Hades: Drilling for Europe's Sovereignty

Hades has raised a €15M pre-emptive Seed round co-led by HV Capital and Headline. Visionaries Tomorrow doubled down alongside Project A.

Hades is a vertically integrated resource-extraction company with proprietary high-power laser drilling technology at its core. The system is designed to drill faster, cheaper, and cleaner than conventional methods - particularly in deep and hard rock formations, where prohibitive drilling costs have historically rendered deep geothermal and in-situ mineral recovery uneconomical.

We first backed Hades in its €5.5M Pre-Seed in August 2025 together with Project A, as well as a group of leading deep tech angels and industrials. Since then, the team successfully tested i) the rock destruction capabilities of its laser, ii) purging capabilities to clear the borehole, and iii) the delivery of 200 kW of energy through its system. These technical achievements and significant commercial progress have driven the accelerated Seed timeline, just six months after the last round.

The funding will fast-track technology development toward industrial scale, build a pipeline of extraction projects across Europe, and more than triple the team in Munich.

Here is why solving subsurface resource extraction is an era-defining opportunity for Europe.

Europe produces less than 3% of the critical minerals it consumes. The vast majority of lithium, rare earths, and cobalt is imported. In terms of energy, Europe sits on vast geothermal reservoirs at depth. Yet, hundreds of billions are spent every year on imported fossil fuels.

This is not a geological problem. The resources are there, but conventional drilling faces exponential cost curves in deep and hard-rock environments. It’s a technology problem - one with geopolitical repercussions.

China has already shown how critical mineral supply chains can be used as leverage during trade disputes. A dependency of this magnitude is a vital economic risk and threatens Europe's ability to make sovereign decisions about its industrial future.

The EU has recognized this, adopting several policies that all point in the same direction: Europe has to extract more of its own resources. But policy alone does not move rock.

Europe has to rebuild its extraction industry. It has done it before, and the history of how it lost that capability is worth revisiting.

The Erzgebirge – the "Ore Mountains" spanning modern-day Germany and the Czech Republic – were for centuries among the most productive mining districts on earth. Starting after 1168, the mines around Freiberg produced over 8,000 tons of silver, underpinning Europe's monetary expansion.

As silver economics shifted, the region pivoted to tin, then to cobalt, and then finally to uranium. By the 19th century, however, cheaper deposits overseas began to undercut European operations, which ultimately ceased in 1990.

Two lessons stand out. Firstly, Europe lost its extraction industry because the available technology could no longer compete on cost. Sovereignty only works when it’s cost-competitive.

Secondly, the Erzgebirge also showed what it actually takes to create a category, beyond only the resource itself. The area became a global leader in technology, incl. underground mining and ore processing. This unlocked an entire ecosystem, from labor organization to financial structures, logistics, and regulation. An economic engine that lasted centuries.

Any company attempting to revive European resource extraction will need to internalize both: a technology that fundamentally changes the cost equation, and the ambition to build the ecosystem around it.

Hades' high-power laser drilling system is designed from first principles for the conditions where conventional methods fail. Building on Europe’s industrial and scientific excellence in photonics, the technology eliminates many of the physical constraints of mechanical drilling.

Minimal vibration and noise improve social and environmental acceptance. Dramatically reduced wear, eliminating the maintenance cycles that drive cost and downtime. And significantly faster drilling speeds, even in the most complex geologies. Combined, these effects can turn previously impossible projects into viable ones.

Hades is not a drilling technology provider. They are building an end-to-end resource platform that covers the full lifecycle of an extraction project from origination to drilling and extraction. The technology is what makes projects viable. The platform is what makes the industry scalable.

The Erzgebirge taught us two things: extraction must be cost-competitive to sustain sovereignty, and technology alone does not build a functioning industry. Hades is built to deliver both, engineering the step-change in drilling economics and the ecosystem around it.

We are fully committed to supporting Max, Björn, Dan, and the Hades team in re-building Europe's extraction capability for a sovereign industrial future.

The Hades Team