“This will be the future”: the people Catalyse NEB 2026 is building for

A team of health workers arrives at an Ebola response site in DR Congo and finds nowhere clean to work. A parent with a child walks past a park pond that the neighbourhood stopped visiting years ago. A farmer looks at the test results from his own water for the first time and says, simply: “This will be the future.”

These people won’t appear on a cap table or a pitch deck. But they are the reason the Catalyse NEB 2026 startups exist.

In this article, we turn the camera around and look at who they build for: health workers and park-goers, farmers and researchers, material developers, designers and makers. Some of these startups have already watched a user unfold, test or touch what they built. Others are still learning what will make the difference. All of them have a clear picture of the person they are trying to help.

Lattice: a clean room on the first day

For: health workers in outbreak response

On paper, Lattice’s customers are ministries, agencies and their partners. They sign the contracts. But when the team talks about who they really build for, they picture the people who arrive first.

“Picture a team of health workers arriving at a site in DR Congo during this year’s Ebola outbreak. They need a closed, clean space to work in, and usually there’s nothing: a borrowed classroom, a tent, or a shipping container still sitting on a truck somewhere, waiting for a crane.

These health workers are who we build for, even though the contract is signed by a ministry, an agency or one of their partners. In 2026, during the Ebola response, we ran a pilot project in DR Congo with a US partner.

What changes for them is the first day. Each unit weighs 70 kg, so it comes off the truck by hand. Two people unfold it in under five minutes, without training. Six units make a complete lab. Instead of waiting for infrastructure to arrive, they set it up where the work is.”

Neusatz: the pond people had learned to walk past

For: everyone who uses a public park, from a parent with a child to an older resident

“Nobody goes to a park to look at filtration equipment,” says the Neusatz team. “They want to sit by the water without worrying about it, and they want that place to stay beautiful after we’ve gone.”

Their story starts at the edge of one such pond:

“I remember standing beside a pond in an old public park and wondering how we’d become so used to leaving places like this to decay. The water was stagnant, the area no longer felt safe, and people had little reason to stop.

We didn’t want to give it a quick cosmetic makeover. A pond is a working water system. If you repair only what people can see, the same problems will return. So we started with the water and the things that make it possible to maintain a pond properly. Then we turned to the surroundings, rebuilding the space with a quiet, Japanese-inspired feel. I like that kind of design because it doesn’t shout. It gives people somewhere to slow down.

The real test isn’t a nice photograph on the day the work is finished. It’s whether a parent with a child, an older resident or somebody walking through the park feels comfortable staying for a while.”

That is the thinking behind their Full EcoSmart Reservoir project: turning neglected water bodies into places people enjoy, and making sure they don’t quietly fall apart again. For Neusatz, beautiful isn’t the finishing touch. It’s the test of whether the work succeeded.

WAI: every drop of data counts

For: farmers, researchers and environmental organisations

WAI wants to make water quality easy to measure and easy to understand. The best way to find out whether that works is to hand the system to the people who need it, and listen.

“During live demos with farmers, seeing results from their own water made the conversation concrete. They knew their land; now they had measurements to discuss. One farmer said: ‘This will be the future.’

Researchers brought a different perspective. In laboratory testing, our early readings weren’t yet as stable as those from lab instruments. But the ease of use stood out: ‘Well, this was easy!’ Some began imagining taking measurements in the field, repeating them when needed and getting immediate results, without sending every sample to a laboratory.”

An environmental organisation that tested the system put it this way: “I actually enjoyed taking the water samples. The system is designed in such a way that even relatively inexperienced samplers can use it.”

WAI has also heard from sectors it hadn’t considered, a sign of how many people need simpler, affordable access to water quality data. For the team, that is where the NEB value of together comes in:

“For us, together means combining landowners’ knowledge, researchers’ interpretation and environmental groups’ practical experience. We can’t build that collaboration alone. But measurements people didn’t have before give them a starting point for deciding where to act, and for checking whether it helped.”

CinSOIL: making farmland part of the solution

For: agrifood companies and the farmers they work with

Agrifood systems produce around one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. CinSOIL starts from a different angle on that number:

“Agriculture can be as much, if not more, part of the solution as it is being presented as a problem. Agricultural soils have the potential to be a giant carbon sink, which can balance out the Scope 3 carbon footprint of agrifood systems. Farmers can play a vital role in this, working with the companies they supply to decarbonise agrifood value chains through carbon farming.

What holds carbon farming back from the scale we need is the lack of a scalable, cost-effective and reliable way to monitor soil carbon.”

CinSOIL’s tool uses satellite data and different modelling approaches to read soil and crop health. With those insights, agrifood companies can design carbon farming strategies that work at scale for them, and are profitable for the farmers they work with.

Farm-32: growing food when the weather can’t be trusted

For: farmers and food producers in increasingly challenging climates

“I don’t believe we can keep farming the way we do today,” says Juriën Koster, CEO of Farm-32. “We are relying on stable weather, abundant water and external resources that we can no longer take for granted.”

The team sees it first-hand on their own farm in Sardinia: water scarcity, extreme temperatures, rising energy costs and declining soil quality. These pressures are increasingly felt by farmers everywhere.

“With Farm-32, we want to fundamentally redesign how food is produced. We are developing an integrated technology stack that brings together fully controlled growing environments, solar energy, battery storage, water recycling, intelligent climate management, and technologies that capture essential inputs such as CO₂ and nitrogen directly from the air. Our ambition is to create highly productive farms that are almost entirely self-sufficient, with a fraction of the environmental footprint of conventional agriculture.”

The team is now moving beyond individual technologies and small demonstrations towards a large-scale commercial project that brings all these systems together. “We want to show that a different approach is not only possible, but also commercially very attractive. Ultimately, we want to make sustainable, reliable food production possible even in the most challenging environments.”

Orpia: what colour should a material be?

For: people who develop the materials in everyday products

Orpia turns cashew nutshell liquid, a by-product of cashew processing, into chemical building blocks that manufacturers can use instead of fossil-based ingredients. But when the team thinks about who they’re helping, they picture a person, not a process:

“I picture someone developing materials for a company that sells e.g. sports and outdoor garments. They want to respond to customers asking for more sustainable products, but they still have to get the performance right. A material has to do its job, even when you change what it’s made from.

We’re still working through the practical challenges, from colour to producing larger quantities. It takes more than a promising result in the lab to make something industry can actually use. Personally, that’s what keeps me going. I’d be so proud to see something I imagined in the lab in a finished product.”

One of those challenges turns out to be a surprisingly good question about sustainable and beautiful:

“Our ingredients can have yellow or brown tones, while manufacturers often need a clear or white starting material so they can get exactly the colour their customers want. That’s a real constraint, and we can’t just ignore it. But removing the colour can require more purification steps and solvents. So we’re asking ourselves: how much processing makes sense, and where could the existing colour be acceptable?

I’m not saying that a brown material is automatically more sustainable, or that every product should be beige. But I’d love us to question the idea that a material always has to start perfectly white to be attractive. We haven’t solved this yet. We’re learning from industrial feedback where colour is a barrier, and where there might be room for a different approach.”

Pit-to-Table: from the olive harvest to the table you work at

For: designers, architects and makers, and everyone who lives with what they make

“I grew up harvesting olives in Cyprus,” says the founder of Pit-to-Table. “The olive harvest isn’t something I discovered through sustainability or design. It’s a memory, a tradition and a part of where I’m from.

Years later, looking at the harvest as a designer, I started thinking about what’s left behind. Olive pits are a natural by-product of olive oil, yet they often have little value and can end up discarded or burned. I began wondering whether we could turn them into something useful and beautiful.”

That question became Pit-Board®, a bio-composite panel made in Cyprus from discarded olive pits. Today, designers, architects and makers use it for furniture, tabletops and interior panels, bringing the character of the olive harvest into the spaces people use every day.

For Pit-to-Table, beautiful means people should want the material for what it is, not only for what it represents. Earlier this year, they got a lovely reminder of why that matters:

“At 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen, someone came to our exhibition specifically to meet us. They had been following our journey for the past year and wanted to see Pit-Board in person, to touch it, feel its surface for themselves, and meet us!

In a world where so much of how we discover new materials happens through screens, someone had followed our story for months and made the effort to find us in person. The material sparks curiosity, but it’s the people, the story and the chance to experience it first-hand that make the connection real. We’re still learning what turns that curiosity into long-term use, but moments like this remind us why making waste-derived materials desirable matters just as much as developing them.”

What comes next

A health worker who can start on day one. A parent who stays a little longer by the water. A farmer with numbers from his own land. A designer who runs a hand over a tabletop made from olive pits. None of these startups is building for an abstract market. They’re building for someone.

Is it your turn? If you’re building something your community, your city or your landscape needs, the Catalyse NEB 2027 open call is now open. Apply by 15 January 2027.