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Henrik Larsson
I was a mechanical engineer before I was a product person. I studied at KTH in Stockholm and spent my first three years after graduation at Scania, designing powertrain components for heavy trucks. It was deeply technical work, and it gave me an intuition for physical systems that has been surprisingly useful in climate tech, where the product isn't just software; it's the intersection of software, hardware, chemistry, and policy.
In 2019, I joined Northvolt, the Swedish battery manufacturer, as a product manager. Northvolt was attempting something audacious: building Europe's first homegrown gigafactory to compete with Chinese and Korean battery manufacturers. My team worked on the battery management system (BMS) software, the layer that sits between the physical battery cells and the vehicles or grid systems they power.
Building product at a hardware-software company is fundamentally different from pure software. You can't A/B test a battery. You can't ship a hotfix to a cell that's already installed in a truck. The feedback loops are months, not days. And the consequences of getting it wrong aren't "users see a broken UI"; they're "the battery overheats and catches fire." I learned to think in terms of safety margins, qualification cycles, and regulatory compliance, which has made me permanently skeptical of "move fast and break things" culture.
I left Northvolt in 2023 after the company hit some well-publicized financial difficulties. But the experience convinced me that climate tech is the most important, and most misunderstood, product category of our generation. The misunderstanding is this: climate tech isn't a vertical. It's a modifier that applies to every industry. There's climate tech in energy, transportation, agriculture, construction, manufacturing, finance, and software. Each sub-sector has completely different dynamics, and the product challenges are nothing like what you'd face in a typical SaaS company.
Since leaving Northvolt, I've been advising early-stage climate tech companies across Europe. The pattern I see repeatedly: deep-tech founders who are brilliant at the science but naive about go-to-market, and software founders who want to "disrupt" a sector they don't understand yet. The companies that succeed are the ones that bridge both worlds.
I joined Signal to write about climate tech with the product specificity that the sector deserves. Most climate tech coverage is either cheerleading ("this company will save the planet!") or doom-scrolling ("we're all going to die"). I want to write about the actual product and business challenges, the unsexy stuff that determines whether a climate solution scales or stays a science project.
I live in Södermalm, Stockholm. I cross-country ski in winter, I sail in summer, and I have a complicated relationship with electric vehicles. (They're great. The charging infrastructure is not.)
Experience
- Product Lead, Northvolt (BMS Software)
- Climate Tech Advisor (EU startups)
- Powertrain Engineer, Scania