Customer Profile
Client: Iren Group
Industry: Multi-utility (Energy, Water & Waste Management)
Headquarters: Italy
Use Cases: Startup Scouting, Technology Validation, Competitive Benchmarking, Market Research, and VC Fund Analysis
Iren Group is one of Italy’s leading multi-utility companies, with operations spanning electricity production and distribution, water management, and environmental services, including urban waste collection, waste-to-energy plants, and biological treatment facilities. Managing this breadth of infrastructure means Iren’s teams are constantly evaluating new technologies to optimize operations, reduce costs, and respond to the demands of an industry in transition.
Iren’s innovation department is a lean, technically focused team responsible for connecting external innovation to internal business needs across the entire group.
How Iren’s Innovation Function Works
Iren’s innovation team is built around engineers. Each specialist covers a specific domain, from energy systems and chemistry to environmental processes, and serves as a technical bridge between the business units operating Iren’s infrastructure and the startups working to improve it.
The team engages business units through multiple channels: annual interviews, plant visits, and periodic internal calls for ideas that surface frontline challenges. Every two years, it also leads a deeper cross-functional process, running workshops with every business unit to systematically map operational needs to technology opportunities and feed those priorities directly into Iren’s industrial plan.
On the investment side, the team manages Iren’s Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) program, which launched in 2019 with direct startup investments. By 2022, the strategy evolved. Iren became a Limited Partner in three external funds investing in startups aligned with its core businesses, freeing the internal team to focus on identifying proof-of-concept opportunities and strategic partnerships.
One of the team’s flagship scouting mechanisms is the Iren Startup Award, a global contest held annually or biennially around a specific technology theme. The most recent edition focused on artificial intelligence.
The process brings in eight to ten finalist startups to present before Iren’s top directors and board, with three to four winners proceeding to proof-of-concept projects, commercial agreements, or investment discussions.
From the latest AI-focused edition, three POCs are now underway: a generative AI tool for Iren’s legal department, an agentic AI platform for Learning & Development, and optimization software for turbo-gas power plants.
The Challenge: Research That Matches the Team’s Technical Standard
For all the sophistication of Iren’s innovation program, the team faced a persistent research problem. They had no dedicated scouting function, meaning the same engineers responsible for technical evaluation were also responsible for finding solutions in the first place.
And the platforms available to them didn’t fit how they worked.
Most startup intelligence tools are built for investors. They emphasize financial metrics, funding rounds, and valuation data. Iren’s engineers needed something different.
When a business unit flagged a problem, or when a startup pitched a solution, the team needed to quickly understand whether the technology was genuinely novel, how many other players were operating in the same space, and, critically, whether the technology was mature enough for industrial deployment.
That kind of technical landscape research was something existing platforms couldn’t reliably deliver.
“We really need a platform that could help us find the right solution in a very short time, with a technical approach. We have an open innovation team composed of engineers, each specialized in a single topic, so we have a great technical approach on every startup initiative.”
— Matteo Vacchetti, CVC Coordinator, Iren Group
Why Net Zero Insights
Three years ago, Iren began working with Net Zero Insights, at the time one of the only platforms focused specifically on the clean technology sector, which maps directly to Iren’s core business areas.
The technical depth was the deciding factor.
Where other platforms offer financial overviews, Net Zero Insights allows Iren’s engineers to go deep on specific technology categories: understanding how solutions are classified, which players are competing, how early or mature a given approach is, and what investment activity signals about where the market is heading.
That combination of technical precision and market breadth was what the team had been looking for.
“The competitive advantage of Net Zero Insights is the expertise and the possibility to go deep in the technology trends, not only on the financial part. In other platforms you can’t find many of the technical details you can find in Net Zero Insights.”
— Matteo Vacchetti, CVC Coordinator, Iren Group
How the Team Uses the Platform
Today, Net Zero Insights is used across multiple parts of Iren’s innovation workflow.
The most common starting point is technology scouting. When a business unit raises a challenge, the innovation team uses the platform to identify relevant startups, understand the broader competitive landscape, and quickly determine whether a technology area is crowded, emerging, or relatively unexplored.
The platform also plays a key role when evaluating inbound opportunities. Rather than assessing a startup in isolation, the team can immediately place it within its broader market context, comparing it to peers and identifying adjacent technologies that may offer alternative approaches to solving the same problem.
This significantly reduces the time required to move from initial interest to an informed technical assessment.
“When a startup contacts us, the first thing we do is search for the company on Net Zero Insights. Then we analyze the technology area, understand how many competitors exist, and evaluate whether the solution is actually differentiated.”
— Fabio Formigaro, Innovation Specialist, Iren Group
The team also uses the platform as a monitoring tool. Rather than conducting large research exercises from scratch every time a question emerges, Net Zero Insights provides a continuously updated view of technology areas relevant to Iren’s business units.
This allows the team to stay informed on market developments without significantly increasing internal research workload.
Going Beyond Startups
While startup scouting was the original use case, the value has expanded as the platform has grown.
One area that has become increasingly important is investor intelligence. As Iren manages relationships with external venture funds and evaluates emerging technology ecosystems, visibility into investment activity provides an additional signal for understanding where innovation is gaining traction.
For a utility operating across multiple sectors, investment data helps validate which technology areas are attracting sustained market interest and where capital is flowing across the energy transition.
Rather than looking only at companies, the team can evaluate entire ecosystems of startups, investors, technologies, and commercial activity together.
“The platform helps us understand not only the startups themselves, but also the investors behind them and the broader market dynamics. That additional context is extremely valuable.”
— Matteo Vacchetti, CVC Coordinator, Iren Group
Market Snapshots and Strategic Research
Another way Iren uses Net Zero Insights is through focused market snapshots.
When a technology area becomes strategically important, the innovation team uses the platform to quickly map the landscape, identify leading companies, assess maturity levels, and understand where innovation is concentrated geographically.
This capability has become particularly useful for emerging technologies where traditional market reports are often either unavailable or already outdated by the time they are published.
Because the platform continuously updates company, funding, and technology information, the team can move from a broad strategic question to a defensible view of the market in a matter of hours rather than weeks.
A Platform Built for Technical Teams
For Iren, the core value of Net Zero Insights is not simply access to company data. It is the ability to combine technical understanding with market intelligence in a way that supports real operational decisions.
That distinction matters because innovation teams are increasingly being asked to evaluate technologies that are moving faster than traditional research processes can keep up with.
In those situations, understanding technology maturity, competitive dynamics, funding activity, and commercial momentum all at once becomes a significant advantage.
For a lean team supporting multiple business units across one of Italy’s largest utility groups, that ability to move quickly without sacrificing technical rigor is what makes the difference.
“The platform helps us save time, but more importantly it helps us make better decisions. We can understand technologies faster, evaluate opportunities more effectively, and provide stronger recommendations to the business.”
— Fabio Formigaro, Innovation Specialist, Iren Group
See What Net Zero Insights Can Do for Your Innovation Team
Iren Group uses Net Zero Insights to identify emerging technologies faster, evaluate startup opportunities with greater confidence, and connect technical innovation to real business needs.
Whether you’re scouting startups, monitoring technology trends, evaluating investment opportunities, or supporting strategic innovation initiatives, having access to structured market intelligence can dramatically improve the quality and speed of decision-making.
Net Zero Insights helps teams move beyond isolated company research and understand the broader ecosystems shaping the future of energy, infrastructure, mobility, industry, and climate innovation. Schedule a demo and see how leading innovation teams are using Net Zero Insights to accelerate technology discovery and decision-making.
