The Financing Infrastructure Layer for the Energy Transition: Why We Invested in Bees & Bears

Extantia is proud to announce our €5 million seed investment in Bees & Bears, alongside Contrarian Ventures. The Berlin-based climate fintech is democratising access to renewable energy financing, following a €2 million pre-seed round in 2024 and a landmark €500 million financing framework from a listed European bank, positioning the company to finance 25,000 solar, heat pump, and battery storage systems over the next two years.

The Problem: Capex is blocking deployment at scale

The world is moving from high opex / low capex fossil technologies to low opex / high capex renewable solutions. Many of the new technologies (PV, batteries, heatpumps, EVs) already beat their fossil counterparts on a Total Cost of Operation (TCO) basis. However, adoption remains painfully slow, with many would-be customers struggling to shoulder the upfront capex.

Most homeowners, small businesses, and even many industrial players hesitate to commit large sums of upfront capital, even if there is clear visibility to cost-savings over an asset’s lifetime. Banks are slow, processes are tedious and opaque, and people are reluctant to either commit large sums or navigate the process of obtaining financing. The result: thousands of viable projects never get built.

This isn’t just a problem for solar panels and heat pumps. As clean technologies continue to come down the cost curve — from batteries to charging stations — upfront capex will remain the structural bottleneck.

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The Solution: Embedded financing at the point of sale

Bees & Bears solves this by making financing as simple as clicking “yes” at checkout.

Founded in 2023, the Berlin-based company embeds financing directly into the sales process of installers. Customers can immediately spread the cost of a solar or heating system over predictable monthly instalments, usually substituting higher fossil operating costs with lower clean-energy payments.

It’s a win-win-win:

• Homeowners immediately lower their monthly costs without large upfront payments (and can feel good about doing their part in the energy transition).
• Installers can expand their customer range, finance working capital, close contracts faster, and can provide holistic customer solutions that are competitive to industry giants like Enpal and Co.
• Banks and investors can deploy capital at scale into a fast-growing, attractive asset class that has verified real assets behind it and helps them reach their green lending goals at the same time.

Bees & Bears has been a pioneer in streamlining the customer journey to eliminate all friction from the buying process (think Klarna-for-renewable–assets). And in the credit game, size matters — in early 2025, the company secured a €500 million financing framework from a large European financial institution. This partnership allows Bees & Bears to offer some of the most attractive terms on the market, accessible via an onboarding process that takes just minutes for both installers and customers.

The Vision: The financing layer for the energy transition

Bees & Bears’ ambition goes far beyond the residential space. The team is building the missing financing layer that enables the energy transition across sectors.

Any situation where someone somewhere is buying a standardised renewable asset, Bees & Bears can offer an alternative payment solution. Today that can be PV, heatpumps, EV chargers, or batteries. Tomorrow that might be whatever new device or invention is coming down the abatement cost curve and becoming profitable to deploy.

And it doesn’t matter whether you’re an individual household or a company — Bees & Bears can create a solution to finance your distributed energy asset.

Why we invested

At Extantia, we back technologies and business models that remove bottlenecks to the energy transition. Financing is one of the biggest obstacles hindering large-scale deployment of already profitable renewable technologies.

The founders Jakob and Marius impressed us with their incredible execution focus, ability to form win-win partnerships, attention to detail, and the quality of the team they managed to assemble around them. In a short time, they have secured enough funding to leapfrog many of the incumbents and helped finance millions in loans that made a real difference in the lives of installers and households.

The combination of the team, proven market pull, a massive market, and an already operational €500 million financing facility made this the most compelling fintech opportunity in climate tech that we’ve seen.

We’re proud to back the Bees & Bears team as they build the financing infrastructure that will power the next trillion euros of the energy transition.

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