Hades: Unlocking Europe's Untapped Energy & Mineral Frontier
We backed Hades' €5.5M pre-seed to pioneer breakthrough drilling tech for geothermal and mineral sovereignty.
Since 2022, Europe's industrial energy prices have averaged 2–3x those in the US, eroding competitiveness. At the same time, nearly all rare earths and lithium are imported, leaving critical supply chains exposed to geopolitical risk. Securing clean, affordable energy and critical mineral independence has become an urgent strategic imperative for Europe.
The answer lies directly beneath us: Europe's subsurface holds vast, untapped reserves of clean, continuous geothermal energy and critical minerals. The challenge is not their existence, but accessing them economically and sustainably. This is exactly where Hades comes in — a Munich-based deep tech startup pioneering breakthrough drilling tech to unlock superhot geothermal and sovereign mineral recovery at scale.
We backed Hades in their oversubscribed €5.5M pre-seed round alongside Project A, with participation from Interface Capital, Viessmann Generations Group, and leading deep tech angels, including Florian Seibel (Quantum Systems), Daniel Wiegand (Lilium), Roman Hölzl (RobCo), and Moritz von der Linden (Marvel Fusion), among others.
WHY SOVEREIGNTY STARTS UNDERGROUND
Securing access to clean, affordable energy and domestically sourced critical minerals is a key pillar of Europe's industrial competitiveness and fundamental to our economic and democratic stability.
- Energy:
- Modern infrastructure demands 99.9999% grid reliability. The intermittency of renewables makes this immensely hard to achieve. Beyond fusion, geothermal is one of the few true clean baseload sources. The new frontier, superhot geothermal, taps rock at 300–400 °C, delivering 30–50 MW per well (5–10x vs. conventional geothermal). Scaled into multi-well plants, this puts geothermal output on par with nuclear or gas, at competitive (and potentially even lower) cost.
- Minerals
- Europe produces only 3.5% of its critical mineral needs domestically, leaving key sectors from energy to automotive and defense exposed to geopolitical leverage, most notably China's weaponization of rare earth export controls. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act now mandates 10% domestic extraction by 2030. Unlocking access will anchor critical supply chains in Europe, capturing billions in value creation and industrial jobs that can be re-shored to Europe.
- Bottleneck:
- Today's drilling tech hits practical limits beyond 4 km — the depths typically needed for superhot geothermal — and in hard rock, a critical barrier for in-situ mineral recovery. In both cases, tool wear, maintenance, and the resulting downtime drive exponential cost escalation, leaving projects economically unviable. Overcoming this bottleneck is key to Europe's energy and mineral sovereignty.
HADES: UNLOCKING THE DEEP FRONTIER
When accessing ultra-deep subsurface zones, extreme heat and pressure push today's rotary drilling — built on century-old mechanical principles — to its limits, despite decades of incremental advances. As a result, geothermal still provides only <1% of global power, and over 80% of Europe's mineral deposits remain locked underground, with drilling costs as the primary barrier (up to 90% of CAPEX in deep projects).
Hades is breaking this barrier with a novel non-contact drilling system designed to minimize wear and impact, maximize speed, and deliver unprecedented precision at depth. By flattening the cost curve of drilling, the goal is to make superhot geothermal and subsurface mineral access economically viable and sustainable for the first time.
The company is building an integrated system engineered for robust industrial deployment under unforgiving time, cost, and quality constraints. Led by experienced deep tech founders and operators across energy, aerospace, and defense, the team combines mission-driven execution with technical excellence to turn deep tech potential into a real strategic asset for Europe.
We're proud to back Hades in tackling one of the most consequential economic and impact opportunities of our time: Unlocking Europe's vast, untapped subsurface resources to deliver clean baseload power and enable critical mineral sovereignty.
Hades Founders (left to right): Björn Dressler — CTO (ex-COO at Isar Aerospace), Dr. Max Werner — CEO (serial deep tech entrepreneur), Dan Gengenbach — SVP Material Displacement (ex-VP at Marvel Fusion)
CURIOUS TO LEARN MORE?
Read more about the round and the €500B geothermal energy and critical minerals opportunity here: