Berlin-based Bees & Bears is on a mission to make renewable energy financing accessible to everyone. The climate fintech has raised €5 million in seed funding from Extantia Capital and Contrarian Ventures, following a €2 million pre-seed round in 2024. This comes shortly after securing a landmark €500 million financing framework from a listed European bank, a first for a European climate fintech.
The funding round will fund Bees & Bears’ next growth phase. The company plans to triple its team, expand into commercial and industrial markets, and launch in neighboring European countries to meet surging demand. The debt facility will finance end-customer purchases through local installers, while the equity capital supports operational scaling and market development.
Fixing the financing gap in Europe’s energy transition
Despite growing enthusiasm for clean energy, affordability remains a major barrier. A 2024 KfW study found that 40% of German households cannot afford climate technologies without instalment options. While large digital platforms already provide financing tools, most of Europe’s tens of thousands of local installers, who carry out the majority of renewable projects, lack such digital capabilities.
Bees & Bears are bridging this gap. Its embedded-finance platform allows installers to offer customers flexible payment options directly during consultations, powered by real-time credit checks. This removes the need for bank visits or paperwork, helping households access clean energy faster and more affordably. For installers, it means unlocking new customer segments and accelerating project completion without cash-flow strain.
Building Europe’s Leading Climate Finance Platform
Founded in 2023 by Marius Schondelmaier and Jakob von Egidy, Bees & Bears now partners with several hundred specialist installers across Europe. By digitising and streamlining renewable financing, it is redefining how clean energy projects are sold and delivered at the local level.
Bees & Bears’ goal is to become Europe’s leading embedded-finance platform for climate technologies. By enabling affordable instalment purchases for solar systems, heat pumps, and battery storage, the company is tackling one of the most overlooked barriers in the green transition: financial accessibility.
“The energy transition must not fail due to bureaucracy and financing obstacles,” said Yair Reem, Partner at Extantia Capital. “Bees & Bears creates the urgently needed infrastructure for households and installers – quickly, digitally, and reliably. This is how we bring climate protection from paper to practice and enable faster expansion of renewables.”
Tomas Kemtys, Partner at Contrarian Ventures, adds: “Achieving net-zero by 2050 requires closing an annual investment gap of $2.5 trillion in green energy. Today’s system is constrained by lack of standardisation, outdated risk models, and illiquid secondary markets. Bees & Bears directly addresses these structural hurdles, fundamentally modernising how capital flows into clean energy.”
