The Pipeline Playbook: B2B demand generation benchma
The bottleneck is no longer money or steel. It is paper.
A project that takes a year to construct takes five years of paperwork to get ready. Due diligence and transaction processes have barely changed in decades, and they cannot keep pace with rising deal volumes and complexity.
The result is wasted advisory fees, time lost on deals that will never close, and capital sitting idle that should be building something.
London, 8 September 2026 – Veridue, an AI-native due diligence and M&A platform that accelerates investment and project financing for energy infrastructure, has officially launched following two years of product development and validation with renewables and data centre developers, independent power producers (IPPs), and infrastructure investors.
The platform gives investors a competitive advantage by enabling them to screen 100x more opportunities, identify the best assets and complete transactions 10x faster – helping them win more deals with the same team and higher conviction. For developers, it helps bring projects to investment readiness and bankability faster, empowering both sides to move with greater speed and rigour at the same time.
Today’s launch has been supported by a $4 million pre-seed funding round – one of the largest ever for energy software in Europe. The round was led by Episode 1 Ventures, with participation from HTGF and Pi Labs, alongside prominent energy and technology leaders including the Co-Founder of Aurora Energy Research Cameron Hepburn and former CEO of Quantum Black Jeremy Palmer.
Market context
Europe and the US are experiencing surging demand for renewables, driven by data centres, electrification and a renewed focus on energy security. Yet while capital appetite is strong, buildout is bottlenecked by slow, expensive and manual processes.
More energy infrastructure projects are seeking capital, IPPs are pivoting from greenfield development to acquisitions, and investors are evaluating a growing number of assets, a significant share of which prove to be distressed or not commercially viable. As a result, identifying attractive opportunities and distinguishing recoverable issues from fundamental risks is becoming increasingly difficult.
Lengthening grid connection queues, planning risk and long lead times are making ready-to-build and operating assets more attractive than starting from scratch.
At the same time, hybrid assets – such as Solar PV or Wind with BESS – and regulatory change are adding significant complexity to clean energy dealmaking. Co-located storage, merchant exposure and stacked revenue models are creating more sophisticated transactions that are harder to assess using traditional due diligence approaches.
"The infrastructure Europe needs — renewables, data centres, grid capacity — represents one of the most critical buildouts of our generation. Capital is ready. Projects are in the pipeline. What's been missing is the ability to move deals at the pace the moment demands. Veridue is fixing exactly that," said Timo Bertsch, Investment Manager at HTGF.
- Benchmarks by stage and segmentConversion rates from MQL to closed-won, broken out by deal size and industry.
- A budget model that holds upHow top teams split spend across paid, content, events and partners.
- Attribution without the argumentsA lightweight measurement framework sales and marketing can both sign off on.
- A 90-day action planWeek-by-week priorities to put the findings to work right away.