Where capital meets judgment.

Portico serves the asset owners, corporations, and investment firms driving innovation across energy systems.

See our practice → About Strata
Track record
$9B+
In transactions advised
Experience
33%
S&P Global 500 advised
Geographic breadth
85+
Countries

More than thought partners. Company builders.

Portico’s leadership team brings a proven track record of bridging the gap between concept and scale. Our prior work spans private markets and principal investing, energy and infrastructure project development, and product launch and go-to-market.

Independent

Uniquely in our field, every engagement is led by the Managing Partners who own and govern the firm. We take backstop responsibility for ensuring our insights and recommendations are actionable and enable our clients to win. To retain full independence in our advice, we do not provide sell-side marketing or capital-raising services in any form.

Evidenced

Our work is grounded in primary research with technical experts who bring firsthand experience of testing, procuring, and maintaining the class of technology our client is evaluating. Our solutions are built to identify end-user adoption criteria, verify unit economics, and substantiate drivers of demand. We take nothing at face value and trace everything to source.

Operator-led

Portico's Managing Partners are operators and investors first, advisors second. We are company builders with hard-earned founder experience who have lived with the consequences of our business decisions. We roll up our sleeves, gather proprietary insights and data, and work from first principles to reach independent conclusions. We only give advice that we would act on ourselves.

What we do

We cut through complexity to provide strategic clarity.

Research & Intelligence

Most market intelligence is downstream of public information. We execute structured primary research that builds conviction on companies, technologies, markets, policy, and geopolitical dynamics. We generate proprietary data and insights through direct engagement with the operators, technologists, and decision-makers who hold ground truth. The result is conviction that desk research alone cannot deliver.

Investor research Competitive intelligence Market mapping Regulatory landscape

Assessment & Due Diligence

We evaluate technical performance, product-market fit, unit economics, and team quality on the evidence. We hand-pick experts from our network who have built the class of technology under review, interview from component suppliers to end customers, and verify numbers from the bottom up. Our IC-ready assessments distinguish scalable technologies from vapourware.

Technology assessment Commercial due diligence Market sizing Go/no-go recommendations

Transaction Support

Our transaction advice is resistant to narrative and backed by unimpeachable data. We rebuild the seller’s case from primary research, identifying where optionality has been overstated and where our client can engineer value invisible to others. After scrutinising the cap table for hidden conflicts, we design capital structures to fit each transaction’s dynamics.

Valuation & price discovery Capital structuring Cap table forensics Risk mitigation Exit viability

Strategic Advisory

We build high-conviction investment strategies that enable off-market origination, global platform building, and accelerated technology integration. The critical question isn’t just ‘what’s the ROI?’—it’s whether an investment advances your strategic priorities and extends the edge that your assets, networks, and customer reach already give you. We workshop priorities with leadership, frame the buy-build-partner decision, map how targets integrate with existing operations, and design vehicles built for scale.

Investment thesis Vehicle design Market entry Technology landscapes Competitive positioning

Everything runs on energy.

Energy is the substrate of the economy.

Our work centres on technologies enabling the energy systems of the future, on both sides of the meter, from generation to end-use demand, plus the materials and infrastructure that make it possible.

If a company's thesis turns on a question of energy—how power gets generated, delivered, priced, or used—we have analysed it.

Data centres are the clearest case. Frequently assessed as real estate or compute assets, their binding constraint is power: procurement, interconnection, and cost per megawatt-hour.

Energy-related investments require sector-specific frameworks, accounting for highly regulated markets and concentrated customer sets.

Everything we do is built on the proprietary market maps and IP we develop, and continuously update, across the layers of the energy system.

Generation

Will the technology perform at commercial scale? Will it be built on time and on budget?

  • Small modular reactors
  • Next-generation geothermal
  • Utility-scale solar & wind
  • Firm gas capacity

Grid Infrastructure

Will utilities adopt it at scale? Can the value be captured under current market design?

  • Long-duration energy storage
  • Grid hardware (transformers, conductors)
  • Grid-edge software (DERMS, ADMS)
  • Interconnection software
  • Grid-forming power electronics

Distributed Energy

Do the unit economics work without current incentives? Will the regulatory structure that supports them hold?

  • Behind-the-meter storage
  • Microgrids
  • Virtual power plants
  • Demand response
  • Distributed solar

Demand-side Electrification

Will load materialise at the size claimed? How much of it will be attenuated through efficiency gains?

  • EV charging
  • Data-centre infrastructure
  • Industrial decarbonisation
  • Building efficiency

Materials

Can the processing economics compete with incumbent supply? Is the off-take real enough to underwrite capacity?

  • Battery materials processing
  • Critical-mineral supply
  • Cell chemistry
  • Cathode & anode production
  • Battery recycling

Carbon & Biodiversity

Are the carbon or biodiversity claims credible? How will the market price them?

  • Direct air capture
  • Point-source carbon capture
  • Methane abatement
  • Nature-based carbon
  • Biodiversity MRV (eDNA, AI monitoring)
Selected work

Decisions clients couldn't afford to get wrong.

Designed and launched a multi-country battery minerals investment platform for a direct investor entering the sector, from opportunity mapping through transaction structuring and partner selection.
Retained by a family office to conduct primary due diligence on a first-of-its-kind autonomous subsea platform designed to support offshore energy projects, including technology readiness evaluation and commercial viability assessment across three target markets.
Advised a leading US technology firm on market entry and customer acquisition strategies, developing localised launch roadmaps across 14 countries to scale an electric mobility platform.
Provided independent commercial assessment of a novel transformer technology for a European investor evaluating a growth equity investment.
Provided comprehensive due diligence and structuring advice for a group of private infrastructure investors and development finance institutions evaluating Independent Power Projects.
Designed and structured a permanent capital vehicle for a family office to accelerate investments across the generation, transmission, and consumption of clean energy.
Conducted commercial and technical due diligence on automated biodiversity monitoring technologies to de-risk large-scale energy and infrastructure developments and ensure regulatory compliance.
Developed a comprehensive decarbonisation strategy focused on industrial heat processes for a multinational agricultural corporation.
From the workshop Private beta

Strata.
Portico's proprietary methodology for assessing deals, codified.

Strata is Portico's family of AI-augmented services for investors in energy systems.

Built on our evaluation of more than 600 energy investment targets, Strata applies our vertical-specific frameworks and scoring rubrics to deliver insights no general AI system or prompt can.

Grounded in our distinctive house view of energy systems, Strata gives investment teams an independent second opinion at any stage of the diligence process: triaging inbound deal flow, evaluating commercial fit on targets you're seriously considering, or validating the underlying technology before you commit.

Each engagement is led by our Managing Partners and grounded in domain expertise. Currently in private beta with a select group of energy systems investors.

— Market maps 14
— Co's screened 600+
— Access By invitation
— Investment process
Sourcing
Screening
Initial assessment
DD & term sheet
Detailed DD
Strata Screen Pursue or pass? Pitch deck / teaser
Strata CDD Is the business real? Detailed CIM / data room
Strata Tech Assessment Is the technology real? Full data room + tech docs
Screening → Initial assessment

Strata Screen

Pursue or pass?

Pitch deck / teaser

Initial assessment → DD & term sheet

Strata CDD

Is the business real?

Detailed CIM / data room

DD & term sheet → Detailed DD

Strata Tech Assessment

Is the technology real?

Full data room + tech docs

Mike Casey

Mike Casey

Founder & Managing Partner
Bill Steen

Bill Steen

Managing Partner
Ashley Elliot

Ashley Elliot

Senior Advisor
Get in touch

Have a deal, a thesis, or a question on your mind?

Email the team → Request Strata beta access