Brant Richards

About Brant Richards

Brant has spent more than two decades on the hardest part of deep technology, which is not building it but getting institutions to act on it. He co-founded Younicos, sat on its executive board, won its first commercial contract and helped take it from four people to over 150, in which time the company delivered Europe's first megawatt-scale grid battery and the world's first fully renewable microgrid. He then directed venture investment in energy storage and electric mobility, built industrial ventures inside Germany's largest utility, and at RMI created and led Third Derivative, where more than $500 million was mobilised for over 120 climate-technology ventures during his tenure. He studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford as an American Physical Society Scholar and holds an MBA from IMD. He has worked in 49 countries and advises in English, Spanish and German. His view is that technology only gains value insofar as it lets people and institutions do what was previously impossible, so he starts with what is technically real and works outward to who must commit and what it will take to move them.

1:1 Sessions

• Selling Into Utilities and Large Industry

  60 min

  The sales cycle nobody warns you about. Pilots that lead nowhere, procurement processes measured in years, and the internal champion who has less power than they implied. Brant did this for grid-scale storage when the category didn't exist, which is the hardest version of the problem.

  $750

• Can You Sell This Yet

  60 min

  For hard tech founders with something real and no commercial traction. Brant works through whether you have a product or a demonstration, who the actual buyer is inside the organisation you're targeting, and what has to be true before anyone signs. He has sat on the accelerator side reading hundreds of these, so he knows exactly which version of the story fails.

  $749