I'm Pat Tindale. I'm CEO and founder of 4energy, and we make cooling equipment for the ICT industry. All our equipment, so that's both the hardware and the software, is all around energy saving. So it's introducing new cooling equipment into that infrastructure, and we have to deliver anywhere between 50 and 90 cooling energy. So all about energy saving, all about infrastructure, all about cooling.
4Energy started off in a garage, bootstrapping, no cash. So we developed technologies for a year and a half, two years, then decided we wanted to try and accelerate that process. So that's when we went for venture capital funding, and we've gone through two rounds. Those two rounds have just given us the legs to go to different countries, develop more technologies, gain big customers, start to get revenues, and so it's been the making of our business from a 4energy perspective. So venture capital took us from an idea which existed to income.
Before 4energy, I think we found that our corporate customers don't like taking risks, especially in the current environment. Going to the VC, getting that money, getting that risk capital enabled us to develop products we knew that the customer wanted but just wasn't prepared to take the risk and invest in it at that early stage. So absolutely crucial in covering that risk period.
We've seen that the money for the real early ideas just doesn't seem to be there like it was when we started five, six, seven years ago. And that just seems to be a place where you miss it. You've got to have lots of ideas to get some fantastic ones that make the returns, but you've got to have lots of ideas at the start.
I think the things that we have is probably, we have a probably the culture of innovation. So that feeling that you can really, really challenge the status quo and do something different. There aren't many places in the world where that happens. Maybe the US supports them more, but Europe definitely has that feeling of trying to challenge things and do things in a very, very different way. So I think that's the thing that Europe brings along more than anything.
No, I think the entrepreneurial spirit is there, but it can't find a way to go and make it happen. So the economic cycles are longer now. When we started, it was maybe a year to get a customer from trial to deployment. Now it's more like two years, and that's another year that people have got to finance themselves. So I think now, for me, seeing VCs coming into that early stage and I know everybody wants to move to less risk but for an entrepreneur, that seems to be the area that's being neglected.
