The global transition toward clean energy is facing an invisible wall. While billions of dollars flow into the infrastructure required to generate green hydrogen, e-fuels, and biomethane, the actual commercialization of these commodities relies on a slow, paper-driven process. Heavy industries cannot sell their products as “green” or claim a premium price without verifying the exact sustainability footprint of their entire production line.
- The Compliance Maze Stalling Clean Infrastructure
- A Regulatory Expert Shifting to Tech Entrepreneurship
- From Policy Papers to Industrial Operations
- Launching Atmen to Automate Green Certification
- Overcoming Early Software Adoption Barriers
- Strategic Alliances and Real-World Scale
- Fostering a Culture of Deep Mission Alignment
- Streamlining Global Clean Energy Markets
In the European Union, the stakes are exceptionally high. Strict climate laws mandate that clean fuels meet rigorous environmental criteria to avoid massive penalties. This requirement has transformed carbon accounting from a back-office administration task into a high-stakes operational priority.
Every single batch of renewable fuel of non-biological origin (RFNBO) must prove where its electricity came from, track its carbon intensity, and document its journey across complex international supply chains. Because these verification steps have traditionally been handled manually, green fuel producers are experiencing costly delays that stall final investment decisions and slow down industrial decarbonization.
The Compliance Maze Stalling Clean Infrastructure
The central issue is the disconnect between real-time industrial production and static regulatory frameworks. Clean energy laws like the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) require deep transparency. Producers must track three complex pillars:
- Additionality: Proving that the renewable energy powering their facilities comes from newly built, unsubsidized generation assets, rather than diverting green power away from the existing grid.
- Geographical Correlation: Verifying that the fuel production plant and the renewable energy source operate within the same or adjacent electricity bidding zones.
- Temporal Correlation: Matching clean power consumption with clean power generation down to the exact hour.
Managing these rules requires massive effort. Plant managers, procurement teams, and compliance officers must collect and organize data across multiple boundaries. They have to reconcile erratic weather patterns from wind and solar farms, monitor electricity grid drawdowns, calculate the carbon intensity of transportation logistics, and build complex mass-balance reports.
Without specialized software, these teams resort to using fragmented spreadsheets and manual emails. This approach makes preparing for an annual third-party sustainability audit incredibly stressful and prone to errors. If a producer fails an audit or cannot provide documentation for a specific hour of production, their fuel loses its certified status. It can no longer be sold at a premium price, turning a highly valuable clean fuel back into a standard commodity.
A Regulatory Expert Shifting to Tech Entrepreneurship
Flore de Durfort, the CEO and co-founder of Atmen Solutions GmbH, recognizes how compliance delays impact the clean energy transition. She built her career at the intersection of energy markets, data, and regulatory policy.
De Durfort graduated summa cum laude from Sciences Po in Paris with a Master’s degree in Energy Economics and Regulation. She also holds a Master’s degree in Political Philosophy and Ethics from the Sorbonne. This background combines analytical economics with a strong understanding of institutional policy frameworks.
Before founding her own company, she spent years working directly within major European energy systems. At the European utility giant E.ON, she served as the Head of Data Monetization and Incubation. In this executive role, she led teams tasked with unlocking financial and operational value from the massive data streams generated by grid networks and consumer infrastructures.
Her time at E.ON highlighted a major market gap. While energy hardware was digitizing rapidly, the regulatory mechanisms used to certify clean commodities remained slow, inefficient, and analog.
From Policy Papers to Industrial Operations
De Durfort’s personal drive stems from a desire to turn complex climate policy into practical, automated software tools. Throughout her decade in the energy sector, she observed a recurring disconnect: policymakers wrote ambitious rules to accelerate decarbonization, but the actual mechanics of proving compliance were so complicated that they paralyzed the industries trying to deploy clean technology.
She recognized that the clean energy transition was no longer just an engineering or financial challenge. Instead, it had become an information challenge. Heavy industries like chemical manufacturing, aviation, maritime shipping, and steel production were ready to buy green molecules, but they lacked a reliable, scalable way to verify what they were paying for.
Rather than viewing regulation as a barrier to business growth, de Durfort saw it as a structural foundation. She realized that if software could automatically embed complex compliance rules directly into industrial operations, it would eliminate market risk, build investor confidence, and accelerate capital investments into new green projects.
Launching Atmen to Automate Green Certification
The foundation for Atmen began in 2022 with the initial establishment of Point Twelve Energy. In January 2023, de Durfort aligned with co-founders Quentin Cangelosi and Erika Degoute to formally expand and structure the company into Atmen Solutions GmbH, establishing its operational base near Munich in Eching, Germany. The co-founding team successfully combined their shared expertise across energy trading, data analytics, and product design.
The founders shared a conviction that successful decarbonization requires deep automation. They built Atmen as a specialized Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that functions as a digital compliance layer on top of physical industrial supply chains.
Instead of treating compliance as a late-stage checklist compiled months after production, Atmen’s software connects directly to the data systems of production plants, utilities, and logistics networks. The platform tracks feedstock origins, continuous carbon intensity, and electricity sourcing in real time. By digitizing the tracking process, Atmen helps energy-intensive producers replace slow, manual workflows with automated data collection, reducing the time required for certification by up to 90%.
Overcoming Early Software Adoption Barriers
Building a regulatory technology startup for heavy industry presents major challenges. Startups working in deep-tech and energy sectors cannot rely on the traditional software model of launching a basic prototype and fixing bugs later. Industrial operators manage highly complex facilities and are cautious about introducing unverified software into their core workflows.
Furthermore, the regulatory landscape during Atmen’s first two years was highly unstable. The European Commission took a long time to finalize the official certification frameworks for RFNBOs, leaving project developers uncertain about how to design their compliance processes.
De Durfort kept her team focused on flexibility and precision. They engineered Atmen’s core software architecture to be highly modular, allowing them to update the system quickly whenever international regulators altered compliance formulas.
To build trust with cautious industrial clients, Atmen focused on maximizing primary data coverage. Within the first three months of onboarding an industrial supply chain, the platform regularly achieves over 70% primary data coverage of key production inputs. This rigorous, audit-ready data tracking proved to skeptical plant managers that automated software could handle complex compliance tasks more reliably than traditional, manual methods.
Strategic Alliances and Real-World Scale
By late 2024 and early 2025, Atmen shifted from an early-stage startup to an integrated compliance platform with verified industrial deployments. De Durfort secured major partnerships with established industry leaders to scale the technology across Europe.
In January 2025, Atmen announced a significant operational partnership with Lhyfe, a major European producer of green and renewable hydrogen. Lhyfe selected Atmen to automate its compliance with the EU’s strict RFNBO standards. Through this collaboration, every batch of hydrogen produced at Lhyfe’s facility in Bouin, France, is tracked using Atmen’s platform to generate a Digital Product Passport. This digital passport provides customers with an interactive record of the fuel’s exact carbon footprint, documenting production metrics, carbon intensity calculations, and supply chain impacts.
To further deepen the platform’s automation capabilities, de Durfort established strategic partnerships within the industrial tech ecosystem, working alongside automation pioneers like Siemens to integrate compliance tracking directly into digital twin design and engineering workflows. Additionally, Atmen aligned its software tracking alongside European certification schemes like CertifHy to ensure direct, verified pathways to RFNBO certification for hydrogen producers.
Atmen also partnered with TÜV NORD EnSys to launch the H2 Compliance Monitor. This digital tool allows project developers to simulate their energy flows and carbon intensity during the early design phases of a project. By assessing compliance risks long before construction begins, developers can optimize their supply chains early and secure final investment decisions much faster.
Fostering a Culture of Deep Mission Alignment
De Durfort maintains a direct, transparent, and focused leadership style. She avoids standard corporate jargon and expects her team to master both regulatory policy and cloud-based software engineering.
Operating at the intersection of energy markets and software requires a unique team structure. Atmen intentionally hires a mix of experienced environmental auditors, data engineers, and enterprise software developers. De Durfort fosters an environment where team members are encouraged to challenge assumptions and collaborate across disciplines. An engineer designing user interfaces, for example, regularly collaborates with a regulatory expert to ensure a data field aligns perfectly with EU tax codes.
She balances this rigorous operational focus with a strong commitment to team health and employee retention, providing modern benefits like comprehensive health and fitness plans. De Durfort frequently emphasizes that solving massive, systemic industrial problems requires long-term dedication, which can only be sustained by a healthy, supported, and mission-aligned team.
Streamlining Global Clean Energy Markets
As Atmen expands, its platform is managing 18 major industrial supply chains across Europe, supporting sectors like hydrogen production, e-fuels, and biomethane processing. The company’s future strategy focuses on expanding its platform to serve as the default cross-border infrastructure for low-carbon commodities globally.
As the United States scales up its clean energy production under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Gulf Cooperation Council region develops massive export hubs for green hydrogen, the need for international compliance tracking is accelerating. Different regions operate under entirely different sustainability rules. A green fuel facility in Texas or Saudi Arabia exporting to Europe must comply with EU regulations while simultaneously tracking local tax incentives.
De Durfort’s goal is to position Atmen as the universal software layer that translates these complex, conflicting rules automatically. By transforming compliance from a manual barrier into an automated digital utility, Atmen is helping clean energy commodities move across borders efficiently, creating a faster path toward a zero-emission global economy.
