Infratech: Europe's Next Big Wave
The hosts:
Davide Cannarozzi, Resilient Infratech Fund (RIF)
Nick de la Forge, Planet A
What is this Ripple about?
InfraTech is Europe's next trillion-euro opportunity, sitting at the crossroads of energy, industry and AI. The technology is ready, but the capital to scale it into infrastructure isn't, and whoever solves that wins the decade.
Why this topic timely or urgent in 2026
2026 is the inflection point. AI's power and cooling demands are exploding, industrial electrification is accelerating, defence and security spending is surging across Europe, and record capital is being committed to upgrade and digitise the continent's infrastructure. A generational investment opportunity is opening now, but the capital to scale it into infrastructure hasn't caught up. The window to position is open today, not in three years.
Key questions or challenges being explored
InfraTech could be the defining investment wave of the decade. Who captures the upside, and who misses it?
Can Europe scale its own InfraTech champions, or will the winners be built elsewhere?
What has to change in how we fund hardware-heavy companies so they reach bankable scale without dilution killing them first?
The key tension or debate at the heart of this discussion
The market trade-off: who pays for going first. The first-of-a-kind asset is where the value is created and where almost all the risk sits. Whoever finances it carries the cost of proving the technology; whoever waits for the second deployment enters cheap and de-risked. So everyone wants to be the second mover, and the first-of-a-kind that unlocks the market goes unfunded. Two related tensions sit underneath it: The asset trade-off: speed vs. bankability. To deploy fast, you back assets that aren't fully de-risked yet, and therefore aren't bankable. To be bankable, you wait until the technology risk is near zero, and by then you've arrived too late. Every InfraTech asset lives on that tightrope. The investor trade-off: specialist focus vs. diversified risk. A specialist sees the deals others miss and understands the physics of each one, but concentrates risk in a slow, capital-heavy sector. A generalist diversifies that risk but can't read the deal. The edge and the exposure come from the same place. These three tensions all point to the same gap: the place where InfraTech is too real for venture capital and too early for infrastructure finance. The debate is whether that gap closes on its own, or whether it takes a different kind of investor to close it.
Who would get the most value from attending this Ripple?
Investors: partners and investment leads at deep-tech and climate VCs; investment directors at infrastructure, energy transition and industrial funds; principals at family offices and institutionals allocating to energy, industry and digital infrastructure.
Founders and operators: CEOs, CFOs and heads of finance at hardware or hardware-enabled InfraTech companies, typically post-prototype and raising to fund first commercial deployments.
Ecosystem: corporate development and innovation leads at energy, industrial and infrastructure corporates; project and asset developers; and structured finance or transaction advisors working on first-of-a-kind assets.