Eastern Colombia now has a clean technology portfolio

Santander is building technology to decarbonize.

For eight months we worked alongside eleven technology-based companies in Aceleratech, the decarbonization-focused acceleration program that the Bucaramanga Chamber of Commerce and Ecopetrol launched at the city's Digital Decarbonization Lab. Suricata Labs ran the technical and methodological execution.

What struck us most was not that these companies exist, but how different they are from one another and how far they had come without anyone outside their own industry noticing.

Eleven technologies with nothing in common

Solutions Biotechnology uses black soldier fly larvae to turn industrial organic waste into agricultural bio-inputs. ECOSY is developing a facade coating that incorporates biochar made from aquatic plants, so the wall captures CO₂ and reduces the building's heat load. Magma Group recovers nickel and cobalt from post-consumer batteries to make electrocatalysts for green hydrogen production. Hexa Nodo attaches a generator to a spinning bike and turns pedaling into electricity that can be used on the spot.

On the digital side, GEATIC built a platform that records and calculates greenhouse gas emissions on a map, Zia a platform for measuring and reporting organizational carbon footprints under international standards, and Dannte an AI-powered thermographic inspection system for solar farms. AC Ingeniería Virtual develops digital twins that predict when an industrial asset is about to lose efficiency. Daimob brings sensor-based temperature control to poultry houses, Green Peak grows kenaf and hemp for natural fiber and biomass, and Emprender Soluciones monitors energy consumption in buildings in real time.

Putting a biotech team, an electrochemistry team and three software teams in the same room calls for support built on shared principles that still adapts to each case. It was the most demanding part of the work, and also the most interesting.

A pitch is no substitute for evidence

Several companies came into the program calculating their emissions reductions with figures taken from the literature or from preliminary estimates without experimental backing. That's understandable. Measuring costs money and time, and a number from a published study always sounds reasonable.

The problem is that in this market, buyers ask for your own data. A decarbonization company competes on its ability to measure, report and verify what its technology avoids, with traceable methodology and evidence it generated itself. Without that there is no serious commercial conversation, however good the product.

A large share of the support went into closing that gap. Each company designed and ran its own tests, and by the end of the program the entire portfolio had replaced assumptions with data it can defend in front of a client, an investor or an auditor. That is the most real difference between accelerating clean tech and accelerating other kinds of technology, and it applies as much to software platforms as to biological processes.

For several of these technologies, nature sets the pace

A temperature control system for poultry houses can't be validated in two weeks. It needs a full rearing cycle, with real birds in production and all the variables the farmer doesn't control. A crop first has to show, through lab analysis, that the soil is suitable before anyone can measure how much carbon it captures. A metal recovery process has to scale from a small setup to a larger one without losing stability.

More mentoring sessions don't speed that up. For part of the portfolio, the program calendar had to adapt to the timelines of biology and chemistry, not the other way around. Anyone designing energy transition programs should keep this in mind when setting duration and milestones, because a format built for software leaves these companies without the time to generate the evidence they will later be asked for.

Nobody buys decarbonization, they buy a concrete benefit

The other recurring conversation was about who each company sells to and what exactly it sells them.

A poultry farmer doesn't buy emissions reductions. They buy spending less on gas and keeping an even temperature in the poultry house. A plant manager doesn't buy decarbonization, they buy knowing their equipment won't lose efficiency without warning. The emissions reduction comes afterward, as a result of the benefit that actually drove the purchase.

Building the value proposition from that concrete job the customer needs done, rather than from the product's technical features, took up much of the one-on-one sessions. It's an adjustment that sounds obvious on paper, and that is hard in practice when a team has spent years in love with its technology.

Why it matters that this is happening in Santander

A region known for hydrocarbons is producing technology for the energy transition, and doing so with teams that, for the most part, hadn't left the lab until recently. This isn't a story about reinvention, these are companies with products and data.

What they need now is the same thing almost all clean technology in the region needs: to meet the corporate and institutional clients who need them and often don't know they exist. We helped with much of that through a matchmaking event we held during the program, which delivered very good results.