Over the last four years, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy has become one of key lobbying forces in European tech, steering climate tech policy in startups’ favour and forging close ties with policymakers to do so.
It helped lay the groundwork for the introduction of the EU’s Clean Industrial Act, which is significant because it foregrounds tech as a climate solution, and helped keep climate technologies on policymakers’ minds as their focus switched increasingly to defence and resilience.
Then, last month, Breakthrough’s European policy team was dramatically cut, with staff — including its influential head Ann Mettler — given just a few days’ notice.
Breakthrough’s team was told that Gates decided funds needed to be urgently diverted to plug the gap left by US president Donald Trump slashing funding to USAID, particularly for life-saving healthcare programmes in Africa.
Breakthrough told Sifted that Gates “remains as committed as ever to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change.”
As the dust settles on Breakthrough’s European shutdown, VCs and startups are lamenting the loss of what many say had become climate tech’s most influential voice — and wondering who will step up to fill the funding gap.
The cuts
Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 in the US, initially as a venture fund to back green startups, financed by uber-wealthy individuals like Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos.
Since then, Breakthrough has grown to include policy operations in both Europe and the US, as well as the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst programme, which funds early-stage tech, and fellowships for entrepreneurs, where their research is funded and they’re provided with lab space.
In Europe, the organisation also secured a €100m pot to back first-of-a-kind projects, in conjunction with the European Investment Bank.
Last month’s cuts affected the European policy team, made up of 12 people focused on policy, as well as the US policy team, which is widely thought to have been heavily involved in drafting the country’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act, a $369bn climate bill.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the VC arm, which has deployed funds in the US and Europe, raised a new $839m fund in August last year and will continue to invest. Sifted understands that three people will remain at the European venture arm.
‘A huge entanglement between Breakthrough and EU politicians’
Breakthrough’s Europe operation was set up in 2021, headed up by Ann Mettler, a well-known face in Brussels from her time leading the European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC), the European Commission’s in-house think tank.
Mettler was joined at the helm by Philip Offenberg, who also came from the EPSC. Their links to the Commission meant “there was a huge entanglement between Breakthrough and EU politicians,” says one climate VC.
The team worked to push Brussels to understand the role that tech could play in the green transition, and to make sure startups — which had typically been excluded from the industry groups large incumbents are part of — had a voice.
That was done in part through the organisation’s direct policy work, and in part through organisations it funded, such as Tech for Net Zero Tech for Net Zero, a network for climate founders, and Cleantech for Europe, which aims to provide a community and industry voice for the climate tech ecosystem.
Lena Thiede, investor at climate tech investor Planet A Ventures, sums up Breakthrough’s impact by recollecting a conversation she had with an MEP before the group existed.
“I still remember one MEP telling me: “For me, early stage innovators or investors do not even exist. I only get to see the incumbent who tells me ‘Don’t raise the CO2 price, I will go bust’; I never meet the young entrepreneur who tells me ‘Please raise the CO2 price, I want to build green steel.’”
“That is exactly what Breakthrough Europe, and especially Ann Mettler, has been good at,” Thiede says: “fighting to give cleantech startups and investors a voice in shaping funding and regulation and giving Europe’s climate tech movement momentum.”
Danijel Višević, investor at climate-focused World Fund, agrees. “There is a significant lack of knowledge in Brussels about technologies and what really helps to decarbonise. Ann and Breakthrough have always been very good at explaining climate investors’ and founders’ pain points.”
Not everyone is as glowing: one climate VC — who requested not to be named — says they believed that topics championed by Gates received disproportionate airtime because of its “outsized” links to policymakers. “Its closure might leave more room for other voices,” the person said.
Breakthrough’s big win: The Clean Industrial Act
Ironically, one of Breakthrough Europe’s biggest achievements came just the month before the team was axed.
In February, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, announced the Clean Industrial Act, a bill aimed at growing the continent’s clean tech industry by channeling more public and private financing towards it.
Unlike previous EU bills, it foregrounds tech as central to decarbonisation — something Breakthrough had pushed heavily for.
“A lot of previous climate policy was about preventing things being built, about working against economic activity,” says a former Breakthrough employee. “We were more pragmatic; no one wants Net Zero through de-industrialisation, we pushed for the role of tech to decarbonise industry. Over time, we felt like we were pushing the needle.”
Mettler, in a LinkedIn post shared shortly after Breakthrough Europe was axed, said she believed Breakthrough had ”certainly contributed to the evolution of a Clean Industrial Deal.”
Multiple people Sifted spoke to cited the formation of the Energy Resilience Leadership Group as another key Breakthrough achievement. The group, founded in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Breakthrough and Siemens Energy, aimed to position climate technologies as central to European security and resilience.
The group was a prominent force at the Munich Security Conference. A former employee of Breakthrough says they believed the group has helped climate tech to “stay relevant” as focus has switched to security.
Time for Europe’s billionaires to step up?
As well as pulling the funding for its European policy work, Breakthrough will also stop funding the climate tech organisations it backed in Europe: Tech for Net Zero and Cleantech for Europe.
Tobias Lechtenfeld, executive director of Tech for Net Zero, says the organisation is currently looking for funding; and Super Climate, an organisation that represents VCs, has stepped in with a few weeks of emergency funding.
Cleantech for Europe is fully funded for 2025, from both Breakthrough and other sources, and recently secured a partnership with Norrsken House in Brussels to plug some of the funding gap left by Breakthrough’s departure.
There’s a hope that, with Gates’s withdrawal from the continent, other European sources of capital could step in.
“Europe’s home to lots of billionaires from the first wave of industrialisation who could help,” says Lechtenfeld.
Planet A’s Thiede agrees. “I’ve always found it striking that Europe relies so heavily on American private wealth to fund crucial climate efforts,” she says. “I see this as a moment for European foundations to step up.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/bill-gates-breakthrough-energy-leaves-europe/
