How to Spot Regenerative Business Opportunities
Tools and frameworks to discover sustainable innovations
Climate crisis, biodiversity loss, social polarization — the challenges of the 21st century are not only confronting governments but also innovation ecosystems. Accelerators, incubators, and startup programs are increasingly under pressure to promote not only scalable but also future-viable business models. At the same time, regulatory requirements are rising, for instance through CSRD, SFDR, or the EU Taxonomy framework. Investors today pay closer attention to ESG criteria — yet the focus is shifting. What was considered “sustainable” yesterday is often no longer sufficient today. The standards for innovation are rising: away from greenwashing, toward genuine regenerative impact.
Sustainability means: doing less harm. Regeneration goes further: it aims to actively restore systems. While sustainability approaches optimize the status quo, regenerative business models ask: How can a company contribute to making natural, social, and economic systems more resilient? This means not just offsetting CO₂, but for example building soil, repairing water cycles, or enabling social participation. This difference is not a semantic detail, but a paradigm shift — from efficiency to resilience, from reduction to restoration.
For strategic partners in startup ecosystems, this opens up a new opportunity and responsibility. Those who recognize regenerative business models early and promote them strategically increase the resilience and future viability of their own portfolio. Because regenerative companies think systemically, often work with stronger local integration, are less dependent on linear supply chains, and thus become more resistant to crises. Early-stage innovation support thus becomes strategic groundwork for the next economic era.
1. Reframe: What Makes Regenerative Innovation
The debate around sustainable innovation has been shaped for years by terms like ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance), Sustainability, and Impact. However, these terms are often conflated or used inflationarily. Those who want to discover and specifically promote regenerative business models need clarity about the differences. Because the crucial transformation begins with thinking.
ESG is a risk management framework. It helps investors evaluate companies along environmental, social, and governance criteria, with the goal of minimizing risks and meeting regulatory requirements. ESG is company-centric, not systemic. It measures how environmental risks influence the company and not how the company influences the environment or society. The EU Taxonomy or SFDR are classic manifestations of this thinking framework [1].
Sustainability goes one step further. Sustainable business models attempt to minimize negative impacts: e.g., fewer emissions, less waste, fair working conditions. The goal is not to become “worse.” The benchmark is often the status quo: How can we make existing products, processes, or services more efficient and cleaner? But here too, the focus lies on damage limitation, not on system transformation.
Regenerative innovation goes beyond this. It asks not only how negative impacts can be avoided, but how companies can make active contributions to restoring systems. Instead of linear efficiency, circularity, resilience, and systemic impact are at the center here. Regenerative business models rebuild natural resources, strengthen social connections, and redesign entire economic or supply chains. The goal: Give back more than you take. And this as a core element of the business model.
An example: While a sustainable fashion label focuses on organic cotton and fair production, a regenerative textile company like Fibre52 works on processes that process cotton with drastically reduced water and energy consumption and increase recyclability. The regenerative principle here lies in redesigning the entire production system and not just the end product.
Characteristics of Regenerative Business Models: Systemic, Net-Positive, Circular, Resilient
What distinguishes regenerative from sustainable or “green” business models? The answer lies in intention and system design. Regenerative companies aim to operate within planetary boundaries and create positive contributions that actively strengthen natural, social, or economic systems. It’s not about reducing an ecological footprint, but about leaving behind a measurable improvement.
Regenerative models analyze entire value creation networks — including ecological and social interactions — and not just markets or user needs. Their approach is systemic: Instead of fighting individual symptoms like CO₂ emissions or plastic waste, they ask what systemic causes underlie these problems and how business models can contribute to their transformation.
A good example is the startup InPlanet, which binds CO₂ in soil through silicate rock weathering while simultaneously promoting soil health and local value creation in Brazil’s agricultural regions. The model not only has a climate-positive effect but also supports food security, biodiversity, and regional resilience — a systemic effect in multiple ways.
A central characteristic of regenerative business models is their net-positive impact. This means: They provide more resources than they consume — whether in the form of clean air, healthy soils, stable communities, or new educational access. The startup Notpla, for instance, replaces plastic packaging with biodegradable algae materials, thereby contributing to the regeneration of marine ecosystems.
Operating net-positively requires a radical reversal of conventional logic: From extracting to regenerating, from competition to cooperation with living systems.
Regenerative companies think in cycles rather than along chains. Raw materials should be used multiple times, products recycled or biologically returned. This not only increases ecological carrying capacity — economic resilience also grows. Because circular models reduce dependencies on raw material prices and global supply chains. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation impressively shows how companies become not only more sustainable but also more future-proof through circular innovation [2].
Finally, regenerative business models are more robust against crises. They build on diversity, decentrality, modularity, and long-term relationships. These principles — inspired by natural ecosystems — make companies more resistant to shocks, whether geopolitical, climatic, or financial. Regeneration is therefore not a moral add-on, but a strategic advantage in a world of multiple upheavals.
Those who think systemically, act net-positively, operate circularly, and co-design resilience are not only building good companies, but future-viable ones. Regenerative business models are the blueprint for an economy that can sustain itself in the long term.
Why Classical Innovation Screenings Fail: Recognizing the “Problem Behind the Problem”
Classical innovation screenings are optimized for efficiency: market potential, technological feasibility, scalability, team fit. But this is exactly where the problem lies, because these filters are not designed to recognize systemic solutions. They evaluate ideas based on how well they address existing markets, not on whether they transform fundamental structures. Those who only orient themselves to the status quo overlook precisely the innovations that are crucial for a regenerative future.
A typical example: Startups in the Food Waste sector are evaluated based on how much waste they reduce. But regenerative food systems aim not only at waste avoidance, but at a fundamental transformation of production, logistics, and food culture– this goes far beyond efficiency.
Regenerative innovation begins with the problem behind the problem. Instead of How do we reduce plastic waste? the question is: Why is our economic system dependent on single-use plastic? Instead of How do we make supply chains more transparent? the better question would be: Why are our supply chains so opaque, extractive, and centralized? This type of questioning changes which ideas become visible and which fall through classical screening criteria. Methods like Root Cause Analysis or the Five Whys Approach help develop this deeper problem understanding.
Many classical due diligence and screening tools focus on output metrics: revenue, user growth, market size. But regenerative business models unfold their value not primarily through output, but through their outcome and system impact. This emerges long-term, non-linearly, and more interdependently than standard KPIs can capture.
The problem: Without suitable evaluation frameworks, systemic impact remains invisible and is ignored in decisions. To identify regenerative startups therefore requires a different innovation radar: One that recognizes not only disruptive technologies but also disruptive thinking models. This means: Shifting focus from incremental problem-solving totransformative system innovations.
The error of classical screenings is not that they are “too harsh,” but too narrow, too short-term, too economically focused in their thinking. Those who think impact must also rethink the methodology for evaluation. Only this way can we recognize those innovations that truly solve problems by changing structures.
2. Recognize: Identifying Regenerative Potential Early
Those who want to recognize regenerative business models need more than a good sense for trends. The question is not: Does this have potential? but: Does this create a systemic net benefit for environment and society? This is exactly where impact frameworks come in. They create structural clarity in idea evaluation, help prevent blind spots — and make impact systematically verifiable.
Three proven approaches have particularly stood out: Lean Impact, the Future-Fit Business Benchmark, and our ownLean Impact & Sustainability Assessment:
Lean Impact: Developing Impact Iteratively
Ann Mei Chang’s Lean Impact Framework [3] transfers principles from Lean Startup to social and ecological innovation. Instead of starting with a finished impact model, it builds on rapid learning, early testing, and continuous validation of impact hypotheses. The focus lies on three questions:
- How large is the possible impact?
- How measurable is this impact?
- How scalable is the model?
Lean Impact is primarily aimed at social enterprises, NGOs, and mission-driven startups. It works excellently in the early phase — but has weaknesses in systemic embedding and alignment with regulatory or capital market requirements.
Future-Fit: Sustainability Aligned to Target State
The Future-Fit Business Benchmark [4] takes a different approach. Instead of developing iteratively, it defines a systemic target state — a regenerative economy within planetary boundaries — and derives concrete criteria and metrics for companies from this. Examples:
- No harmful emissions
- Fair value creation
- Replicability without external burdens
The framework is scientifically grounded, CSRD-compliant, and compatible with international standards like the SDGs or the GHG Protocol. It is particularly well-suited for medium- to long-term impact measurement — but is often too complex or difficult to operationalize in the early phase.
COSMICGOLD’s Lean Impact & Sustainability Assessment: For Early Phases with Foresight
Our proprietary framework from COSMICGOLD [4] bridges the gap between impact and investability. It is based on the Lean philosophy but supplements it with systemic future thinking and regulatory compatibility. The goal: Make startups “Future-Ready” both in terms of impact and capital access. o The assessment is built in sprints and examines:
- Systemic impact: Is not just a symptom being solved, but a regenerative lever being addressed?
- Circular capability and resilience: How future-viable is the business model with growing uncertainty?
- Regulatory compatibility: Does the model meet current and upcoming ESG/CSRD/SFDR/VSME requirements?
- Investor perspective: How compatible is the narrative for capital market-oriented partners?
The USP: COSMICGOLD makes impact operationalizable for early phases without losing sight of systemic transformation. The framework is modular, practice-oriented, and was specifically developed for incubators, VC programs, and corporate startup formats.
Those who want to recognize regenerative potential early need tools that ask: What will be needed tomorrow and how can it be implemented credibly, measurably, and scalably? Our assessment combines exactly that: Systems thinking, impact depth, and investor logic. It is a toolkit for all who want to score with strategic depth instead of greenwashing.
Pattern Recognition: 6 Archetypes of Regenerative Startups
Not every innovation labeled as sustainable actually creates regenerative impact. To recognize business models with genuine system transformation early on, it’s not enough to compare industries or follow ESG criteria. Instead, it’s worth looking at the impact logic behind a business model. In the field of regenerative innovation, certain patterns consistently emerge that can be observed regardless of sector or technology used. Six of these archetypes are particularly relevant for early-stage screenings and portfolio strategies.
The first archetype: Rethinking Ownership. Startups in this category question the classical logic of ownership and profit maximization. Instead, they rely on models like steward ownership or platform cooperatives, where value creation is distributed in a long-term, common good-oriented and more democratic way. Examples are organizations like the digital platform Fairbnb, which channels revenues directly back into local projects, showing that ownership is not just a legal but also a cultural question.
The second archetype: Reconnecting Flows. These startups work on closed material, energy, or value cycles. Their goal is to replace the linear “take-make-waste” model with circular systems. The spectrum ranges from biotechnology startups like Insempra, which produces sustainable ingredients using microbial fermentation processes, to platforms like Too Good To Go, which reduces food waste. The common denominator: waste creates new value not only ecologically but also economically.
Third: Rewilding Systems. Startups of this type aim to regenerate natural or social systems: through reforestation, soil building, biodiversity promotion, or strengthening local communities. InPlanet combines the concept of “Enhanced Weathering” with soil health and CO₂ storage, while Terraformation develops modular infrastructures for reforestation projects. What they share is that they don’t just want to slow environmental destruction but actively work on restoring living systems.
Fourth archetype: Enabling Commons. This is about providing open infrastructures that can be used by many actors — whether in the form of data, tools, or know-how. These startups don’t think in proprietary technologies but in scalable commons. OpenForests offers digital platforms for transparent forest projects, while Restor uses satellite-based data to make global renaturalization measures visible. Their impact arises through leverage effects because many others can build on these “commons.”
Fifth archetype: Localizing Value. These startups focus on regional value creation and place-based solutions. Instead of global scaling at any cost, they build on cultural resilience, local resources, and deep integration into existing communities. Regenerative Resources Co. connects mangrove reforestation with income-generating projects for coastal communities. Here, impact doesn’t arise through expansion but through rootedness.
Finally, the sixth archetype: Anticipating Transitions. This type recognizes structural tipping points early — whether in the energy system, agriculture, or finance — and develops solutions before regulation or markets react. This can be carbon removal like at Climeworks, but also transition-as-a-service models for cities or supply chains. These startups act with foresight, often against the mainstream — and create structures for a post-fossil, resilient economy.
What unites all these archetypes: They address causes. They generate system impact with business models that may seem unusual at first glance but are precisely therefore resilient in the long term. Those who recognize these patterns not only gain an advantage in evaluation but actively help shape the next generation of regenerative economy.
And these six archetypes apply not only to business models in classical regenerative fields like nutrition, energy, or mobility — they are equally relevant for deeptech innovations. Because: technology is never neutral. Deeptech startups also make fundamental decisions with every product, architecture, and business model choice. The question is what they enable technically and for what and for whom.
Especially in the deeptech sector — with its high capital intensity and potentially transformative power — it’s crucial to recognize early which systemic problems are being addressed and which paradigms are being continued or questioned. A new chemical process can either optimize resource efficiency in the existing linear model or enable (new) cycles that transform waste into valuable materials (“Reconnecting Flows”). An AI platform can centralize and control or scale collective problem-solving as open-source infrastructure (“Enabling Commons”).
Regenerative archetypes help broaden the perspective. Instead of limiting themselves to technological feasibility or market size, they ask about long-term system impact. This is strategically smart: Because the greatest levers for impact — and thus also for economic scaling — lie where technology breaks existing system boundaries. Or, as Tony Fadell (iPod and Nest inventor) puts it: “If you want to affect a billion lives, you need to work on the underlying systems, not just the symptoms” [6].
This is precisely why deeptech needs regenerative lenses: Because this is where the tracks are being laid for the next epoch — economically, ecologically, socially. And those who recognize early whether a startup is not only technologically excellent but also systemically future-viable are investing not just in innovation, but in resilience, relevance, and genuine progress.
Case Studies: What We Can Learn from Startups like Notpla, InPlanet, Amini, Wild.Labs
Above we have already described what distinguishes regenerative startups from those that merely focus on “sustainable” efficiency or ESG compliance: a different way of thinking. The willingness to address systemic causes instead of symptoms. Four examples show what this looks like in practice and what we can learn from this for scouting, screening, and developing regenerative business models.
Notpla from the UK doesn’t simply replace plastic: the startup dissolves the idea of packaging itself. Using algae, Notpla develops biodegradable, partially edible packaging that integrates seamlessly into natural cycles without residue. The impact lies in redefining consumption habits and logistics. That Notpla already collaborates with major clients like Unilever or Just Eat shows: system change is scalable when technology and behavior are thought through together.
InPlanet, a Brazilian-German startup, takes a different approach: Instead of relying on classical CO₂ offsetting, it invests in the regeneration of tropical forests with the goal of stabilizing local ecosystems, restoring biodiversity, and simultaneously sequestering CO₂. The impact emerges through the interplay of scientifically-based reforestation, participatory collaboration with local communities, and a clear focus on long-term resilience. Offsetting becomes a byproduct of genuine regeneration here.
Amini, based in Kenya, addresses a deep structural problem: the lack of data infrastructure for climate-resilient agriculture in Africa. Instead of developing new hardware, the startup combines satellite data, AI, and local agricultural data into a data backbone for insurance, supply chains, and investments. The systemic leverage lies in the fact that Amini doesn’t sell a product but enables entire economies as an infrastructure partner to adapt to climate change.
Wild.Labs finally develops open-source technologies for nature conservation, but not top-down, but together with indigenous and local communities. The sensors, tools, and digital applications help, for example, with monitoring poaching or deforestation. But their real value lies in the fact that the communities themselves become owners of these technologies. Wild.Labs thus creates not just tools, but technology governance. An often overlooked but crucial lever of regenerative transformation.
All these startups show: Regenerative business models don’t emerge through efficiency improvements, but through the conscious reframing of value creation, ownership, and system boundaries. They connect technology with cultural compatibility, economic viability with planetary responsibility, and are thus not only morally relevant but economically highly strategic.
Because those who recognize early how such models function lay the foundation for portfolios that are not only resilient but future-viable.
3. Redesign: Rethinking Screening and Selection Processes
Startups are not just products, teams, or business plans — they are leverage points. Those who invest in young companies today or accompany them through accelerator and incubator programs help decide what economic structures we will have in ten years. In a decade when the resilience of ecosystems and societies has long become a location factor.
Nevertheless, many due diligence processes still focus on short-term scalability, market size, and the usual team-tech-traction triangle. Impact potential, however — the ability of a startup to address system problems at their root and build regenerative structures — is often evaluated as an afterthought at best. This is a strategic error.
Because impact is not a moral bonus. It is an early indicator of future viability. Startups that aim for systemic regeneration, whether through circular business models, nature-based solutions, or reimagined ownership logics, are usually not only more socially relevant but also more robust in the long term against political, ecological, and financial shocks.
Capital markets are beginning to recognize exactly this: More and more institutional investors are increasingly focusing on sustainability risks as part of their risk models. Those who already consider impact in the early phase createdifferentiation in dealflow as well as connectivity to later financing rounds, which increasingly demand a credible impact story and not a subsequently added slide with colorful icons.
Moreover, impact-oriented due diligence offers additional insight: It forces startups to formulate the “why” of their actions more clearly, rethink stakeholder relationships, and validate assumptions systemically. This increases entrepreneurial clarity and also the quality of the founding idea itself. A better business emerges precisely because impact is consistently considered.
In short: Those who don’t integrate impact ignore central risks and opportunities. Those who strategically embed impact, however, build early the companies that can truly transform our economy.
Thinking Within the System from the Beginning
Regenerative innovation cannot be a one-way street. It doesn’t emerge in the ivory tower of visionary founders but in the interplay with the real challenges and dynamics of existing systems: whether supply chains, infrastructures, communities, or political frameworks. Those who want to build regenerative startups must not only understand this reality but actively include it.
This is exactly where the blind spot of many classical startup programs lies: They focus on the founders and their business case, but not on the stakeholders who co-shape the system. Potential pilot customers, administrative partners, farmers, NGOs, data providers, or regional actors — they all often only come into play later. This is wasted potential.
Co-design instead of later collaboration is the motto. Successful programs like EIT Climate-KIC or the systemic initiatives of Dark Matter Labs show how early involvement of system partners leads not only to better solutions but also to higher success probabilities. When a startup works on decentralized water storage, for example, a co-design process with municipal utilities and environmental engineers can not only clarify technical realities but also open political and social pathways.
We at COSMICGOLD pursue this approach specifically through the early connection of founding teams with stakeholders along their value chain. This not only changes the selection process, it changes the startup itself. Because through interaction with system partners, founders validate their hypotheses not only faster but also more holistically. An entrepreneurial self-understanding emerges that doesn’t assume disruption through isolation but change through connection.
Moreover, co-design opens up new selection criteria for programs: Instead of only looking at market size and pitch deck consistency, potential startups can be evaluated based on how open they are to multi-stakeholder interaction, how compatible their solution is with existing infrastructures, and how consciously they want to recognize and co-shape system boundaries.
This paradigm shift is not comfortable, but necessary. Because the major challenges of our time — from biodiversity loss through resource scarcity to social division — cannot be solved with linear thinking or isolated MVPs. They need startups that think along with the system. And programs that foster this capability.
Structure Creates Scaling Potential
What applies as sector logic in traditional funds — such as fintech, mobility, or health — must be rethought in the age of regenerative innovation. Because regenerative business models don’t follow classical industries but aim to renew vital systems: soil, water, air, biodiversity, social cohesion. Those who want to systematically promote impact therefore need astructural reorganization of portfolios and programs along impact categories.
Such impact categories — such as Soil Health, Water Security, or Social Resilience — provide a systemic framework to identify projects with shared leverage effects, promote synergies, and enable learning effects between teams. Instead of supporting startups in isolation, clusters emerge with shared challenges, stakeholders, and infrastructures.
A good example is provided by the 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People Program, which orchestrates partnerships along geographic and ecological impact priorities, such as soil health, land use, and water regeneration. The EIT Food Accelerator Network also uses thematic cohorts (e.g. Soil & Crops or Circular Food Systems) to network founders more specifically and facilitate cooperation with corporates, research institutions, and regions.
This logic can equally be applied to investment portfolios: Impact categories help not only with scouting but also with diversification. A fund can, for example, specifically invest in various biophysical domains (such as Soil, Water, Air) or social fields of action (such as Inclusive Infrastructure, Democratic Participation). This creates more substantive depth and a higher systemic return on investment because solutions can mutually reinforce each other instead of randomly overlapping.
We at COSMICGOLD work with a set of impact categories based on planetary boundaries and social tipping points that goes beyond pure SDG assignment. This approach enables accelerators, funding programs, or funds to systematically curate their cohorts along global regeneration needs instead of waiting for random applications.
Because only those who structure impact can scale impact. And only those who recognize how projects are mutually dependent can turn a portfolio into a real lever for global regeneration.
Why Regenerative Innovation is the New Default
The innovation landscape is at a turning point. Amid multiple crises, it’s clear: The next wave of entrepreneurial innovation will not primarily be digital or technological. It will be ecological and social. And it will renegotiate the relationship between economy, planet, and society.
Regenerative business models are not a “nice to have” for niche markets or impact funds with moral aspirations. They are the key to securing entrepreneurial resilience, strategic relevance, and capital returns in the long term. Studies like those from the Future-Fit Foundation [4]prove that systemic impact and economic success are not contradictory but increasingly interdependent.
What this requires is a mental shift: away from classical startup scouting toward actively shaping innovation ecosystems. Those who recognize regenerative patterns early, co-design suitable founders, and systematically integrate impact categories are no longer investing in individual bets but in the next economic epoch.
This requires new decision logics, as established by our Lean Impact & Sustainability Assessment: Instead of looking solely at revenue projections or scalability, resilience, net-positive potential, and system relevance count here.
The call is clear: Regenerative innovation is not a special track. It is the new foundation. Those who create better search patterns, selection processes, and ecosystem architectures today are actively co-shaping — instead of just waiting to see what the market produces.
Sources:
[1] https://finance.ec.europa.eu/sustainable-finance/tools-and-standards/eu-taxonomy-sustainable-activities_en
[2] https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/topics/circular-economy-introduction/overview
[3] https://www.annmei.com
[4] https://futurefitbusiness.org/benchmark/
[5] https://www.cosmic.gold/lean-impact-sustainability-assessment
[6] https://www.harpercollins.com/products/build-tony-fadell?variant=39741204824098
