David Hunt – Hyperion Q4 Market and Talent Review

David Hunt (00:00.344)
and welcome back to the Leaders in Clean Tech podcast for 2026. I’m David Hunt, founder and managing director at Hyperion Search and your host for the podcast. Now we have a number of great founder and technology episodes coming up, but today we’re going to do a short audio only special just to share some market and talent insights from the Hyperion Q4 market and talent review, including a bit of a look ahead to some of the trends for 2026.

Now every quarter we published a Hyperion Market and Talent review. It’s a snapshot of what’s happening across the energy storage grid, e-mobility, renewables and all of the adjacent sort of decarbonization technologies shaping the energy and mobility transitions. And this quarter the timing lined up nicely with our friends at Net Zero Insights publishing their State of Climate tech report for 2025.

It’s a huge data set that helps validate and contextualize much of what we’re seeing on the ground here at Hyperion. So in short, this episode is a walkthrough, some of the key highlights, what has actually happened during 2025, what changed, what does it mean for leadership and talent, and what should leaders be preparing for in 2026. Now, if you want the full report, the full details, you can download the Hyperion Q4 review using the link in the show notes.

And I’ll also add a link to the Net Zero Insights report, which I’m sure you’ll find interesting also. Now let’s start with the big picture. And this is something which we felt across every search, every board conversation, every leadership brief that we had during the course of the year. 2025 was, of course, a challenging year and one in which cleantech, to some extent, grew up.

Not because the challenges disappeared, far from it of course, but because the sector for many and varied reasons shifted decisively from exuberance to execution.

David Hunt (01:55.094)
In the Hyperion review, we describe 2025 as a year of maturity on the back of that. that faced, companies that progressed, raised, partnered, or exited weren’t necessarily the ones with the most exciting technology, but they were the ones with operational discipline, the ability to execute and scale under pressure, and to do this, of course, having credible leadership teams.

Boards and investors, I think, have changed their questions over the course of the last year, 18 months. It’s no longer, is the technology compelling? Increasingly, it’s can this leadership team scale? Can they navigate regulatory and market complexity? Can they attract follow on capital, customers and talent? And can they do it without burning trust culture or all of the cash? And this shift is backed somewhat by the Nets or Insights data.

What they show is that nearly 50 % fewer companies reached seed to Series A rounds compared to 2022. And there was an 80 % fewer rounds between A and B or funding rounds between A B that were successful. Grant funding also fell 51 % during the course of the year. And of course we saw that capital concentrated heavily into later stages and commercially ready companies, companies fit for and ready for scale.

So the story is consistent for what we’re seeing and from what the data suggests. The market hasn’t slowed, but it’s certainly shifted and sharpened somewhat.

We’ll take a move into the various sectors, starting with the energy storage and grid market, an area led at Hyperion for the last five years by David Beeson, many of whom will know David well, who’s had a front-row seat to the sector’s evolution this year. 2025, of course, in storage was a year of real-scale. Europe is on track to hit 100 gigawatts of deployed energy storage, and globally, utility-scale best accounted for more than 80 % of new capacity additions.

David Hunt (03:54.286)
In the Hyperion review, we highlight that giga-sale projects in the UK and the Middle East, a surge in US deployments driven by ITC incentives and AI-driven demand, longer duration storage becoming more mainstream, and major grid performance finally starting to unblock interconnection queues. The Net Zero Insights reinforces this. Battery, solar, and grid technologies accounted for 55 % of all climate tech funding during 2025.

That’s quite an extraordinary concentration and it validates what we’re seeing in the hiring world. Talent demand in storage and grid has been laser focused in these particular areas. Project execution specialists, people who can deliver best projects to COD. Of course, asset optimization and trading talent as portfolios grow and revenue stacking becomes more complex. Grid connection experts, still one of the biggest bottlenecks in Europe in particular.

and supply chain leaders as tariffs geopolitics reshape the landscape, people who can navigate and develop and manage supply chains. As David Beeson puts it in the review, 2026 will be about maximizing asset revenues and navigating increasingly sophisticated flexibility markets. Much to be seen during the course of the year ahead. Looking at the EVian future mobility world.

An area led by Stephen Robinson. Again, many of you will know Steve for his eight years plus with Hyperion in the immobility space. Stephen has been deeply embedded in the sector shift from rapid expansion and land grab to operational excellence. And 2025 here was a year where the European EV charging sector in particular truly mature and continues to do so. The focus has moved away from build as fast as possible to the key issues of reliability, uptime, utilization.

and of course profitability. In the Hyperion review, we highlight some of the key areas. The EV, sorry, the UK confirming the EV mileage tax. BEVs, electric vehicle market share hitting 20 % across Europe. Key targets or key events such as InstaVolt deploying the UK’s first motorway battery-backed ultra-rapid charges. The Change League launching the Simplify networks and Eliminate to eliminate app chaos.

David Hunt (06:11.222)
and megawatt-level charging accelerating for heavy-duty vehicles, which of course is a key area for development that we’re seeing growth in for the year ahead. The Net Zero Insights again backs this up with a broader trend that AI and A-word optimization is now one of the fastest-growing investment categories in the mobility sector. To reflect that, the talent picture reflects that shift. Steven and the team have seen high demand for program and project delivery leaders, grid integration specialists, of course.

Go-to-market roles and country managers with deep local policy knowledge, operations and maintenance leaders, and increasingly AI-driven optimization tools and people that can develop those uptime operations and assets within businesses to maintain a competitive differentiator. The Secretary is certainly no longer about building networks, it’s about running them well and optimization.

Renewables was an interesting one. Again, lead at Hyperion by Nikita Meier. Renewables has had a milestone year in many ways. Solar officially overtook coal as the EU’s largest electricity source. Quite a symbolic moment, one to celebrate, but also a practical one. In the Hyperion review, we highlight Europe’s grid package to accelerate infrastructure. There’s been a wave of &A activity across the solar and wind sector. The continuing rise of co-located solar and storage.

and the reality check of containment and negative pricing, particularly across many countries within Europe. But the talent trends here are also quite clear. There’s a huge need for senior grid engineers, EPC and construction specialists, project developers with deep local knowledge, and again, that digital and AI enabled roles, forecasting, optimization, predictive maintenance. The key to share some thoughts from the floor from a trip to RE Plus.

in Vegas earlier in 20 or later in 2025. Clearly solar and wind in particular have been hit hard in the US, yet solar continues to scale at pace in the rest of the world.

David Hunt (08:18.318)
Beyond grid and electrification, our core sectors in 2025 saw momentum in advanced materials, circularity, bioenergy, biofuels, industrial carbonization, course, and the digital industrial technologies. But hard tech remains a challenge. Sharing the funding issues already discussed, first of a kind funding remains very challenging.

Net zero insights shows that more than half of all climate tech equity funding now goes to hard tech, which is good. But the pilot to readiness gap is widening and debt financing for FOK projects fell by 20%. Really challenging market. But for talent, again, this means that companies really need leaders who can navigate long-term development cycles. Boards need operators, not just advisors.

and strategic investors are becoming the key partners for scale more so than VC. And this is where Hyperion’s work with boards and founders has been particularly active, something I’ve obviously directly involved myself, strengthening leadership teams earlier, adding chairs and non-executives directors and operators who bring pattern recognition from previous cycles. Incredibly important to have these days people who have seen the course and been through the course and can directly impact on

the operational delivery and scaling of businesses. So what does all this mean for the year ahead? Across the Hyperion review and the Nets or Insights data, a few key themes stood out. Execution talent will define winners and losers. The next phase of the transition is about delivery, not invention. Grid storage and electrification remain the center of gravity, driven by AI data centers and the electrification across all sectors.

AI of course becomes invisible infrastructure in many ways, not a headline, but a layer that optimizes everything. And at the board level boards professionalize, operator led boards, digital oversight, cybersecurity expertise are increasingly becoming the standard. Talent markets are becoming more selective. There are fewer roles, higher expectations, and candidates who are increasingly discerning about where they take their talents, particularly leadership and those people who’ve got proven delivery and execution experiences.

David Hunt (10:34.444)
Now that’s just a quick snapshot. If you want the full picture, the sector trends, the people moves of which there are very many, the hiring patterns and the outlook for 2026, you can download the Hyperion Q4 market and tenant of rest mentioned in the link in the show notes. It’s a concise data-driven snapshot of where the market is, where it’s heading and what it means for the teams building the future of clean energy and mobility. So thanks for listening to the short episode. Thanks for being part of the Leading Clean Tech Community.

We have, as mentioned, good number of found episodes for you, including a great one at the end of the month I’m recording. As ever, please do leave a review and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice and share your favorite episodes online. If you would, your support is hugely appreciated. I think we’re now into our sixth or seventh year, possibly even eighth, I should count really, but a good many years of 160 odd episodes. And it’s been great for those of you who’ve been with us from the beginning or those who’ve joined us more recently. Thank you for.

Your attention. Thank you for listening. As ever, you want to discuss any of the issues in the podcast today, then by all means reach out to me via LinkedIn or via email. But for now, thanks for listening.