Decade Energy, the Paris-based depot-electrification specialist founded by former Volta Trucks executives, has raised €22 million to deploy at least 100 megawatts of battery energy storage across French logistics sites. The round, announced on 23 April 2026, is led by Eiffel Investment Group and SET Ventures, with continued backing from existing investors Contrarian Ventures and Ananda Impact Ventures.
The financing splits into two tranches with very different strategic logics: a €16 million project-finance commitment from Eiffel’s Eiffel Transition Infrastructure fund, earmarked for deploying the first wave of battery energy storage systems (BESS) assets, and a growth-equity portion to fund Decade Energy’s optimisation software, new product lines for EV truck charging and photovoltaic integration, and expansion beyond France.
Inside the round
Eiffel Investment Group and SET Ventures jointly led the round. Eiffel’s €16 million project-finance commitment is arguably the more consequential piece of the deal — it is not simply venture equity but long-duration capital dedicated to building a portfolio of at least 100MW of BESS projects across France, with an expected total capital expenditure of roughly €50 million. SET Ventures, one of the most experienced European climate-tech funds, anchored the venture equity alongside Contrarian Ventures and Ananda Impact Ventures, which backed the company’s €3.6 million seed round in June 2024.
The split between equity and project finance reflects a maturing pattern in European climate-tech. Asset-heavy businesses that deploy physical infrastructure are increasingly raising two kinds of capital in parallel: equity to pay for the platform and software, and project finance — often from specialist infrastructure funds — to pay for the assets themselves. That structure keeps the equity story clean and avoids diluting operating shareholders to fund steel and batteries.
“We now have the capital and platform to turn logistics depots into the power infrastructure that electric road transport needs,” said chief executive and co-founder Casper Norden.
Julia Padberg of SET Ventures described the proposition more bluntly: “Decade Energy is tackling one of the most critical choke points in the energy transition.” Laurent Coubret of Eiffel Investment Group added that “BESS is no longer a niche technology. It is becoming core infrastructure.”
The bottleneck Decade Energy is solving
Electrifying a truck fleet looks simple on paper — buy electric trucks, plug them in overnight. In practice, the grid connection at a typical logistics depot was sized for office lighting and forklift chargers, not for a fleet of 40-tonne battery-electric tractors each drawing hundreds of kilowatts. Upgrading a grid connection in France or much of northern Europe can take two to four years, and in many industrial zones there is simply no capacity left to allocate.
That is the wall commercial EV fleets hit. Decade Energy’s answer is to develop, finance and operate the full energy infrastructure needed at each depot: new grid connections where available, battery energy storage to smooth load against grid constraints, solar to reduce grid draw, high-power EV charging, and software to optimise energy use across the stack. The BESS is the keystone: by storing energy when the grid can deliver it and discharging when trucks need fast charging, Decade Energy can electrify a depot whose grid connection would otherwise make the project impossible.
The business model is capital-intensive but recurring. Decade Energy owns the assets and sells depot operators a managed service — charging-as-a-service, capacity-as-a-service — rather than a one-off installation. That aligns well with fleet operators, many of whom would rather pay per kilowatt-hour than take balance-sheet exposure to multi-megawatt battery infrastructure.
The team and what’s changed
Norden co-founded Decade Energy in 2023 alongside Alexandre Cleret, Alejandro Ortega Peniche and Mariela Atanasova. The four led the development of financial and energy management services at Volta Trucks, the Swedish electric-truck manufacturer whose collapse and subsequent restructuring exposed how much of the commercial EV story depended not on vehicle manufacturing but on the surrounding energy infrastructure. Decade Energy can be read as a response to exactly that gap: the most important constraint on electric trucking is not the truck, but the depot.
In addition to the €22 million announced this week and the €3.6 million seed two years ago, the company secured a €36 million project-finance facility in 2024, bringing total capital deployed and committed to around €62 million.
Use of funds and what comes next
The €16 million Eiffel commitment funds the first tranche of BESS projects across France — the company’s immediate focus market. The remaining equity supports three strategic initiatives: accelerating optimisation software development, extending the product line to include bespoke truck-charging and rooftop PV configurations, and market expansion into adjacent European geographies. The company has already signed a letter of intent with Sarrion Global Solutions to study BESS deployment across French logistics hubs, indicating the commercial pipeline is already taking shape.
Where it fits in the European funding picture
Decade Energy’s round sits in a fast-growing cohort of European climate-infrastructure bets tracked by Sesamers — from Altilium’s £18.5 million battery refinery grant to Edinburgh’s Exergy3 renewable heat round. The thesis running through these deals is consistent: the hardest part of the energy transition is not technology invention but deployment financing, and the European funds willing to write project-finance cheques alongside equity are becoming decisive for which climate-tech companies can scale.
The next data point will be the first BESS sites coming online in France later in 2026. If utilisation and off-take contracts land as planned, Decade Energy will be positioned as the default depot-electrification partner for European fleet operators — and as one of the clearest examples of the project-finance-plus-equity model that is reshaping European climate deployment.
Source: Tech.eu — Decade Energy secures €22M to electrify logistics depots at scale
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