Hi Matthias, it’s great to have you here with me today. Could you start by telling us a bit about your journey up to now? How did you end up here as a climate tech founder?

My background is in chemical engineering – very technical. But during my undergraduate studies, I realized that I wanted to become an entrepreneur and not actually work as a chemical engineer. So, I complemented my engineering master’s with an MBA and co-founded my first company called bentekk. We built a technology to measure carcinogenic gases, so cause cancer. We went through a typical founder's journey. Spinning off from university, acquiring some public funds, and then eventually landing some money from VC.

After four years, we decided to exit bentekk to Draeger, a big German DAX corporation in the field of medical and safety devices. Our solution fitted perfectly into their portfolio. After the acquisition, typical for the founder’s journey, we integrated for roughly two years. I didn't want to climb the corporate ladder and chose instead to stay entrepreneurial and take a different path. It was a great success story for everyone involved, from the investors to the buyers. It was also fun to integrate that business and expand to different markets within Europe and to the US.

I took some time off and engaged in several different projects before starting my new journey – the one I am on right now. I wanted to use my prior experience in measuring gases for the oil and gas industry to tackle the most pressing issue that we are facing at the moment, climate change. I went on a hunt and found somebody through the Entrepreneur First community who became my co-founder. Marius, a second-time founder with a background at BP was the perfect match. We both are repeat founders, have a background in oil and gas, and share the ambition to build a global champion tackling climate change.

So, have you been using some of the hardware knowledge that you gained from bentekk in this new venture? And can you explain what the overlap is?

The most obvious overlap is the knowledge we gained in developing a hardware device that can measure gases. The technology must be certified, and it must measure gases in a highly accurate way. There has been a ton of learning on the way, both within our own company, and when we joined forces with Draeger.

Another learning was, that measurement data doesn´t lead to valuable insights and information on itself. To improve the work and processes of customers, software is needed to interpret and present insights from hardware data. It is very difficult for pure hardware companies in the gas industry to build great software products. That’s where we come in with our software-first approach. Through software, we guide users from making measurements, documenting them, and managing the whole process via our cloud platform.

Yeah, because everybody wants to invest in software these days, right? So, how do you marry the hardware offering with the software part? How do you make those two things into a package that people understand and want to invest in?

We're not just doing software because it's great to invest in. We’re doing it because it's the best way to solve our customers’ problems. So, just to give a bit of context, our customers right now are all natural gas operators. They have methane leaks on a regular basis which is natural because the parts, pipes, and instruments are under a lot of pressure. You must take the weather conditions into account, too, for outside operations. Our technology helps operators to find these methane leaks for which hardware is required. You need a gas measurement device to inspect components and detect leaks and then you need software to document and report on these leaks later. It is a combination that solves our customers’ problems. If we only had software, they would need the hardware and if we only had hardware then they would have to deal with horrible processes like taking a notepad or pen and paper and writing things down, instead of documenting these measurements digitally.

And so, this is a product that works by measuring methane gases? You've got the hardware component that measures the leaks and the methane that's being emitted. And then you have the software that actually helps customers to understand where the methane is coming from? How much does your product help your customers to reduce the level of methane that's being emitted?

The first step is to detect leaks and then to manage the repair process. The software helps to manage the whole process as efficiently and easily as possible to stop those leaks. It will work especially well once we’ve collected a lot of data as we'll be able to make predictions like “look these are the places where leaks are most likely to happen”. We will be able to prompt people to look at these parts during specific seasons or preconditioned weather conditions. Then we may even be able to stop leaks before they happen.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you got into measuring methane because we know that climate change is a big problem but most of the time, we're only thinking about carbon dioxide and reducing carbon emissions. How did you get into this realm of working with and measuring methane?

It's already known that methane is bad for the environment and COP 28 created a lot of news about this topic. Methane causes one-third of global warming so it´s good to see that there´s more attention on it. The tricky part about methane is that it has more than 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere, so it warms up the Earth much more than CO2 does. But the opportunity here is that if you reduce one ton of methane in the atmosphere you can do the equivalent of removing 80 tons of CO2 and that really strikes me. I love that with our work, we have an immediate impact on reducing global warming.

My co-founder and I got into methane together. We looked at the market of gas measurement and environmental technology and then had a deeper look into measuring methane. A group at Stanford analyzes methane technologies and we gained valuable insights and met interesting people through their webinars. We managed to dive a lot deeper and found a huge and global issue not just within the US but worldwide and this was the first point of entry for us.

We learned about the regulation that's starting to kick in in the US. They’re a little bit ahead of the EU, but there's a new regulation coming up in the US that will increase the pressure on companies operating in the oil and gas industry to detect and repair leaks. The EU will follow with new regulations, too.

So, your product will help companies to be a bit more proactive about their methane emissions and what they do with them?

It will help them to be proactive, but it will also help them to comply with regulations. Some companies joined private initiatives and set their own goals to reduce methane long before the regulation came into play. Our product helps them to meet their own sustainability goals and to comply with new regulations.

And what kind of companies are you working with?

We focus on companies within the gas sector because it's a low-hanging fruit. Some of their leaks are easy to repair and have a huge negative impact on the environment. One leak can emit the methane equivalent of the CO2 emissions of 60 Germans for a year, i.e. what we emit in carbon emissions for a whole year of eating, traveling, heating our homes, and so on.

Do you have plans to expand into other Industries or is the oil and gas industry your main focus for the time being?

For the time being, we are focused on the natural gas supply chain. So, operators who are storing, transporting, and distributing natural gas. That’s a big Industry in Europe. Europe is the biggest consumer and importer of natural gas in the world. The US is a big market too, so it makes sense for us to internationalize. Eventually, we will move into other industries, hydrogen, and other greenhouse gases. Hydrogen actually has a higher global warming potential than CO2, too, so that's a new industry with new applications for us in the future.

So now you're kind of working on the front line of climate tech, what would you say about climate technology at the moment? How is it progressing and what’s the investment like within this space?

Climate investments surpassed other segments in terms of how much money is going into startups in this space. Over 40% of all new startups are doing something in climate. You do need to watch out though and ask yourself: does this really fight the climate crisis or has this idea or company been bent too far to make it fit into this segment?

I'm very excited about any investment going into climate. I think it makes a lot of sense not just for Earth but also commercially as these could be very successful companies. There are many moonshot ideas out there, like fusion reactors or sustainable aviation fuels. What I love about our own business is that it solves one specific climate-related problem much faster than other solutions. You don't need to wait for 30 years for the technology to finally be developed but the impact starts today.

What's interesting about you is that you’ve already worked within this kind of space with hardware that worked with software to actually measure gas with bentekk, so you already had this technical expertise, which you've now put into climate technology. So, there’s no question about whether your technology works, right? What are the tools that you need within a team for a climate technology startup to move from an idea to something that works and has an impact?

You need to have a long breath especially if you work in the energy sector like we do. Sales cycles are typically long and therefore you need that long breath with persistence and resilience. That is a challenge for sure, but it's manageable and there are some hacks to it. You just need to find the right beachhead market, somewhere to start. Some technologies, like fusion reactors, are under development for the next decades so it is difficult to assess if such projects will be successful. Right now, it’s unclear whether or when they will have a future. So you need to have that long breath, along with a big vision and the resilience to go for it. The advantage for us is that we can have a direct impact right now. We can go out to a natural gas storage facility, find leaks and do something about it, today.

Would you say that you need to be an optimist to be a founder of climate technology?

I would say you need to be both – optimistic and realistic but I think that's true for every founder. If you were a pessimist, it would be very tough. Founding a company is a roller coaster. You have to work through all the tough phases. You need to pivot, or just work harder and so if you were a pessimist, you would not last very long in the industry. You need to be very resilient and take those negative hits, and maybe that's especially true for climate technology.

If you were a pessimist about the climate and what's happening to our planet, or you think that we can’t rescue our planet, then it would be tough to really believe in your work. But saying that, we have somebody in the team who's a little bit pessimistic, but he still works with us. I think it’s important to have a mix of both in the team. That's not just true for climate tech but for every team, you need to have diverse thinking. It’s great if you have people pulling and pushing in different directions as you can all get better as a whole.

People working within climate tech or on the environmental side of things get very frustrated about how slowly things work, especially within huge companies, and a lot of the time there’s a lot of talk but not enough action. So, how do you approach these big oil and gas companies? And how do you then slot your product into what they currently have?

We aren’t approaching huge companies yet. We're looking for smaller companies that only have a few natural gas assets like natural gas storage facilities. That’s our beachhead market. They often have large shareholders like BP but the entity itself is smaller and easier to work with. They are able to make faster decisions and they're quick to react and give feedback.

Generally, we’re happy with the actions our customers take. We’re in it together.

How do you see your startup in the next five years? What do you think you'll be working on and what’s your vision?

Within the next five years, we’ll have conquered the German market, meaning we help natural gas operators to be more sustainable and detect and reduce leaks on a regular, operational level. I'm also very excited about internationalizing, expanding within Europe, and moving to the US. The US is one of the main producers of natural gas.

Entering the US was a lot of fun at bentekk, traveling to the Houston area where you have a density of oil and gas that you can't imagine in comparison to Germany. It took me two years to visit all the refineries in Germany and I could visit the same number of refineries in one week in Houston.

Our product will make a big impact on the environment once we roll it out in the US and it`s a huge opportunity commercially.

Let's change the topic a little bit. You’ve also been doing some investing right since you exited with bentekk, so tell me about yourself as an investor, what you look for, and what's your mindset when it comes to investing in other startups.

Not to downplay it but investing for me really is very opportunistic and my main investment is my daily work at my own company. That's where I put in all my effort and my passion, everything goes into it.

When it comes to investing, I earned some in my first exit and want to do something useful with it. I like the idea of founders giving back and investing in other founders in their region. It strengthens the whole ecosystem.

Like you, Robin, you’re a big advocate for this. When you make a new investment, you invite other portfolio founders to invest alongside you, and so one of my last investments was in another company from your portfolio.

Of course, the primary goal of my investments is to make money, but it’s also a learning opportunity. Through my investments, I get insights into the journey and trajectory of other companies and that’s something I can learn a lot from as a CEO. Overall, I am a founder, not an investor though.

What do you think makes you a very good founder?

A big vision, persistence, and the ability to ask for advice and help. Generally, I’m a better founder this time around. It worked out well the first time and there are many good reasons for that, but it was also an early exit.

With it being our second company, my co-founder and I are very strategic and clear about how we want to develop and build the company. It’s always about phases. For example, the first phase was customer development, to learn as much as you can about your potential customers and the market, but you don't build anything. Maybe conceptually, you draw out your solution or sketch it out, but you don't start building it yet. You just learn as much as you can about a problem and then start conceptualizing your product afterward. In our case, we raised capital around then because we needed the money to build the solution to this problem.

For us, this prior experience helps because we're very good at executing this process now. One big learning is that you need a strong community and a strong network. We won’t be successful on our own.

What makes me a good founder is that I reach out and seek help when I need to. Despite prior successes, I’m coachable and work with people who've done great things before, and I’m always eager to learn.

What do you see as your biggest challenges for the next couple of years with atmio?

The biggest challenge is usually about how to execute and stay focused. Maybe it's not just the development of a great product or long sales cycles and going into different markets and so on, but how to orchestrate and line everything up in the right way while having the right people in the team.

But I guess you have your previous experience to try to navigate some of this?

Up to a certain point. When we sold, our team consisted of ten people. We didn't go through hyper-growth, it made sense to sell early and have a strategic partner. Then, within Draeger, when I said goodbye, I sent an email to over 100 people so of course, it needed a big extended team to bring such a professional and complex product to market.

Last time I took my company to the international level together with a big corporation. This time, I want to do it from within our own company and build a global champion, so that’s very exciting.

I wish you all the best. Thank you very much for your time!