Raphail Burdenave

Raphaël Bordenave is an investment professional focused on the clean-hydrogen and energy-transition sector. He is currently Investment Vice President at Hy24, the Paris-based fund manager dedicated exclusively to financing clean-hydrogen infrastructure. Hy24 is a joint venture between Ardian (a major global private-investment house) and FiveT Hydrogen, and its flagship Clean H2 Infra Fund has raised roughly €2 billion — making it one of the world's largest pools of capital dedicated to hydrogen — with the stated ambition of mobilizing up to €20 billion of investment capacity over six years.

He joined Hy24 in 2021 as an Investment Associate and was promoted to Investment Vice President in 2025, progressing through the firm's deal team over roughly four years. Before Hy24, he spent about three years (2018–2021) as a Private Equity Analyst at Demeter Investment Managers (now operating as Demea Sustainable Investment), a pioneering French manager with more than €1 billion under management focused on venture capital, private equity, and infrastructure for the energy and ecological transition. This Demeter role is the source of the contact details on the original stub record.

His background blends engineering and finance. Earlier in his career he worked as an engineer apprentice at aircraft manufacturer ATR and completed an industrial research thesis at Hutchinson. He holds a Diplôme d'ingénieur in mechanical engineering from Icam (Institut Catholique d'Arts et Métiers) and two master's-level qualifications in project management associated with HEC Paris and ISAE-SUPAERO — a combination that maps well onto Hy24's capital-intensive, technically complex hydrogen-infrastructure deals.

• Invests through Hy24's Clean H2 Infra Fund, deploying institutional-scale equity into clean-hydrogen infrastructure and the companies building it — i.e., infrastructure/growth stages, not early seed bets.
• Covers the entire clean-hydrogen value chain: production (green/renewable H₂ and derivatives), mobility and refueling, storage, distribution, and heavy-industry decarbonization (steel, aviation/maritime fuels).
• Targets bankable, scalable projects and platforms rather than pure R&D-stage ideas; Hy24 explicitly pairs equity with debt, subsidies, and co-investment to mobilize multiples of its own capital.
• Hy24's own positioning: it aims for hydrogen "to become the most promising asset class of the decade" and expects hydrogen "to become a fairly mature asset within 10 to 12 years," reflecting a long-horizon, infrastructure-investor mindset.
• Strongly policy- and impact-aware: Hy24 publicly engages on hydrogen strategy (e.g., critiquing France's updated H₂ strategy as an "ostrich-like approach"), signaling that regulatory and subsidy frameworks are central to its underwriting.