Germany → the United Kingdom
Expanding a German climate-tech company into the UK
German climate-tech companies usually come to the UK for the buyer side: utilities, infrastructure owners, corporate offtakers and a public sector that procures pilots.
The hard parts are rarely commercial. They are conformity marking for hardware, the entity question for grant and procurement routes, and the cost step up if you land in London by default.
The order of work
Step 1
Name the buyer before the entity
Decide which UK customer, utility, local authority or testbed you are trying to reach. Everything else — city, entity, funding route — follows from that, and doing it the other way round costs months.
Step 2
Check the product gate
For hardware, conformity marking and any sector approvals sit ahead of procurement. Confirm the position for your own product area before you build a pipeline you cannot legally supply.
Step 3
Use the free soft-landing help
Inward-investment agencies and city partners offer market data, introductions and site search at no cost. They are underused by first-time entrants.
Step 4
Set up the entity when a route requires it
UK grant competitions and public-sector contracting usually expect a UK-registered company. Incorporation is quick; banking and payroll are not, so start those early.
Step 5
Line up the funding route to the deployment
Look for the competition or programme that funds the kind of work your first UK customer wants, and read its eligibility conditions before planning around it.
Cities on this route
Indicative benchmarks with the source and reference year shown on each city page. Confirm locally before budgeting.
Guides that matter most here
UKCA and CE marking: what an EU climate-tech company needs to know before selling in Great Britain
How product conformity marking works when an EU climate-tech company sells hardware in Great Britain: UKCA, continued CE recognition, Northern Ireland, and where to check the position for your own product area.
Setting up a UK entity as an EU climate-tech company
What a UK subsidiary actually involves for an EU-based climate-tech company: incorporation, directors and addresses, tax registrations, payroll and the order to do things in.
Innovate UK funding for EU-based climate-tech companies
How Innovate UK and UKRI competitions treat a company headquartered in the EU, what a UK presence is usually needed for, and where to check eligibility for a specific competition.
Organisations to contact
Named accelerators, testbeds and trade bodies with official websites and enquiry pages, each with the date we last checked it.
Make this route specific to your company
GreenLaunch scores open funding calls, tenders and pitching opportunities against your company profile, ranks the cities on cost and fit, and drafts the applications and intro emails.