Family offices and long-term investors are entering a period of transition. What once sat at the edge of investment conversations, sustainability, climate, and deep technology, is now moving firmly into the core of capital allocation decisions. But behind the headlines, the thinking is far more nuanced. 

In this Connect Group Insight, we speak with Frédéric De Mévius, Founder and Managing Partner of Planet First Partners, whose career spans investment banking, multi-generational family capital, and the build-out of one of Europe’s most recognised evergreen investment platforms.

From backing consumer success stories like Oatly to investing in nuclear fusion, green hydrogen, and quantum technologies, Frederic shares how his perspective on long-term capital has evolved, and why the next generation of investment opportunities will look fundamentally different from the last. This is a conversation about conviction, patience, and what it really takes to allocate capital over decades, not quarters.

Your career spans multi-generational family capital and growth investing in sustainability. How has your thinking around long-term capital allocation evolved?

My thinking has evolved in three distinct phases, each defined less by theory than by the specific work I was immersed in at the time. I started in investment banking — SG Warburg, then Lehman Brothers — where capital allocation was almost entirely about near-term pricing and transaction execution. The long-term was five years, and ‘purpose’ wasn’t part of the vocabulary.

At Verlinvest, which I founded in 1995 as a family diversification vehicle alongside our AB InBev holdings, the time horizon expanded considerably. We structured it as an evergreen platform, which meant we could hold companies like Oatly or Vita Coco for as long as it took to create genuine value — without the artificial discipline of a fund lifecycle forcing premature exits. That taught me that patient capital isn’t passive capital; it’s the most active kind, because you’re accountable for the outcome over a longer arc.

The real shift came from an unlikely source: my farm in Belgium. When we dug a well and found the water polluted by nitrates, we converted to organic. Within a decade, the water was drinkable again. That experience taught me something I couldn’t learn from financial models: measurable environmental improvement is possible, it takes time, and you have to be rigorous about tracking it. That mindset directly shaped how we built Planet First Partners — sustainability performance auditable by third parties, tied to carried interest, not just disclosed in footnotes.

What I’ve moved away from is the idea that financial returns and sustainability exist on separate spectrums. The companies I back today — spanning green hydrogen, immersion cooling for data centres, nuclear fusion, low-carbon mobility, and digital health, among other critical sustainability industries — are competing on economics, not just on values. That is the structural shift that wasn’t true twenty years ago.

After more than two decades of building Verlinvest into a force, you left to start again from zero. That is not a small decision. What were you running towards, and what did you know you had to leave behind?

I was running towards a specific thesis: that the defining investment opportunity of the next generation would be technology companies enabling the transition to a sustainable economy. In 2019, I believed that. I still do. What I left behind was the comfort of a well-capitalised, respected platform with an established LP base and a team that knew the playbook.

But Verlinvest’s mandate was fundamentally consumer-brand focused — built for a different era and a different thesis. I couldn’t simply ‘add’ tech-enabled sustainability to it. The LP base, the governance, the culture — none of it was structured to execute what I wanted to do. To do it properly, I had to build something new. I also had to leave behind the assumption that brand equity and consumption growth were sufficient proxies for impact. Oatly matters. But the companies I want to back now are in categories where the counterfactual is genuinely catastrophic — where the world is materially worse if they don’t scale. That raises the stakes, and it requires a different kind of conviction.

Honestly, I was running towards the version of this work that felt necessary rather than comfortable. And that kind of necessity tends to require a clean start.

You backed General Fusion before fusion energy was a dinner table conversation. How do you think about conviction when the commercial timeline is genuinely unknowable?

Conviction in deep technology is never about the certainty of timing. It’s about the certainty of direction. When I personally backed General Fusion, the commercial case was unclear and remained so for years. What was not unclear was the physics: fusion offers an energy source without the waste profile of fission, without the intermittency of renewables, and with an abundance that is structurally different from anything else in the landscape. If it works — commercially, not just scientifically — the implications for the energy system are profound.

The question I ask is not ‘when will this be deployed at scale?’ Does the team have the capability and the methodology to advance the critical path?’ A team that consistently hits its technical milestones, narrows the uncertainty with each experiment, and has the intellectual honesty to communicate setbacks clearly — that team earns confidence over time, even if the timeline slips. In fusion, as in quantum, we are in a phase of emerging technologies that will produce one, maybe several, dominant designs.

That same logic brought Planet First Partners into Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which we backed in 2025. CFS raised nearly $3 billion and has consistently executed against ambitious technical targets. Few technologies in our investable universe have the potential to reshape the global energy system as profoundly as fusion — and CFS assembled a world-class team executing a credible plan to deliver net energy gain with its SPARC technology.

In practical terms, I prefer to work on underwriting with an adequately precise commercial timeline for a deep-tech bet. I require a team with demonstrated execution competence, a technology with defensible differentiation, and a market large enough that even a partial outcome is significant. On those dimensions, General Fusion and CFS both warranted conviction.

How do you determine the appropriate level of risk when backing technologies that have not yet demonstrated scalability?

As a growth investor, this means we are focused on businesses at Series B to D that have already de-risked the core technology and are now navigating the challenge of commercial scale-up. We invest in companies that typically generate between €5–25 million in recurring revenue. They have paying customers and working unit economics. The technology risk has largely been absorbed by earlier-stage investors. Our job is to help proven technologies scale to the point where they reshape their market.

That said, residual execution risk is always present. I manage it through three filters. 

First, the team: I want to understand how founders have handled adversity — not just how they pitch. Founders who are honest about what isn’t working earn more confidence than those who only present the upside. 

Second, financial rigour: we model every investment using Monte Carlo simulations across conservative and upside scenarios, and we look hard at paths to profitability without relying on subsidy regimes or regulatory tailwinds. 

Third, market-driven economics: Submer, for example, delivers cooling solutions that reduce energy consumption and water usage in data centres — but the economics work because they reduce operating costs. That resilience matters enormously as policy environments shift.

You raised 450 million euros for sustainable tech at a time when many investors are stepping back from ESG commitments. What conversation are you actually having with LPs right now?

The conversation we have with LPs is grounded in fundamentals. We are a committed sustainability investor — but the reason our LPs allocate to us is that the companies we back are solving structural supply-demand imbalances in energy, compute, food systems, and healthcare. These are not impact concessions — they are enormous markets with insufficient supply. When a data centre operator needs cooling solutions that cut energy consumption by 40%, that is not purely a sustainability story. It’s also a margin story. Sunfire’s green hydrogen electrolysers are critical infrastructure for European industrial decarbonisation and energy independence — not a green credential exercise. Commonwealth Fusion Systems represents a potential step-change in clean baseload power generation. The Draghi report, RePowerEU, and Europe’s broader focus on industrial resilience have reinforced — not undermined — the strategic value of what we back.

The LPs who allocate to us understand that sustainability and commercial performance are not in tension — they are converging. The investors stepping back from ESG were committed to the label. We are committed to the economics with real-world impact. Planet First Partners is currently raising the next tranche of capital, and the conversation with LPs now is about returns, not just positioning. That is a healthy evolution. There is another dynamic that gets overlooked. Across the family offices we speak with, the next generation is entering decision-making roles — and sustainability is consistently one of the first things they ask about. This is not a passing preference. It is a generational shift in how capital owners define value.

Having been close to businesses that scaled globally, what are the most common pitfalls founders face as their companies grow sustainably?

Four things. First, founders confuse product-market fit with organisational readiness. The product works, so they assume the company can scale — but they have not built the management layer, the processes, or the culture to operate at two or three times the size. Second, capital discipline. Growth-stage companies often either raise too much, too early, at valuations that create expectations they cannot meet or the opposite, where they delay much-needed rounds and then go out to the market from a weaker standing with too short a runway and reduced negotiating power. Both scenarios compress optionality later. Third — and this is specific to sustainability — founders sometimes let the mission become a shield against commercial rigour. 

The mission matters enormously, but it does not excuse poor unit economics. The companies that scale are the ones that hold both truths simultaneously. Lastly— and it applies particularly to sustainability-focused companies — is governance. As companies raise more capital and add more institutional investors, the board becomes more complex. Founders who haven’t been through a board-level governance process before often struggle with how much energy it requires, and how quickly a misalignment at board level can consume management bandwidth. It’s one reason we prefer to take a board seat and lead, rather than observe from the side. Honest, constructive engagement at board level before these issues become crises — that is the job of a good growth investor.

Which areas within sustainability or climate solutions do you believe are still underappreciated by private capital today?

The capital flowing into AI dwarfs what is going on in quantum, yet quantum will reshape materials science, drug discovery, cryptography, and logistics within a decade. The window to build conviction is now. Also in digital health. The intersection of AI and healthcare delivery is going to fundamentally restructure how chronic disease is managed, and the economics are compelling — but it sits in an awkward gap between healthcare investors and tech investors, so it is often overlooked by mainstream capital looking for a home.

Nuclear fusion is the most dramatic example of underappreciated potential. General Fusion attracted almost no institutional interest when I first invested. Even now, with Commonwealth Fusion Systems having raised nearly $3 billion — more than a third of all private capital ever invested in fusion globally — many investors still treat it as a science project. It isn’t. SPARC is a fusion demonstration machine with a credible path to net energy gain, and ARC is a grid-scale power plant concept with a realistic path to commercial operation in the early 2030s.

Green hydrogen is another area where conviction is unevenly distributed. The infrastructure economics are improving faster than most models anticipated, and the industrial applications — for refineries, for chemicals, for steel — are not speculative. Sunfire, which manufactures electrolysers, is a direct expression of that thesis. 

The common theme across all of these areas is: long-cycle, capital-intensive, and technically demanding. Those are exactly the characteristics that most growth funds prefer to avoid — and exactly the characteristics that create structural opportunity for patient, conviction-based capital.

Twenty years from now, what benchmark would you use to judge whether Planet First Partners succeeded?

I would look at three things, and I’d want them to be genuinely inseparable.

The first is a team that is motivated by success both financially and sustainability wise. A team that has strong work ethics and enjoys working together. A team that dares and never cuts corners. A team that can stay humble yet communicates its enthusiasm for the project.

The second is financial. Did our LPs obtain returns consistent with the risk they took? We target a top quartile performance for investors. If, over the long arc of PFP, we delivered on that consistently, and if the companies we backed are durable, growing businesses that didn’t need to be rescued by a subsequent owner — that is financial success.

The third is substantial contributions to sustainability. Did the companies we funded measurably contribute to a better outcome for the planet and for people? Not in a reported sense, but in a real sense. Did Sunfire’s electrolysers displace a meaningful volume of fossil-based hydrogen? Did CFS generate low-carbon baseload for the grid? Did Submer’s cooling technology reduce the electricity intensity of the global compute estate? 

Did THIS’s plant-based alternatives reduce the land footprint of the conventional animal protein they displaced? Did Oviva’s digital health platform bring clinically meaningful improvements to the hundreds of thousands of patients it served, lowering the long-term burden on healthcare systems? And did Riverlane’s quantum error correction technology unlock the practical applications of quantum computing? These are not rhetorical questions. We track sustainability KPIs for every portfolio company under a rigorous and bespoke sustainable investment thesis, and 25% of our team’s carried interest is tied to delivering against them.

The benchmark I would look to in twenty years is this: look at the ten or twelve companies we backed, and ask whether the world’s trajectory in their sector is materially different because they scaled. That is the version of success I came back to build.

Closing

What emerges from this conversation is a clear shift in how long-term capital is being deployed.

The separation between financial performance and sustainability is narrowing. In many cases, it is disappearing entirely. For investors like Frederic, the question is no longer whether sustainability should be considered, but whether the companies being backed are solving real, structural problems at scale, and doing so with the discipline required to generate lasting returns. The implications extend beyond any single portfolio. As more family offices and institutional investors adopt this mindset, capital will increasingly flow toward businesses that combine technical depth, commercial viability, and measurable impact. The benchmark, as Frederic describes it, is simple but demanding. To look back in twenty years and see not just financial success, but a set of companies that materially changed the trajectory of their industries. For those allocating capital today, that may be the most important lens of all.