where you’re looking for private equity, different forms of project finance, or strategic investment to fund your first commercial-scale project. That requires a very different structure of the team — different expertise around techno-economic assessments, front-end engineering, structuring of contracts and project finance, insurance, siting, and regulations. This is all a challenge for innovators that have just moved through their Series A.
Second, regulation is often not designed with innovators in mind. Governments tend to run consultations on policy change, but there is very little engagement between innovators and government departments actually setting the policies. Innovators don’t necessarily have the time or capacity to contribute in consultations compared to larger organisations or incumbents. One outcome of this is technology lock-in, where policy picks a specific technology and pushes out different forms of innovative approaches.
Third, uncertainty in domestic demand and procurement pathways. A McKinsey survey of 50 UK-based organisations within the FTSE 100 and 50 within the S&P 500 showed that if there’s a 10% green premium on a product, 80% of the companies interviewed would not procure it. So a product needs to reach price parity — and there has to be sufficient demand signal to incentivise investment, particularly when it comes to larger-scale first-of-a-kind projects.
Fourth, a fragmented support ecosystem. What is cleantech and where it is funded is very difficult for an innovator to understand, because the definition is quite broad and the funding sits across many different organisations.
Fifth, it is difficult to engage corporates in pilots and commercial demonstrators. Previously, government support was very technically driven. Over the years there has been increasing understanding that commercial readiness is important, but in a lot of the programmes we’ve run, engagement of corporates has always come close to the pilot stage — when really, they should have been embedded in the early-stage design of the product themselves.
Six Trends in How Government Support is Changing
Ross Bruton: How are these challenges affecting the way government looks at supporting cleantech? There are six trends.
One: Funding pathways have changed. The NZIP came to an end at the beginning of 2025, with no clear direct centralised pot of funding specifically targeted towards cleantech. We’ve seen a reallocation of funding, particularly under DSIT, facilitated by Innovate UK, which has become more of the centralised unit to drive cleantech funding going forward.
Two: We’re moving from broad-based R&D to more mission-focused R&D. The NZIP had 10 different priority sectors. Now we’re moving to a mission-based approach embedded within the priority sectors of the Modern Industrial Strategy, of which there are eight — but really, when it comes to tech development, six priority sectors, of which clean energy is one. Any form of engagement with those pots needs to be framed within the context of the broader priority sector.
Three: A shift from early-stage intervention to commercial readiness, scale-up, and market intervention. Within new propositions and funding mechanisms — Heat Pump Ready 2, the Venture Builder, and others — you will see a request to demonstrate your commercialisation pathway and how your proposed business model will create scalable, commercial-ready organisations.
Four: Work is being done on market and sector development. The creation of Great British Energy, the National Wealth Fund, the Mansion House Reforms, and the British Business Bank’s Growth Partnership Fund — which supports channelling pension fund investment into venture capital — are all financial and organisational mechanisms taking place to try to build out the infrastructure and the funding environment to allow organisations to scale.
Five: Later-stage and more capital development projects. Great British Energy and the National Wealth Fund both speak to this.
Six: A shift to regional and place-based innovation. The Local Innovation Partnership Fund (LIPF) is a £500 million fund developing what they call “triple helix” based clusters: public sector, research houses or innovators themselves, and corporates, to design architectures that can support the development of innovation. We also have CCUS clusters, Freeports allocated as key innovation centres, and university clusters being developed.
How We Got Here: Policy Evolution from 2020 to 2026
Ross Bruton: I’ll take you through the evolution of how we got here, because it’s important to understand the decisions that government has taken when thinking about how to engage with UK government support going forward.
2020 — Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution. A £12 billion fund across a variety of technology areas, predominantly setting targets for offshore wind, hydrogen, advanced nuclear, EV and supply chains, as well as establishing the Green Homes Grant and putting in place the initial CCUS infrastructure fund. It set ambitious targets: 40 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, 5 gigawatts of hydrogen. As part of that was the £1 billion NZIP. The core goal of that plan was to meet carbon budgets — it was about decarbonisation and net zero.
2021 — COP26 in Glasgow. Investment was more than doubled from £12 billion to £26 billion. The NZIP Accelerator launched — the first time the programme put in place support for companies to create scalable and commercialisable businesses, not just develop the technology. A full grid electrification target by 2035 was put in place. Additional budgets were assigned for buildings and heat: the Future Homes Standard upgrade, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme. The hydrogen business model approach was first announced, leading to the hydrogen allocation rounds later on. Still all about net zero — heightened ambition.
2022 — War in Ukraine. A shift from net zero to, yes net zero, but importantly, energy security. For the first time, a 2030 target for low-carbon electricity at about 95%, and a target of gas reductions of 40% within the country. Targets were upgraded: offshore wind increased to 50 gigawatts, hydrogen to 10 gigawatts. A marked increase in ambition, with a framing around energy security.
2023 — Powering Up Britain. BEIS changed its name to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). The Energy Security Plan, Net Zero Growth Plan, and Carbon Budget Delivery Plan were released — sectoral plans detailing how the goals set by previous policies would be achieved.
2024 — Change of government. The new government looked to reorientate funding and strategies around innovation. The NZIP came to an end. A shift from energy security to a missions-based focus, of which the Clean Energy Superpower Mission is one. The Clean Power 2030 Action Plan was published — setting for the first time a target of a decarbonised power sector by 2030. The ban on onshore wind was removed; planned solar allocations increased; significant focus placed on grid reform and energy flexibility. Great British Energy was established (£8 billion). The National Wealth Fund was announced. Sector-specific plans: £15 billion for the Warm Homes Plan, £22 billion for the CCUS programme, and Hydrogen Allocation Round 2 releases.
2025 — Modern Industrial Strategy published. Cleantech moved away from being framed as a net zero or energy security programme to being embedded as part of the industrial growth strategy of the country. The LIPF was published (£500 million). Great British Energy announced a billion-pound fund for the clean energy supply chain. £28 billion allocated to the National Wealth Fund. The British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme put in place to reduce electricity tariffs of energy-intensive users by a rebate of 70% to 90% of network charges.
Where is Government Funding Now?
Ross Bruton: So what does that mean for us and where are we today? I’m going to break this up because it’s a very busy landscape.
DESNZ and Ofgem
DESNZ used to run the NZIP — no longer. The programme we’re familiar with continuing is the Heat Pump Ready programme. Heat Pump Ready 2 is out at the moment, funded by the Warm Homes programme — a £20 million pot of funding, up to £2 million per project, for heat pump-based technologies.
The other route of funding is through Ofgem, through the price control mechanism — RIIO-3, which is funding network-based innovation. The Strategic Innovation Fund runs challenges every year where innovators need to collaborate with network participants to develop innovation projects solving specific challenges set by the innovation task force each year. They’ve moved from one round a year to three rounds a year, so a lot more opportunities to participate, and you can participate at both early and late stages.
Network innovation-based allowances are run by the networks themselves. If you want to know more about those, go to the DNOs or transmission network operators’ sites.
DSIT, UKRI, ARIA, and Innovate UK
Where is the innovation funding largely sitting now when it comes to cleantech? Largely under DSIT, facilitated through UKRI, and in particular Innovate UK.
Under DSIT: the route to Horizon Europe is open again.
ARIA has a billion pounds to 2030, funding very high-risk innovation around critical technology sectors. A more flexible structure in terms of how programmes are engaged, but worth looking at.
Under UKRI, the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund (£500 million) is currently being bid into by regional clusters — a really good time to find which regional clusters are in your area and start engaging with them.
Through Innovate UK, the primary mechanisms established are:
• R&D Mission Accelerator programme. Still largely unallocated, but originally £500 million across the five missions to grow early-stage innovation. For the Clean Energy Superpower Mission, roughly £80 million is looking to be allocated. The only programme launched through that so far is the GridFlex programme — £5 million of funding for early-stage flexibility-based technologies. Keep an eye on this because there will be new allocations coming out.
• Investor Partnership Scheme. Innovators combine forces with a venture capitalist investor to bid in, and the government provides non-dilutive blended finance if successful. They’ve increased the number of approved VCs to 150, and you can bid for anything from £50,000 to £2 million.
• Innovation Loans. For later-stage organisations, the minimum threshold has been reduced to £100,000. These are essentially low cost of capital loans issued by Innovate UK to commercialise businesses.
• Contracts for Innovation. Still running — government procuring innovation. Not a grant; procurement from an innovator, with government supporting and scaling that innovation through its own adoption.
• Energy Catalyst programme. Still running in collaboration with the Carbon Trust — £50,000 to £1.5 million for energy access-based technologies in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
• Venture Builder programme. An expansion of ICURe. Post-spin-out, pre-seed — £150,000 to support commercialisation-based activities of pre-seed organisations getting ready for investment and commercial scale.
Department for Transport and Ministry of Defence
Under the Department for Transport (DfT), significant funding is going into net zero-based innovation through the Drive 35 and Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) programmes — £4 billion through the APC, with a structured programme across Mobilise, Demonstrate, and Collaborate tiers. The Demonstrate programme and Collaborate programme are open — a huge amount of funding available for propulsion-based activities.
The Battery Innovation programme — an extension of the Faraday Challenge — has £450 million specifically into battery technologies. The Aerospace Technology Institute also has dedicated funding.
The UK SHORE programme invests in marine-based innovation through the Clean Maritime Demonstration Competition 7 and Zero Emission Vessels and Infrastructure — £450 million, £121 million, and £150 million across those funds.
UK Defence Innovation and the British Business Bank are also worth considering. The Mansion House Reforms are looking for pension funds to allocate about 5% of their funding into early-stage venture capital for innovators. The British Business Bank’s Growth Partnership Fund has an initial close of £200 million. The National Security Strategic Investment Fund is at £85 million for defence-based technologies — but across those, different forms of cleantech technologies are also applicable.
Innovate UK’s New Strategy
Ross Bruton: Innovate UK are now central to driving cleantech innovation going forward within the UK. Their new strategy reflects this: they’re shifting their approach significantly. What they’re looking for from companies are signs of potential and signs that potential has been realised — not just the tech, but the market commercialisation roadmap, performance, traction, and growth momentum. They have a High Potential Business Framework in which they plan to evaluate companies across those metrics, and they’re focusing their funding at an industrial strategy level.
What This Means for Innovators and Investors
Ross Bruton: So what does this mean for you?
Look for funding within IS6 sectors. It’s not enough to say “I’ve got a great clean technology.” That technology now needs to be nestled within a broader market approach within the industrial strategy.
Prioritise electrification and the grid. We have our 2030 mission, and a lot of focus around grid flexibility — the GridFlex programme is one example. Home buildings and retrofit through the Warm Homes Plan is a big driver. Net zero transport through the APC is central to net zero plans and where a lot of the funding is at the moment.
Demonstrate commercial readiness and traction in your applications. This is not optional — it is now central to how proposals are evaluated.
Engage with investors, project finance, and strategic investments at early Technology Readiness Level (TRL) levels. The Venture Builder programme reflects this expectation even at the pre-seed stage. Some stats out there show that the engagement of corporate venture capital or strategic investment in the early stage of development leads to about a 60% increase in the chance of valuable exits.
Look regionally. The Local Innovation Partnerships Fund is a real opportunity — but also look at the Freeports. They’re doing a lot of work and have a lot of investment going into innovation. They’re not just incubators; they have manufacturing space, warehousing, and the ability to export.
Get involved in working groups early. There is a lot of work happening around how government develops market interventions. The exposure to key corporate offtakers and government through those initiatives is significant. We’ve just concluded one with Innovate UK looking at market-forming interventions for chemicals, automotive, and the built environment — and the degree of collaboration achieved through those kinds of settings is substantial.
Look out for the R&D Mission Accelerator, and make sure you engage with ecosystem support providers. It’s a complicated web. Having someone support you to navigate it is key. We’re one of those organisations, but there are many others — please do reach out.
In terms of how Eigen Ventures can help: we do a lot of work in commercialisation advisory with companies themselves — not just providing this kind of information, but practically turning it into a viable commercialisation pathway and funding pathway. We have a long history working with UK government and the cleantech support ecosystem. And increasingly, we are working around the ideas of deployment, scale, and first-of-a-kind projects.
