E702 | Lubomila Jordanova, Plan A: Climate Isn’t “Over”

0:00Andreas:Welcome back everyone to the European VC podcast. Despite the pressing need to accelerate the climate transition, women-led founding teams continue to attract only a minuscule portion of climate tech venture capital. In 2024, all female founding teams only secured 1 % of total climate tech funding. That was a difficult word. And mixed standard teams only raised approximately 7%. That is far too little, obviously. So of course, we're doing a series now that is focused on championing some of the women that have built incredible companies in this space. Carmel, you're my co-host for this series. Please tell a bit about yourself.

0:34Lubomila Jordanova:Hi, Andreas. Thanks for doing this with me. I had the table. We are a community for co-investing in women-led climate ventures. We have brought together over 370 investors, syndicates, funds, family offices, CVCs, that share co-investment opportunities, pre-C to A, where there's at least one female founder holding substantial equity, doing anything that has a direct and substantial positive climate outcome. So we're sector agnostic, climate positive. And our goal is really to accelerate the collaboration in the ecosystem to increase the speed and the size of investments going into these women that are building incredible climate innovation and making sure that anybody that's interested in seeing this deal flow has access to that pipeline.

1:21Lubomila Jordanova:We're currently raising a foundation. So the Table Foundation will be an evergreen vehicle that will provide recoverable grants. You can think of it as a forgivable revenue-based loan that will match the tickets that our community members are doing in the deals shared so that we can provide catalytic capital at the ground level to accelerate the underfunded innovation and close the funding gap for women. It's really great to be here. Thanks.

1:50Andreas:So, today is a conversation I'm incredibly excited about because we're talking to Lubomila Jordanova, co-founder and CEO of Plan A. Plan A, of course, is one of Europe's absolute leading corporate carbon accounting and decarbonization software providers, helping companies measure, reduce and report their emissions with the rigor that regulation, investors and markets increasingly demand. So you've raised a lot of money from Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Deutsche Bank, Visa, Opera Tech Ventures and many more great names. But you were also just recently acquired. Luper Mila, welcome to the podcast.

2:27Andreas:Thank you so much for having me. So Luper Mila, I just described a little bit who you are as a company, but you were also acquired. And I wanted to just give you the opportunity to share that story because you were acquired in the end of 2025, which makes it at the time of recording almost just 30 days old news. I think it's incredibly rare that we get the opportunity to unveil a bit what goes on behind such a fresh off acquisition. And on top of that, this is in a space where everyone was looking and saying there's going to be a lot of consolidation in this space. So I'm super excited to hear from you what happened, what's your take on the market.

3:06Andreas:Where are you today? What's the plan?

3:07Carmel Rafaeli:Thank you so much for having me. I think this is an important conversation as a lot of people on the founder side are asking themselves big questions about the future of their organizations. We were there 12 months ago and we sat down with our shareholders and as experts in the field thought that it might be better that we lead the consolidation rather than be the laggards behind. We are now part of a global entity that has a strong Asia presence, which is putting a lot of resources into consolidating the space, utilizing, as of last week officially, the Plan A ecosystem and network, not only on carbon accounting, but also ESG reporting.

3:55Carmel Rafaeli:I think I'm actively involved in the organization as it stands today, and I stay on involved. And I'm happy to share more of what we experienced. It was absolute madness. But I'll pause here.

4:11Lubomila Jordanova:I guess consolidation was in the stars for everyone. But after doing all the fundraisers so far, what led you, both from the logic of building your fundraising strategy into the logic of saying, this is the position I want to take into acquisition and utilizing these opportunities?

4:30Carmel Rafaeli:The space in which Plan A operates, a lot of complexity arose just over the course of the last five years because there's a not so positive sequence of shift of events, change in legislation, absolute elimination of laws in certain countries. And finally, a lot of consumer-led confusion about what sustainability really meant. While navigating all of this, we were dealing with launching products for banks, launching products for a lot of different large-scale organizations, maintaining their needs while obviously pushing for change in our space. it felt a lot more relevant for us to stand on our own two feet within a family that would allow us to join forces with other businesses and to be at the forefront of this consolidation that is happening since quite some quarters and has been hush-hush discussed in some places, in other places openly covered.

5:44Carmel Rafaeli:But I'm someone that is really pragmatic about business doing. I like to be facing the facts before making big proclamations. And the facts of navigating 26 shareholders plus also making sure that there was really consequential growth, development and scaling of the business ended up being in some cases conflicting. And we decided to go the way in which growth was possible.

6:13Andreas:I'm going to ask a question that might be difficult to answer, but I think this is one that's really interesting for both any founder listening in and also any investor listening in, which is, of course, the difference on a good outcome for a founder versus a good outcome for a VC. An acquisition, you've raised$40 million, I believe, before you were acquired, and you were acquired at least at the reported number for$55 million plus a potential€25 million euro earn out. That can be an incredible and awesome outcome for you as a founder because you get to continue as the CEO of Plan A. I'm sure you have an awesome package inside the company and you grow with the entire platform.

6:57Andreas:But if you're Lightspeed Venture Partners, obviously that's not the outcome you hope for when you go in. Could you talk a bit, and maybe I'm wrong there, maybe you say, no, no, we actually, Lightspeed have a strong holding now inside the mother company Diginex. So for that reason, it actually makes sense. I don't know the details here. You say whatever you can say. I'd love for you to reflect on this for founders that are listening in, thinking about the journey that they're on. What's the right decision? What's the wrong? What was going through your mind and your co-founder's mind when making this decision?

7:31Carmel Rafaeli:Plan A really studiously raised money over the years that might have not been with the bombastic 100, 250 million size, but were associated to certain progress as a company, both on our revenue growth as well as also our valuation growth. In line with this, the exit actually is an incredible outcome for all of our investors because they continue on the DigiNex cap table and they have the possibility for significant upside as we also scale the company through the knowledge that we've developed. I'm not quite sure what's the reference point of those listening, because maybe there's the fable of 10x, maybe there's the fable of, you know, the AI funding rounds that are being announced.

8:18Carmel Rafaeli:In the climate space, there's been a really weirdly defined plot for what a successful sustainability company would be. The only exits that one can probably name from today's perspective are the one within the solar industry. There's been a few maybe large-scale buyouts of corporates. There's been takeovers that were with unannounced numbers. We actually have done now one of the few deals that stands for incredible transparency and all of the documentation is out there, thanks to the fact that this is now a Nasdaq-listed company. I'm happy to dive into further details of this, but I can tell you, and probably this is no news to you and known you to many of the listeners.

9:04Carmel Rafaeli:It is about the money. It is also about the people and it is also about the relationships you build forward. I believe we ticked off all the boxes. I'm incredibly proud of our investors. They have been supportive where it was possible for them. They also did their best to learn about the space, but also this is a very complex, sophisticated scientific field, which sometimes can confuse this whole idea of like SaaS growth versus just general business growth. And finally, I'm incredibly proud of the choice we made at the end while sitting in front of seven other options, which was ultimately one allowing us to have the ultimate freedom to continue on to a mission that is bigger than us, a problem that is bigger than a balance sheet and one that most likely will last longer than our lifetime.

9:58Carmel Rafaeli:I've been fully excited and respectful for all VC learnings along the way. However, I do believe that the truth in numbers lies where the actual economy sits and this is where Plan A thrives.

10:13Andreas:Unpack that exact statement. The truth is where the real economy sits and this is where Plan A excels. Unpack that. So what you're saying is that the truth is that this is the best journey for plan A and that you are building with strong traction. You have strong partnerships. You're now in a better position as a company than you've ever been. And then the VC chatter ecosystem can talk about 10x and blah, blah, blah, as much as we want. But the reality is plan A as a company is in a better spot. Am I translating somewhat correctly?

10:49Carmel Rafaeli:The biggest issue in 2016, when I kicked off building the company in understanding what was actually supposed to be built, was actually developing a value proposition that would solve a real world problem. This is the unfortunate luxury of the climate space. The climate space works with actually dealing with optimizing supply chains, actually dealing with organizing the packaging of a company, organizing the decarbonization capacity of a company while also respecting their growth targets. This is a real economy problem. If I look at the approach that has been taken about our space, just carbon accounting, considered as a luxury, or maybe the EU actually has a bunch of legislation formats for this, there was quite often a lack of understanding of how truly valuable the data is, how truly valuable the scaling within a client is.

11:48Carmel Rafaeli:So in that context, I'm proud of the 80 % gross profit that we have. This is, you know, SaaS metric that I believe stands for that. I'm also proud of the multi-million euro contracts that we have with large corporates that have trusted us over the course of five, six years. And finally, when it comes to the actual problem that we're solving, it's really about the decarbonization that we've achieved, and that exceeds 20 % over the course of the years that we've worked with businesses on average. which is significant. The approach that has been taken for our space has been mainly to apply the framework of SaaS and the KPIs of SaaS to an industry that was never SaaS.

12:31Carmel Rafaeli:I'm speaking about the 80%, but I can give you examples of 10, 15, 20 companies that are with 250, 300 million in funding that are doing 30, 40 % gross profit and have five to 10 people managing one single account. This is consulting. This is glorified consulting service with a digital angle to it. And one might say that the tech industry takes an approach of giving itself time against resources that is quite biasly distributed, depending on the investor. In our context, that has not been really possible to go along with. And hence why I found and my investors have found an angle to find this to be probably more lucrative than even a 10x success.

13:21Andreas:I think it's incredibly awesome to talk to someone as thoughtful and smart as you about this space, because I think it's exactly the learning journey the VC ecosystem is on. And we're going to see the same thing play out in so many spaces now that VC is transitioning from really being something purely software to now figuring out how to deal with deep tech. And we're going to see all kinds of wrong assumptions. We even have it with AI right now, trying to figure out what's quality revenue, what metrics actually matter, what don't. And I think that what you're describing here is exactly now we've been through a cycle of carbon accounting.

13:58Andreas:it. And now we can see, well, this is actually the type of companies that we're able to build here. This is what it requires. And yes, it's absolutely investable, but it's investable with this in mind. So I think it's incredibly cool to hear from someone as in the weeds as you are about this.

14:16Lubomila Jordanova:I think it's a really, really important point. And it goes a lot to the conversation that we have had over the last year, year plus of this climate tech dead. Can we continue doing VC investing and climate? And I think that it's really, Lumina is saying something really important about the fact that as investors, we need to be asking ourselves, how are we constructing our portfolios and thinking of our returns, assuming we're building real world solutions. And software is a relatively easier gamble when we are looking at more deep tech hardware, actual real world solutions that are being built and manufactured.

14:57Lubomila Jordanova:This is even a bigger kind of rift from what we know in VC. And we talk a lot within the community about do we need to readjust what we are thinking of as our distributed returns? Should we stop looking at one in 100 giving us 100x? Should we think of having more of these companies mature and grow and give us a smaller return rate, but the portfolio as such can still have a much larger return or at least equal to the very successful funds? And for that, we also lack some players in the capital stack. That's where philanthropy can come help de-risk some of it. It's also a place that we can see the need for secondaries that we see is growing, the need for corporates to take part.

15:48Lubomila Jordanova:I'm really interested in how you've transitioned the discussions. I'm assuming you needed to transition the discussions with your investors to kind of align the vision on that.

16:01Carmel Rafaeli:One fundamental issue we observed in the years since 2020, when we actively went to seek funding, was that there was somehow in the VC pot of money, a pocket that was kind of in between charity, let me please the LPs with an ESG angle because it's cool. Oh, by the way, there's EU legislation, so maybe EIB, you know, there was a lot of opportunity, but there was no maybe associated return on investment to that. While this was still part of a pocket that was cumulatively assumed to bring this 10x or bring the 5x or 7x. Unfortunately, when you kick off the discussion on the wrong foot, which I believe our space quite often had the challenge of, you end up still growing in prominence maybe as a space, well, divisively finishing discussions with investors exactly in the same manner.

17:03Carmel Rafaeli:They don't end up changing their views about this space. And as we've seen now, especially in the last 12 months since there's been some political issues related to the topic, especially in North America, There's been repercussions to that. I am not a VC, so I'm not allowed to say, you know, how the expectations of LPs can be changed. I do, however, see that there is a lack of understanding of the lucrativeness of the opportunity associated to this domain, which doesn't require scientific knowledge, but requires financial knowledge and financial engineering against the costs and losses that are already occurring on this planet due to climate change.

17:44Carmel Rafaeli:and when this is not part of the bill that is at the end of the day presented to the LPs of why they should invest and what is the return on investment, you probably are still working with this 10, 8-year trajectory probably while being able to activate money within a very short amount of time, two, three-year window for a five-year return on investment because consolidation in this space is the only way forward. You don't need like 300 ESG reporting platforms, which is the space we still have. You know, hopefully we work a little bit on that as we go. So within that context, Kamil, it's a matter of making sure that there's no misalignment to the expectations of LPs bulking up climate with everything else.

18:32Carmel Rafaeli:Climate is not all of it at once. a hardware for carbon removal is not the SaaS that we've been building. And there needs to be a better distinguishment, better education, and then also better financial calculation on a shorter term return rather than even 10-year horizon.

18:51Andreas:Lubomila, I'd love to ask you to try and pull out learnings from managing investor perceptions and views, perspectives on the space and the company that you're running as a founder. Many founders are going through this right now. And we all know that every sector has their ups and downs. Every company has their ups and downs. And especially now we have, as you also had, generalist investors investing in something that's very specialized. And they know that this is not what they normally do, but they think the opportunity is right. They believe first and foremost in the founders and that they can take it forward and so on.

19:34Andreas:But that, of course, leaves the founder with an incredible responsibility to make sure that you have your investors with you on this journey. Can you talk to exactly how you manage investor interests and perceptions about your space and company throughout your life journey?

19:52Carmel Rafaeli:I'll share a few learnings, starting with a negative one. And that was that the visibility that we had as a company, which was absolutely organic, we never paid for a single speech that I had given, never paid for a single participation in a conference, bit me back and bit the company back by investors thinking that I'm a male female founder, LinkedIn influencer. I've been in really awkward situations where I'm standing there with all my knowledge and capacity and scientific geekiness. And intelligently, someone tells me, oh, it must be incredible to have so many followers on LinkedIn. And I'm like, I'm not here to do business on that domain.

20:32Carmel Rafaeli:I trust the platform. I believe in it as it's a most powerful tool for education, but nothing beyond that. The second big learning has been to make sure that you balance the expectations. I'm someone that is sometimes overly optimistic and overly believing. And when you have 26 shareholders, three corporates of the biggest financial institutions on the planet, the biggest by AUM VCs in certain geographies, everyone comes with a baggage of expectations, also baggage of issues from other board meetings. And when your piece of the puzzle is too small to even see, they often don't have the patience to go through the assessment that they would put in a company that has received the three digit Series A.

21:24Carmel Rafaeli:And it's always good to believe in yourself, regardless of your size, but sometimes it has been incredibly difficult to see eye to eye with some of the decisions that were put on us, as we knew that we were just a clock in a massive clock that is ticking in weird and actually sometimes conflicting directions. The final learning that I would add is probably the consequential truth for many investors from today's perspective that the VC industry doesn't act in isolation. It's part of a financial pyramid and ecosystem that is, let's be honest, a lot more complex. You have the hedge funds, you have the private equities, you have the public markets.

22:08Carmel Rafaeli:And the truth about the realities that VCs find to be exciting is not always in alignment to what the other financial institutions find. I like to believe that the global economy speaks a common language, even if there's geopolitical tensions. There's always going to be a cost associated to the bread that you put on the table. There's cost associated to the materials that are building this product, that are baking it, and even the machines that are associated to this, the staff that is taking care of the packaging. And you can't assume that you can inflate this or deflate this if you don't rely on some general, normal human economics.

22:51Carmel Rafaeli:And the AI spaces in that way are really scary. Reality check for where we are headed because there's money being thrown that don't account for the challenges that we as humanity go through because of natural disasters, because of climate risk. That is visible. It's visible. It is in the eyes of China, in the eyes of India and big economies that are driving, let's be honest, the global reality prominent. I was just now gathering some insights from what's going on at Davos and there was just the speeches of Uso von der Leyen and also the vice premier of China. and they spoke extensively about climate change in their speeches, while we in the VC space are thinking that this is not a trendy topic.

23:43Carmel Rafaeli:There's some sort of a mismatch, at least I think.

23:45Lubomila Jordanova:I think that's a really interesting point and maybe a bit to Plan A and your actual activities. In a time with so much geopolitical and lexicon changes and concepts shifting around, you've been growing. The corporates are still engaging. How are you seeing the way to close this gap in building the company, funding aside, deal aside, in building the company? How are what works in still pushing the need to monitor, to change priorities, to change allocations for other founders building in the space? How, from your learnings and experience, how best to position the continued need and efficiencies that you're building?

24:36Carmel Rafaeli:As now being part of a publicly listed company, our goal and ultimate activity is acting against profitability goals. We have a really strict approach to this, and this is quite openly discussed in all the public documentation of DigiNex. The company is really strongly standing by the strategy and the vision that it has on consolidating the space through active M &A. There's been quite a few deals that were closed last year and still some now in the making already this year. The shift in priorities is that I am fully fixated as I have been in planning on taking care of my team and navigating this simple KPI discussion that isn't about whether my topic is interesting or not, but how we can make sure that there's no further money being lost along the way while this problem is being solved.