Last month, QUIXOTIC was selected for WE-RISE — a Horizon Europe-funded program supporting women-led startups in greentech, agritech, and climatetech. Twenty companies were chosen from hundreds of applications across the EU.
I could frame this as a milestone. A badge to display. Another logo for the website.
But the honest version is more interesting.
What €5,000 actually means
The Phase 1 grant is €5,000 in non-dilutive funding for travel — exhibitions, fairs, investor meetings across Europe. For context: QUIXOTIC is a team of 15 people. Eleven are engineers. I am the marketing department. All of it.
In a company building enterprise infrastructure for energy retailers, product eats first. Engineering eats second. Marketing gets what’s left — and what’s left needs to work harder than it has any right to.
So €5,000 for travel doesn’t sound like much until you understand what it actually unlocks. We landed our first customer outside Spain earlier this year — a German energy retailer. Now we’re exploring the DACH market and beyond. Every conversation in a new market compresses weeks of remote research into a single afternoon. You learn things in person that no amount of desk research will surface: how a prospect describes their own pain, which regulatory detail they lose sleep over, what their actual workflow looks like versus what the industry documentation says.
That €5,000 isn’t a prize. It’s acceleration. Without it, we’d still get there — but slower. And in a market where timing matters, slower has a cost.
The math of doing more with less
Here’s the part I don’t usually share publicly.
Last year, my total marketing budget — including my own salary — generated a 5x return on closed revenue. Pipeline generated? 30x.
Those numbers sound impressive until you realize they exist precisely because there’s almost no budget to dilute them. When you have very little to spend, every euro either earns its place or gets cut. There’s no room for “brand awareness” experiments with no feedback loop. No agency retainers that run on autopilot. Every campaign, every piece of content, every outbound sequence has to connect to pipeline or it doesn’t survive.
This isn’t a philosophy I chose. It’s the physics of building capital-intensive software with long sales cycles in a niche market. Energy retail — the meter-to-cash cycle, switching processes, billing automation — is not a space where you can growth-hack your way to traction. Our sales cycles run long. The product is complex. Trust is everything.
So marketing in this world looks different. It’s one person doing content strategy, SEO, paid acquisition, business development, internationalization, and RevOps. Not because it’s glamorous, but because that’s what the stage demands.
The gender dimension, without the theatrics
WE-RISE specifically supports women-led deep tech startups. I want to be honest about what that means to me.
The funding gap for women founders in Europe is real and well-documented. Less than 2% of VC funding goes to all-female founding teams. In energy tech specifically, the landscape is more nuanced than a single statistic suggests — I see reasonable representation at starting and intermediate roles among prospects and clients I work with. But leadership remains predominantly male. The higher up you look, the fewer women you find.
Programs like WE-RISE matter not because they solve this — a €5,000 travel grant won’t close a structural funding gap. They matter because they create a specific kind of permission: to show up in rooms you might not have traveled to, to have conversations you might have postponed, to accelerate a timeline that resource constraints would otherwise stretch.
I didn’t apply to WE-RISE because it’s a women’s program. I applied because it directly supports what we need right now — market access, investor exposure, and cross-border visibility during the most critical phase of our international expansion. The fact that it also recognizes and supports women in this space is meaningful context, not the whole story.
What actually excites me
If I’m honest, the grant money isn’t the most exciting part. What I’m looking forward to is being in new markets physically — talking to energy retailers in countries where the regulatory frameworks are different, the competitive landscapes are unfamiliar, and the assumptions I’ve built in the Spanish market may not hold.
QUIXOTIC has been operating since 2021. I joined in 2024. In that time, we’ve gone from a Spanish-market product to a company with its first international customer and a real expansion strategy forming. The product works. The market need is clear. What we’re figuring out now is how to tell that story across borders — in German, in French, in Italian — in ways that resonate locally while staying true to what we actually build.
WE-RISE gives us a structured reason to accelerate that exploration. Not hypothetically. In planes, in meeting rooms, at industry events where the people who run energy retailers in the DACH market are actually present.
Not waiting for the perfect moment
If there’s a thread that connects all of this — the grant, the budget constraints, the one-person department, the international push — it’s that none of it happened because conditions were ideal. They weren’t.
The budget was never going to be comfortable. The team was never going to have a dedicated demand gen person and a content strategist and a growth marketer. The expansion into Germany wasn’t going to wait until we had a local office and a native-speaking sales team.
You build with what you have. You apply for the grants that match where you are. You get on the plane when someone offers to help pay for the ticket.
And then you make the most of every conversation on the other side.
QUIXOTIC builds vertical software for energy retailers managing the full meter-to-cash cycle across European markets. We’re currently expanding beyond Spain into DACH and other EU markets. If you’re in energy retail and curious about what we’re building, I’d love to hear from you — quixotic.energy
