Why Future Positive Capital invested in Sweetch Energy

About Future Positive Capital

Future Positive Capital is an investment firm that invests in deep tech companies.

• 📌 Paris, Ile-de-France, France
• 👥 1-10
• 📊 Venture Capital
• 🌟 Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Seed, Venture
• 🌐 www.futurepositivecapital.com

About Sweetch Energy

Sweetch Energy is created to leverage most recent academic discoveries in nanotechnologies and materials in the blue osmotic energy field.

• 📌 Rennes, Bretagne, France
• 👥 11-50
• 📊 Series A
• 🌟 Private
• 🌐 sweetch.energy

Our Investment in Sweetch Energy

We are thrilled to announce our investment in Sweetch Energy, a France-based company that uses breakthroughs in nanotechnology and material innovation to harness osmotic energy — a totally new source of renewable energy that is continuous, abundant, predictable and free from rare earth minerals.

We led the 5.2 million euro round alongside historical investors Demeter and GoCapital, and were joined by angel investors Dominique Gaillard (co-founder of Ardian) and Fabio Ferrari (founder of Symbio and one of Europe’s pioneers in the hydrogen industry), as well as ADEME, the French environmental and energy management agency.

But these sources have well-known shortcomings. Seasonal intermittency combined with prohibitively expensive storage means a reliable grid could always require another form of base-load production. Geographical weather constraints prevent many countries from reaping their benefits.

Where there’s abundant wind and sun, installation of utility-level parks is often far from cities requiring additional expensive transmission and distribution lines.

Centralized and outdated grid infrastructure means we cannot make the most of the renewables we produce.

Finally, both solar and wind use rare earth minerals that have highly damaging supply chains, are very difficult to recycle or repurpose, and, critically, are threatening the West’s technological autonomy and sovereignty.

(China currently mines 80% of rare earth minerals used globally and is responsible for the refining of 95% of them in a context of potential acute shortage as demand skyrockets over the next few years.

This is likely to create political tensions similar to what we are seeing in Denmark, where divisions over the Kuannersuit mine projet triggered a snap election that was then won just a few days ago by the opposing party.

As an aside, if you’re an entrepreneur solving any one of these problems, please reach out!).

In short, developing a fully renewable grid will be nothing short of a miracle.

Water: simultaneously the oldest and newest source of renewable energy

In this context, there is another source of carbon-free energy that isn’t getting quite as much attention, despite the fact that it is — by far — the largest modern renewable source: water.

Through hydropower, the source of life represents 60% of global renewable production, and is poised to play a major role in the future energy mix.

Osmotic energy is naturally available from the difference in the salt concentration when river fresh water meets sea water. It was first theorized in a Nature paper in 1954:

“There are many methods (using osmotic and other forces) which might, in theory, be used for obtaining power by reversibly mixing fresh water and seawater.

The one which appears most practicable depends on the ionic nature of salt and uses membranes (incorporating ion exchange resins) selectively permeable to ions of one sign or the other.

If such a membrane separates two salt solutions of different strengths, a potential difference appears across it.”

Harnessing that chemical potential difference by separating the cations and the anions and converting the resulting ionic current into electrons is the basis for osmotic energy.

As the Sweetch founders like to illustrate, osmotic energy is, in a way, hydropower’s pendant.

It is made available by the same natural water cycle. After water evaporates from the ocean and falls back as fresh water above land, hydropower uses gravity to generate renewable power, while osmotic energy harvests the ionic power naturally generated in deltas and estuaries around the world as fresh water returns to the ocean.

Osmotic energy’s potential is huge.

While estuaries could, in theory, generate 27,000 TWh/year, osmotic energy’s technical potential is closer to 1500 TWh/year, after accounting for factors such as sea salinity, temperature, river to sea water volume ratios, sea salt composition, salinity gradient steepness, infrastructure requirements, local energy demand, environmental impacts, extraction factors and seasonal variability of freshwater discharge.

This is still massive. As a comparison, in 2019, solar energy generated 725 TWh while wind generated 1420 TWh.

Critically, osmotic energy is continuous (i.e. non-intermittent — as opposed to solar and wind) and predictable. While it does require significant infrastructure (akin to desalination plants), it does not have the real estate footprint of solar and wind; and, since estuaries are often located near cities, power is generated closer to usage and consumption, reducing the need for additional infrastructure.

In short, it’s potentially a revolutionary addition to our global energy mix.

While this concept has been tested in labs around the world, few commercial scale experiments have taken place, and none have so far delivered on the promise of the technology’s potential. That’s largely because the power density of membranes — the core of the system — was insufficient to generate electricity at a competitive price.

Introduction to Sweetch

Enter Sweetch Energy — a company on a mission to apply breakthroughs in nanofluidics to reduce emissions in power and industry.

Their focus is developing osmotic energy systems that are cost-competitive with other sources of renewable energy at a LCOE of circa 40€/MWh.

A one-of-a-kind team

The first asset of the company is its team.

The company’s 3x operational founders are deeply complementary, driven, and experienced leaders, who bring decades of experience operating in complex and regulated industries, and have successfully built and exited companies.

Bruno Mottet, the Chief Science Officer, has been leading the charge on transforming the company’s IP into technological innovations that can be produced at scale and integrated into a full power production system.

He holds a PhD in physics and chemistry as well as a MBA, and has spent much of his career in applied R&D in mineral treatments and ceramics.

Most of all, he’s an eternal tinkerer and experimenter — always internalizing insights from disparate realms of science to bring elegant solutions to Sweetch’s most complex technical challenges.

Pascal Le Melinaire is the company’s big thinker, business developer and fixer. Initially trained as an engineer in geology, he holds a PhD in computer science and a MBA, and has spent the last 20 years commercializing technologies in the oil & gas, energy and desalination industries.

As COO of Bionersis, a company focused on anaerobic digestion, he spent years scouring the globe to set up plants, striking deals in highly complex environments.

Before that, he was one of the co-founders of Earth Decision Sciences, which sold to Paradigm Geophysical (itself later acquired by Apax Partners for 1 billion USD).

Earth Decision Sciences is where Pascal met Nicolas Heuzé, Sweetch’s CEO and the company’s deal maker and operational leader — and himself a seasoned entrepreneur and business leader.

After listing his first company on Nasdaq through a reverse merger, Nicolas joined Earth Decision Sciences as CFO.

When they sold the company, he took the CEO role at Bionersis (where he recruited Pascal).

Prior to Sweetch, Nicolas was the Head of Corporate Development & Corporate Finance for MedinCell, a biotech company he joined when they were a dozen employees, which is now listed in Euronext.

Finally, the scientist behind the original idea, and another co-founder of the business, is Lydéric Bocquet, a global leading authority on micro- and nanofluidics, and the director of the Institut Pierre-Gilles de Gennes in Paris, one of the world’s top institutes in the field.

Breakthrough science & engineering

Sweetch Energy was born after Lydéric published a foundational Nature article in 2013 that uncovered a phenomena he called “nano-osmotic diffusion” — whereby immense osmotically induced electric currents are generated by salinity gradients at the nanometric scale, exceeding incumbent technologies by two orders of magnitude.

After reading the paper, Pascal and Bruno met with Lydéric and took it upon themselves to determine whether these results could be replicated at scale, in a way that opened the door to commercialization.

Three years later, the company has produced a membrane that is 25x more powerful than existing technologies (even after accounting for multiple resistances, including electrode resistance).

Ecofriendly, available and cost-effective materials

Importantly, the team has figured out how to do all of this with membranes that are made from widely available organic ecological materials.

This isn’t trivial. Not only does it have major impact for producing membranes at scale — as Sweetch can use infrastructure that is already in place for other ecomaterial-based industries instead of reimagining new production lines — but it means that it’s a source of renewable power that does not rely on raw earth minerals or metals, and is 10x cheaper than what is currently on the market.

Conclusion

We believe we are moving into a transformative decade for renewable energy — and a technology like Sweetch’s in the hands of this team could make osmotic energy a reality and build an entirely new category.