5 November 2025
Iliana Portugues
The Need for a Systemic Solution
Despite the recent reduction in emphasis over the past year, the urgency of the global energy transition remains. This transition, which I believe represents humanity's most consequential technological challenge, is crucial. The need for climate technology— encompassing renewable energy systems, industrial decarbonisation, sustainable agriculture, circular economy solutions, nature-based interventions, climate adaptation infrastructure, digital monitoring systems, and carbon removal technologies— to scale from a $56 billion annual investment in 2024 (nearly 35% of which were for energy technology specifically) to the $230 trillion needed over the next 25 years to reach net-zero emissions, is more pressing than ever.
Yet despite this urgency, approximately 90% of startups fail, with 20% failing within their first year, and 75% of venture-backed startups eventually shutting down. Interestingly, 42% of startups fail because they create products with no market need, a failure rate that has remained stubbornly consistent since the 1990s.
Yet among successful startups, 70% attribute their success to finding product-market fit early. This disparity between failure and success hinges largely on one factor: effective market discovery.
After 25 years of bridging entrepreneurship, energy innovation, and corporate venture capital, I founded CurrentWorks to address this systemic inefficiency. My journey from researcher-turned-founder to corporate innovation leader—building innovation portfolios exceeding €1 billion at National Grid and transforming Siemens Energy's R&D—revealed a counterintuitive truth: data abundance creates intelligence scarcity.
This paradox manifests daily in the energy sector. Founders have access to thousands of databases, reports, and information sources, yet lack the synthesis and contextual understanding to identify which opportunities align with their capabilities. They're drowning in noise while thirsting for signal. Meanwhile, corporations accumulate vast market intelligence through expensive consultants and internal teams, but their insights remain siloed, inaccessible to the very innovators who could act on them. The result is a tragic misallocation of resources: solutions searching for problems while urgent problems go unsolved.
The result: founders drowning in fragmented information sources miss critical opportunities, while corporations with resources gain an unfair advantage that they often fail to apply.
Quantifying the Energy Innovation Challenge
Climate tech funding totalled 244 deals in Q1 2024, with average funding rounds in the tens of millions. As a rule of thumb in the Energy Tech sector, 1 out of 25 startups gets funded. If, for the sake of argument, no startup closes two rounds of funding in one year, this means thousands of energy startups are competing for market validation in the first place.
Following this initial carveout, given the 75% failure rate for venture-backed startups, approximately three-quarters (183) of these well-funded ventures will fail, not for lack of technology or capital, but for misreading market needs. We have gone from 6,100 startups at the pre-seed level to 61 (1%).
Unlike software that can pivot quickly, energy ventures require extensive regulatory approvals, pilot demonstrations with utilities, and integration with century-old infrastructure. A solar technology startup must navigate interconnection standards, a battery company must prove decades of operational life, and a grid software provider must ensure compatibility with legacy SCADA systems. Each of these requirements extends validation timelines and increases the cost of market discovery errors.
The Green Energy Innovation Platform Solution: A Game-Changer in Market Discovery
CurrentWorks' platform directly applies the systematic approaches I developed throughout my career while managing billion-euro portfolios, but democratises them for the entire ecosystem. It has the potential to transform market discovery in the energy sector.
The platform maps technology landscapes continuously, allowing stakeholders to view it simultaneously and individualise it to their own needs, with no need to deploy teams of analysts and consultants to map technology landscapes for single corporations.
CurrentWorks' Green Energy Innovation platform represents a fundamental reimagining of startup discovery, built on four product leadership principles:
Solving the problem beneath the problem: Not just providing data, but creating actionable intelligence
Building for the ecosystem: Serving startups, utilities, corporations, and policymakers simultaneously
Designing for active and passive discovery: Enabling both targeted searches and serendipitous connections
Continuously expanding opportunity horizons: Weekly updates tracking technology evolution globally
By systematically mapping energy startups worldwide with real-time growth data, we transform market discovery from a manual, fragmented process into an intelligent, systematic one. This systematic approach is the key to addressing the core challenges: the fragmentation problem (founders monitoring only a fraction of potential sources), the hidden opportunity gap (80% of opportunities missed due to inadequate understanding of technology applications or regulatory requirements), and the matching dilemma (extensive manual research required for utility-startup partnerships).
Measurable Impact and Path Forward
The platform's value proposition extends beyond individual startups. By compressing pilot timelines from the typical 18 months to 6 months, we create approximately $5 million in acceleration value per startup—calculated from reduced burn rates, faster revenue generation, and improved funding efficiency. For utilities, this means speedier innovation deployment; for investors, better due diligence; and for policymakers, clearer visibility into technology trends.
The path forward requires acknowledging that fixing market discovery isn't just a business opportunity—it's essential for achieving global climate goals. When 42% of startups fail due to preventable market-discovery problems and the energy transition demands unprecedented innovation velocity, systematic market intelligence becomes critical infrastructure for the entire ecosystem.
This article examines the market discovery crisis through multiple lenses: validated failure statistics, sector-specific challenges in energy and climate tech, and proven solutions from real-world implementation. Drawing on comprehensive research across 2,000+ energy ventures and direct experience managing billion-euro innovation portfolios, I present both the problem and a proven framework for transforming startup discovery into a systematic, intelligence-driven process that can accelerate the energy transition at the pace our planet requires.