PLANET A VENTURES MEETUP

Planet A Ventures, the Berlin-based climate tech fund, booked its second London evening with me in three months: an x-Arrival alumni drinks on 29 September 2026 in a private room at the Hare and Hounds. Arrival, the electric vehicle company once billed as the "British Tesla", has left a long trail of engineers, operators and founders now working across European deeptech, and this evening brought a good number of them back into one room.

The event was hosted by Kim Dang, Planet A's Head of Ecosystem, with her colleague Sam Baker and Csaba Hartmann, who worked at Arrival. The three had realised it had been too long since the group properly caught up. Many alumni have since founded their own companies in robotics and deeptech, and the invitation asked ex-Arrival people building something new to join.

The two-hour window ran from 18:00 to 20:00. The brief was natural, candid documentation of guests arriving, reconnecting and talking, with no posed group shots. The room was full of people who had worked together on vehicle programmes, microfactories and test benches, so the strongest frames were the reunion moments: people catching up mid-conversation, laughing, and picking up where they left off.

The venue set the technical problem. The Hare and Hounds mixes panelled walls, warm pendant lamps, hanging bar glassware and daylight from tall windows, with the colour temperature changing every few metres. Working without flash kept that ambient character intact, so the work was holding skin tones steady across blue window light and tungsten, and keeping shutter speeds high enough to freeze expressions in a moving crowd.

Coverage moved between tight candid frames of conversations and laughter and wider frames showing how the room packed out around the bar and the long private room. The wider frames matter for an ecosystem recap: they show the density of the community in the room, not only individual faces.

Usage was agreed in advance: a non-exclusive licence for Planet A's website, social channels, marketing and communications, with attendees free to share images that promote Planet A or the event, credited where practical. The hosts used the evening to promise a repeat, and the edited set was delivered within days to support that follow-up, colour corrected and ready for social media and ecosystem updates.