A First Day of School for Nature Tech: Inside the Launch of the SCION Accelerator
On September 15, 2025, Bulgaria’s school bells rang to welcome students back after the summer break. That same morning, we opened a different kind of classroom: the first cohort of the SCION Accelerator, the only program in Central and Eastern Europe built specifically for early-stage Nature Tech and Clean Tech founders.
Ten start-ups: Airlytics, Alt.Real, BioBliss, MASAP.EU, Nomadium Robotics, PLANET, Proon-Tech, SolarBlinds, Solmag, and Xylon X entered a ten-week program designed to help them transition from breakthrough science to scalable, investable companies. Their journey begins at a moment when the global market is demanding exactly what our region can supply.
Why Now, Why Here
Worldwide, Nature Tech is gaining momentum. According to Dealroom, global venture funding for Nature Tech climbed 16 per cent in 2024 to reach USD 2.13 billion. Yet Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), despite hosting some of the planet’s richest biodiversity, remains a marginal player in that boom.
The disconnect isn’t a lack of capability. Bulgaria and Romania possess scientific resources that most investors never see. Bulgaria’s Academy of Sciences operates 42 research institutes with continuous datasets spanning more than seventy years, including soil samples collected annually since 1947. Romania’s Danube Delta Research Institute has tracked water quality, sediment flows, and species populations since 1970. These longitudinal archives are priceless for anyone working on carbon sequestration, soil regeneration, or ecosystem modelling.
Couple that with extraordinary natural capital—over 41,000 documented species in Bulgaria alone, 170 of them endemic; Romania’s Carpathian forests sheltering Europe’s largest populations of brown bears, wolves, and lynx—and the region becomes a living laboratory. Meanwhile, EU policy is creating immediate market pull: the Green Deal and the Recovery and Resilience Facility are channelling billions into biodiversity restoration and low-carbon transition.
In other words, the science, the urgency, and the market are already here. What’s been missing is the bridge from research to scalable enterprise. That is the gap we built SCION to close.
How We Built the Program
Our accelerator runs as an intensive ten-week curriculum that pairs founders with global mentors and regional investors. Each week focuses on a core challenge—market validation, impact metrics, regulatory strategy, fundraising—delivered through a mix of workshops, one-to-one sessions, and field learning.
The mentor roster reflects both breadth and depth. Soma Ray, systems-design and research leader with two decades at Booking.com and IBM, leads the opening module on evidence-based product design. Ben Sanders, a multi-time C-suite growth executive who scaled fintechs from seed to IPO, teaches go-to-market strategy. Ginny Radmall, an international pitch coach who has worked with Techstars and Google for Startups, prepares founders to communicate with clarity and impact. They are joined by Chris Coleridge of Carbon13, Jaïr Halevi of Miro, Michelle Egly of Wildya, and others who collectively have launched or scaled hundreds of climate-focused ventures.
This year, we added a new dimension: artificial intelligence. Petar Petrov, one of Bulgaria’s earliest AI-adoption experts, and his teammate Nikola Petrov are creating an AI overlayer for the accelerator. Their sessions will help founders integrate AI into daily operations—streamlining research, strengthening market analysis, and building smarter customer tools. For many of our start-ups, it will be the first time they see how AI can become a practical ally rather than a distant buzzword.
Lessons from the Region
We designed SCION with a deep awareness of the region’s history. For centuries, the Black Sea basin has been a crossroads of empires and ideas. Periods of political isolation forced Bulgaria and Romania to develop self-reliant scientific systems; Soviet-era institutes maintained meticulous datasets and perfected techniques that remain world-class. Today, those same scientists work inside EU regulatory frameworks and global markets.
This dual heritage—rigorous science and open access—creates exactly the environment Nature Tech needs. Building climate solutions isn’t like writing software. Prototypes depend on seasonal cycles. Pilot projects require partnerships with farmers, utilities, or conservation agencies. Impact is measured in ecosystem health, not user downloads. Geography matters, and here, founders can test solutions in living systems while drawing on decades of hard data.
Our Ambition
When we say “class is in session,” we mean it literally. Over the next ten weeks, our founders will learn how to translate complex ecological insights into marketable products, how to communicate technical risk to investors, and how to scale without losing scientific integrity.
But the accelerator is more than a training ground. It is a signal to global capital that Central and Eastern Europe is ready to lead in Nature Tech. We believe the next generation of climate and biodiversity solutions will come from people who have lived through environmental collapse and renewal. Our job is to give them the conditions to grow—capital, mentorship, and a community that understands the unique challenges of working with nature.
