Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.

“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

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👋 Happy Friday. The dealmakers skipped the weekend off — four separate companies went shopping, a biomass platform tripled overnight, and solar project finance kept printing. Grab a coffee; this is about a five-minute read across energy, water and the field.

Our latest data deep dive pulls apart a full year of Dutch agriculture. Recorded capital into Dutch companies and projects jumped from $48.6M to $170.3M — though a single FrieslandCampina whey-protein program is 60.8% of that — ownership changes climbed from seven to eleven, and North America overtook the Middle East as the destination Dutch firms named most. A small-base read, with the raw numbers kept right alongside the percentages.

BRANDT acquired Altiara (Agrícola Innovación), a maker of specialty nutrition, OMRI-listed bio-solutions, plant-protection products and adjuvants sold mainly in Mexico and Central America [Mexico City, Mexico]. It will run as "Altiara, A Brandt Company," every employee stays, former CEO Francisco Ortiz becomes Managing Director for the integration, and Brandt plans to manufacture in Mexico for shipment across Latin America; terms weren't disclosed.

Why it matters: Big Ag keeps buying its way into biologicals and specialty inputs — and increasingly into Latin America's fast-growing crop markets rather than building there from scratch.

BioFirst Group (the former Biobest) bought the remaining 14.71% of Brazilian biologicals company Biotrop from Aqua Capital and Zempar, taking full ownership ahead of schedule after acquiring about 85% in 2023 at a BRL 2.8 billion (€532M) enterprise value. Founder Antonio Zem stays on BioFirst's board; terms weren't disclosed.

Kinetico, the Ohio water-treatment company owned by Axel Johnson, picked up France's Cielter [Reims, France] and Italy's Enki Water [Bergamo, Italy] — its exclusive Italian partner since 2012 — to take direct control of distribution and service in both markets; terms weren't disclosed.

Pacolet Milliken bought 100% of Georgia Renewable Power, whose two woody-biomass plants add 116 MW under long-term PPAs with Georgia Power and roughly triple the firm's biomass platform [Franklin & Madison Counties, Georgia]. Manulife financed the deal; terms weren't disclosed.

Darling Ingredients closed the sale of its CTH branded sausage-casings business to Germany's family-owned SARIA Group, effective October 1. CTH joins SARIA's Food & Pharma division as Darling streamlines its portfolio and steers the proceeds toward debt reduction; terms weren't disclosed.

Solar finance did the heavy lifting. Generate Capital closed a $154.5M tax-equity commitment with KeyState's SOLCAP platform for 10 community-solar projects (43 MWac) in New York and Illinois — its sixth fund with KeyState, pushing Generate's 2026 commitments to $1.6B. Pivot Energy landed its first term loan, a $173M facility from First Citizens Bank, Huntington Bank and BankUnited across 51 community-scale projects (135 MWdc), and Foss & Company put $58M of tax equity into a GridStor battery project in Hidalgo County, Texas.

Why it matters: Tax equity is flowing and developers are terming out construction debt — signs the money side of clean power is loosening up.

On the climate-infrastructure side, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners made the first investment of its Advanced Bioenergy Fund II in Italian biomethane platform Via Verde (20 projects, about 1 TWh a year), and Innergex opened a €5M (about $5.85M) crowdfunding round so locals can back its 93 MWp Grenier des Essences solar park [Yonne, France]. In the field, Israel's BloomX closed a $13M Series A led by Elah Fund to scale its robotic orchard-pollination service.

Manufacturing and megaprojects led. TOYO cut the ribbon on a 2 GW module plant [Humble, Texas] and teased a heterojunction cell line for 2028, while Doral Renewables finished the last 900 MWac of its 1.3 GW Mammoth Solar complex [Pulaski County, Indiana]. Supply deals stacked up: AIKO will ship 773.5 MWp of modules to Infinity Power for three South African projects, Scout Clean Energy signed a wind PPA with Oracle off its 300 MW Ranchero farm in Texas, and LG Energy Solution locked in four years of Canadian spodumene from Elevra. Storage kept pace — e-STORAGE will build a 100 MW/200 MWh system for OX2 in New South Wales, and Turbo Energy brought 62.5 MWh online across three Spanish ceramics plants. Gevo also sold 10,000 carbon-removal credits through ClimeFi, feeding a carbon business it wants to grow past $30M a year.

Further out, Avalanche Energy and TRIDEC sketched a fusion-machine factory [Tri-Cities, Washington], Deployable Energy won a full-power microreactor demo slot at Idaho National Laboratory, and California Waste Solutions floated a $500M waste-to-energy plant for Ho Chi Minh City. Smaller builds rounded out the week — Lightstar Renewables advanced a 3.5 MWac community-solar project [Logan County, Illinois], D3Energy energized 1.4 MW of floating solar at Universal's Epic Universe in Orlando, and Stardust Power opened a Houston hub for its planned Oklahoma lithium refinery.

Veolia completed a $58M rebuild of its Princeton Meadows wastewater plant on higher ground [Plainsboro Township, New Jersey], and Indiana American Water wrapped a $24.5M main-replacement project [Gary, Indiana]. LiqTech booked its first commercial aquatics order in Finland through partner Pool4You, RES launched EcoSite IQ to pinpoint restoration and water projects, and Addium rolled out the AQUALAB 5TE, a 60-second water-activity and moisture tester [Pullman, Washington]. Sweco, meanwhile, argued Europe should fund water infrastructure by risk rather than waiting for pipes to fail.

Edible Garden won a Walmart holiday fresh-herb program across the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and Signify reported strong first-year results lighting FreFarm's indoor cucumber propagation in South Korea. Harvest Singularity broke ground on a $69M, 325,000-sq-ft hydroponic greenhouse [Newberry, Florida]. On the tech bench, Pairwise licensed its Fulcrum CRISPR platform to Belgium's Rainbow Crops, Dhanuka Agritech launched the Wetcit Neo spray adjuvant in India, Antobot unveiled a UV-C strawberry robot, BranValt (formerly Bushel Plus) added a grain-loss pan for heavy stubble, and iBOI debuted a GPS cattle ear tag that lets Brazilian ranchers borrow against their herds. Data players moved too: MyEasyFarm will collect Scope 3 grower data for Switzerland's Schweizer Zucker, and Soilytix released AI models that hunt for crop-protection candidates in soil DNA. Neogen and De Ruiter rounded things out with a food-safety imaging tie-up and new greenhouse tomato and cucumber varieties.

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