After successfully raising $6 million in mid-2023 to scale up production of synthetic hydrogen from biomass waste using biocatalyst technology, Hydgene founder Louise Brown has dusted off her pitchbook and is preparing to do the rounds with investors for a Series A raise.
Brown is grateful her company was founded too recently to need seed capital in 2021, when the climate tech fundraising market was at its most frenetic. While it would have been relatively easier to usher in capital through the door, she believes the startup would have been been saddled with a valuation too high for today’s market.
“I feel optimistic going into this next raise,” she says. “We don’t have the challenges of overvaluations that went through the markets post-Covid because we weren’t around then.”
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Brown is not expecting an easy ride this time around. With aspirations to include both domestic and global investors in her cap table — “because our product, hydrogen, is a global market” — she feels that “hardware” climate tech businesses like hers, which are built on deep tech solutions, find it much more difficult to win over investors than software solutions.
“The depth of the deep tech capital space is limited in Australia,” she told Capital Brief.