The Netherlands faces a need to increase renewable energy production to meet national climate goals, with solar PV electricity as a key component. However, recent reports indicate stagnation in solar PV growth due to financial uncertainty arising from the planned phase-out of the SDE++ subsidy scheme. This subsidy has historically provided financial stability by covering unprofitable segments in renewable energy business models. With its impending termination, large-scale solar PV projects face significant financing risks, which may hinder progress toward national energy targets.

This thesis investigates whether Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) can mitigate financial uncertainty for solar PV projects in the absence of subsidies. PPAs are long-term contracts between energy producers and buyers that offer revenue predictability, essential for securing project financing. Drawing from the Dutch offshore wind sector’s success with PPAs in a subsidy-free context, this research explores if PPAs can fulfill a similar role for solar PV. The study employs a qualitative approach, combining desk research and 14 semi-structured interviews with industry experts, including policymakers, lenders, and developers, to validate propositions developed from the literature.

Findings indicate that PPAs are currently seen as valuable complements to subsidies, enabling higher debt leverage. However, several challenges limit their use as standalone solutions. The Dutch solar PV market currently lacks sufficient creditworthy offtakers, and the relatively small project sizes further complicate PPA viability. Additionally, the rising frequency of negative price hours, periods when electricity prices drop below zero due to market saturation, presents new new problems that PPAs alone may not fully mitigate. Although PPAs are currently not yet equipped to replace the SDE++ scheme entirely.

The research suggests that other measures, such as a PPA guarantee fund and adjustments in debt models, may be needed to ensure the financial sustainability of future solar PV projects. Limitations of the study include the qualitative methodology and confidentiality constraints, which restricted insight into specific PPA strategies. Among others, the findings underscore the need for additional research on alternative financing structures and the role of smaller offtakers in the Dutch PPA market, as well as hybrid solutions like battery storage to address price volatility.

This thesis explores the strategies used by European cleantech startups to navigate the Valley of Death. This critical stage in the development of startups is characterised by a funding gap that hinders commercialisation efforts. Cleantech startups, however, with their focus on sustainable innovations addressing global issues such as climate change and energy transition, often experience a Valley of Death longer and deeper than other startups due to significant additional barriers in this phase. The additional barriers are high capital intensity, long development time, high technological risk, and ecosystem dependence. Thus, understanding how these startups overcome these barriers is crucial, given their potential to drive environmental and energy solutions. Therefore, this study seeks to uncover the strategies that allow cleantech startups to successfully navigate this challenging period. Through a multi-case study involving semi-structured interviews with eight cleantech startups and four investment stakeholders, the research seeks to identify the strategies used to navigate the Valley of Death. To ensure the strategies are grounded in a shared understanding, the timeline and barriers encountered by cleantech startups are first compared to the literature. This comparison is important because the timeline and barriers strongly influence the strategies that startups adopt. After establishing this foundation, the study then identifies the specific strategies used by cleantech startups to overcome these barriers.

The findings reveal that cleantech startups generally experience the onset of the Valley of Death around Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) 4-5. However, the exact timeline is highly dependent on the sector, market conditions, and type of technology being developed. Compared to other deeptech sectors, cleantech startups experience a delayed onset of the Valley of Death, largely due to the greater availability of government grants and strong public support that help mitigate early financial constraints. The Valley of Death typically ends around TRL 8, when startups begin to generate revenue and achieve financial independence.

In terms of barriers, the findings are strongly aligned with the existing literature, confirming the multifaceted nature of the challenges cleantech startups face. However, the interviews provide additional practical nuances that are less emphasised in the literature. For instance, while the literature touches on the limitations of grants, interviewees pointed out specific challenges such as grant application biases and restrictive conditions, the scarcity of skilled personnel was highlighted as a significant barrier to team-building, adding a practical layer to the more general discussions in the literature.

Another key difference is the strong emphasis placed on product-market fit by both startups and stakeholders during the interviews, which is underrepresented in the literature. Once startups progressed into the Valley of Death, tech risk appeared to diminish in importance, with startups shifting their focus to commercialisation and market challenges. These practical insights provide a deeper understanding of how cleantech startups navigate the VoD and highlight areas where existing research may need further exploration.

To overcome these barriers, European cleantech startups implement a combination of strategies that address both immediate financial constraints and the inherent risks of their ventures. The key strategies identified include non-dilutive funding, blended financing, alternative revenue streams, bootstrapping, investor engagement, deployment-led innovation, customer discovery, market demand signals, strategic partnerships, consortia-building, semi-commercial deployment, and early commercialisation.

Non-dilutive funding, such as grants, plays a crucial role, particularly in the early and intermediate stages, allowing startups to retain ownership while advancing development. The reliance on non-dilutive funding is one of the distinguishing features of cleantech startups, as they often use grants extensively, even until late stages, due to high capital intensity and the regulatory support available for climate and sustainability solutions. This reliance sets them apart from startups in other sectors, which may not leverage grants to the same extent.

In terms of managing inherent risks, cleantech startups employ strategies such as deployment-led innovation, customer discovery, and strategic partnerships to validate technology, establish credibility, and demonstrate market fit. By engaging with investors and pursuing blended financing, cleantech ventures can reduce perceived risks and secure the capital needed for scaling. These strategies are most effective when integrated, providing both short-term solutions for bridging funding gaps and establishing a foundation for long-term stability.

While the strategies employed by cleantech startups to overcome the Valley of Death align broadly with general entrepreneurial practices, the reliance on government support and the nature of addressing urgent global issues such as climate change and sustainability distinguish cleantech ventures from other sectors.

In a world marked by rapid technological advancements and environmental concerns, clean technology clusters have become hubs of innovation. Attracting investment in these clusters has gained significant attention from scholars and industry professionals, which aim at understanding which activities companies can undertake in order to increase the attractiveness of the cluster and region.
This study explores the factors influencing investment attractiveness in clean technology clusters, focusing on company-level variables like patenting activity, publishing activity, and proximity to universities.
Using a case study approach, the research analyzes four Western European clean technology clusters, aiming to uncover insights and differences in investment attractiveness. The four clusters are Aclima (Basque Country, Spain), CLEAN (Central Region, Denmark), Greenreality (South Karelia, Denmark) and Water Alliance (The Netherlands). The analysis is divided into the single case reports for each cluster, exploring the variables at the company level, and into the cross-case analysis, bring the previous observations together at the cluster level.
The findings highlight the positive impact of patenting activity on cluster attractiveness for the clusters under study. While no distinct relationships were found for publishing activity and university proximity, the cluster-level additional factors in consideration provided useful identifying some potentially meaningful differences between the clusters, such as the approach and recognition of their regions and countries toward sustainability.
However, the study also acknowledges its limitations, mainly stated as the availability and quality of data, as well as some methodological decisions on the assessment of investment attractiveness, suggesting future research opportunities in this dynamic field. From elaborating a more refined iteration of this study to approaching new topics, the findings and limitations of this research invite future researchers to enrich the body of knowledge associated with clean technology clusters, and in particular with their funding dynamics.
The implications of this study mainly concern the positive influence of patenting on the attractiveness of companies and clusters. Pursuing and supporting this kind of intellectual protection activity could prove to be a powerful tool for firms and cluster managers.

This master thesis seeks to better understand the investment valuation procedure followed by software venture capitalists (VC) in the European context. I explain how VCs perform fair value estimations of software start-ups with the emerging comparable analysis technique. Furthermore, this study examines the relative importance of start-up characteristics in determining the multiple and how these factors influence the VC’s valuation behaviour. Additionally, I explore whether this behaviour and the multiples paid can be explained by differences in VC firm experience at a time of historically low interest rates and record-breaking fund inflows. Based on 36 interviews with European VCs, primarily from the Benelux region, I find that all start-up characteristics matter in the determination of the multiple, but the management team a little more. As a result, software VCs are willing to pay higher multiples for stellar management teams than for exceptional business characteristics. In contrast with the other characteristics, poor traction does not necessarily kill the deal, but VCs might rather use it to enforce a lower valuation. Overall, VC firm experience is not a strong predictor of the valuation behaviour and ARR multiples paid for deals. However, I do find that more experienced VCs are willing to pay higher premiums for benchmark-exceeding traction than their less experienced counterparts.