The energy transition doesn't have a capital problem. It has a friction problem.
The capital is there and investors want to deploy it. What slows everything down is the machinery of getting deals done. Every renewable transaction runs on a data room of thousands of documents in dense legalese, and proving the project is real and legally sound takes weeks and €50k+ in external counsel.
Cepter is building the AI operating system for renewable energy companies. We start at the sharpest, most expensive point in that workflow: legal due diligence on a project transaction.
We don't just sell a tool. We deliver an AI-enabled due diligence service, where outputs are reviewed by our own lawyers before anything is final. Through an independent, fully regulated law firm entity, we offer full legal reliance on the report.
Purpose-built AI plus real legal accountability: no software-only competitor can offer it, and no law firm can match it on speed or cost. Very few companies can credibly sit in the middle.
Legal DD in Germany is the wedge. From there we are going to tackle: more diligence types, more markets, and the wider workflow of renewable energy companies. Every renewable asset in Europe should pass through Cepter. Today they pass through inboxes and shared drives.
Kaspar (CEO) studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford and started his career as a strategy consultant at BCG. He quickly realised that building slides for blue-chip corporates was not what he wanted to do long term. He had known since university that he wanted to build something himself, and the closest thing to training for that is working inside a startup. He joined a pre-seed company as employee #1, built the MVP and led the go-to-market. Early traction was good, but the company could not raise again after the Covid bubble burst. For the last two years Kaspar was Chief of Staff at terralayr, an energy-tech company backed by Creandum, Earlybird and others, where he led ~€150m in partnership deals and more than €100m in capital raises, and helped grow the company to 50 FTEs and multi-million revenue.
Douglas (CPTO) studied Computer Science at ETH Zürich, where he took his Bachelor's and went on to graduate study focused on artificial intelligence. At LGT Capital Partners he built the VC team's data infrastructure end to end, automated data ingestion across diverse sources, and launched live BI dashboards that gave investors real-time visibility into portfolio performance and market trends. Most recently he was an AI Engineer and Data Scientist at IBM, designing and deploying production-grade AI microservices and APIs: modular, fault-tolerant systems with full CI/CD, spanning retrieval-augmented generation to large-scale data processing. He previously co-founded Trace, a personal finance AI, in ETH's Talent Kick incubator.
**Max (Founding Head of Legal)** is a lawyer who spent his career in the energy and infrastructure practices of two Magic Circle firms, Linklaters and Freshfields, advising on some of the largest energy and infrastructure mandates in the German market. These are transactions where a single missed condition in a grid connection agreement moves nine figures. That is exactly the work Cepter is automating, and Max knows better than anyone which parts of it a machine can be trusted with. He joined to build the legal side of the company: the check playbooks our agents run against, the review process behind every report, and the regulated law firm entity that lets Cepter offer legal reliance.
We are backed by Visionaries Club (investor in Lovable, n8n, Miro and Personio), Yellow VC, and prominent angels including the former Director of Product at Google DeepMind and Jan Oberhauser, the founder of n8n.