Our data show CleanTech has become a major industry trend in Europe over the past years. The Startup Heatmap Europe tracks a variety of metrics to measure the top tech trends every year and ranks CleanTech as the 7th most important trend in Europe in 2020 – moving up two places compared to 2019.
To visualize this trend, we plot Tweets as well as Tech News mentioning CleanTech startups over time. In 2020 we see a gradual increase on Twitter mentions based on an average monthly growth rate of 2.5%. The average monthly growth rate for Tech News was 3.7%.
Where is the trend the strongest?
To identify the leading CleanTech hubs in Europe we looked at a dataset of thousands of meetups organized in Europe, we are collecting since 2018 and created an index based on the number of CleanTech focused meetup groups and the Twitter activity around CleanTech buzzword mentioning also a city. We identified 25 European cities with at least 20 meetups groups focusing on CleanTech and analyzed over 2,000 tweets mentioning CleanTech startups and a city in 2020.
The top three positions are held by London (92% signal strength), Berlin (66%), and Paris (38%).
On a deeper look we discover, that all three cities have a well-functioning and strong investor setup in CleanTech and boast successful Cleantech companies like Arrival or Bulb in London, McPhy in Paris or Zolar and Ecoligo in Berlin. All three cities have numerous incubators, accelerators and clusters that support CleanTech startups, for example Entrepreneur First, Startupbootcamp, in London, Station F in Paris and EIT Climate-KIC and the Innogy Innovation Hub in Berlin.
Who are the runner-ups?
Amsterdam, Munich, and Tel Aviv show trend signals of 15-20% each and have a strong potential in becoming hotbeds for cleantech startups. Amsterdam offers a wide range of accelerator programs like Climate-KIC, Rockstart, Dutch CleanTech Challenge and Yes!Delft incubator that provide cleantech entrepreneurs support to test their ideas and raise capital. Likewise, Tel Aviv has a high potential in commercializing cleantech companies, especially due to its competitive position in technology for re-using water. Thus Tel Aviv grew high-scale water monitoring companies like TakaDu, Netafim, uManage, SolarEdge, Amiad and many more.
Munich is another European location for CleanTech companies. Germany maintains strong existing markets for hydraulic and solar power and has renowned research institutions and universities, cluster networks to support development in environmental technologies (TUM.Energy, KUMAS, Energy Technology Cluster). Moreover, the state has provided tens of millions of euros in funding cleantech research projects. Siemens, tado, Lumoview Building Analytics GmbH, Sono Motors are some of the headline cleantech companies in Munich and Cologne.
Other fast-growing clean technology hubs in Europe are Dublin, Barcelona, and Frankfurt. Dublin has a solid number of cleantech funds and high levels of early-stage venture capital investments. Barcelona is quite popular with its Cleantech Camp that supports and grows cleantech startups. And Frankfurt highly supports climate action and provides funds to expansion of energy efficiency and renewable energy.
We are slowly approaching the environment tipping point and many countries are already taking all necessary measures to reduce ecological footprint. There is no doubt that Cleantech startups are at the forefront of sustainable development movement that can tackle many sustainability concerns.
If you are interested to learn more about our technology trend analysis join our DEEP Startup Ecosystem Conference on 15th of April.
