The jury and the audience agreed. Unanimously

On Friday, six sustainable start-ups and scale-ups pitched their ideas at Kennedy Van der Laan in Amsterdam, and when the moment came, the jury and the audience arrived at exactly the same conclusion, independently of each other. The winner was Hydryx.

The premise of the pitch is disarmingly simple: the best answers to climate, energy, and resource challenges don't come from policy papers, they come from entrepreneurs. The pitch is a room full of people who take that seriously, and who believe that growth, sustainability, and security aren't in tension with each other. They belong in the same sentence.

Kennedy Van der Laan is a fitting place for that kind of event. The Amsterdam law firm works at the intersection of technology, business, and innovation, exactly the environment that genuinely wants to understand what founders are building, not just evaluate whether it's fundable. Presenting alongside five other companies, each with something real and specific to say, is its own kind of pressure. We enjoyed it.

Anthonie Jacobson and Joren Tangelder walked away with the trophy. But more than the win, what landed was the recognition that automating something as overlooked as gas extraction from landfills is exactly the kind of high-impact work this pitch was designed to find.

Four editions in, and the field keeps getting sharper. That's as it should be.

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