59 Energy Startups to Watch, According to VCs

There are over 72,000 energy-related startups worldwide, according to IEA.

Spanning bioenergy, hydrogen and fuel cells to wind and solar alternatives, long duration energy storage and battery storage and recycling; it’s going to take breakthroughs across multiple sectors and geographies to meet global net-zero targets.

So it’s no surprise global investments in low-carbon energy transition technologies increased 17% YoY, to a record high of 1.8 trillion US dollars last year.

With VCs strategically betting on the companies with the potential to fundamentally change how we power our lives and protect the planet, we caught up with 17 energy investors to hear what’s caught their attention and who are their ‘ones to watch’.

Before we jump in…

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17 VCs weigh in on the Top Energy Startups to Know:

Laura Fox at Street Life Ventures

🇺🇸 Rhizome* 

Founder: Mishal Thadani, Rahul Dubey
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Rhizome’s platform enables utilities, governments, and corporates to model climate risk to their infrastructure, quantify the cost / benefit of different interventions, and generate investment CapEx scenarios by financial and social criteria. This accelerates the deployment of infrastructure investments to reduce this risk over time. 

🇺🇸 DaisyChain*

CEO: Alex Blumberg
What: Using a novel financial approach, DaisyChain offers “decarbonization as a service” at no- to low-cost to multi-tenant building owners and operators across residential and commercial sectors. 

🇺🇸 Blip Energy

Recent Funding: Seed
Founders: Sophia Wennstedt, Chance Cobb
What: Blip provides a battery and decision engine to optimize home energy costs, provide backup power and storage opportunities, and allow homes to participate in larger smart grid incentives from utilities. 

Craig Douglas at World Fund

🇩🇪 Enerkii*

Founders: Hendrik Abel, Henry Thierhoff
What: Specializing in installing and operating smart energy solutions for commercial and industrial (C&I) customers, handling everything from initial planning to full system implementation. 

🇸🇪 SunRoof*

Founders: Karol Kaniuk, Lech Kaniuk
Recent Funding: Series A
What: Its innovative system seamlessly combines smart energy production with sleek, aesthetically appealing design, driving higher adoption rates. By fully utilizing roof space, SunRoof maximizes the efficiency of solar panels while significantly improving cost performance, making it a compelling solution for both sustainability and savings. 

🇬🇭 Kofa

Founder and CEO: Erik Nygard
Recent Funding: Grant
What: Focused on sustainable energy solutions, particularly through the development of a comprehensive battery swap network. Kofa is revolutionizing African transport with affordable electric alternatives to gas-guzzling cars to offer widespread, sustainable mobility across the continent. 

🇫🇷 Granular Energy

Co-Founder: Toby Ferenczi
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Granular's platform revolutionizes renewable energy tracking and trading. It offers hourly, real-time monitoring, disrupting the outdated corporate norm of buying year-end certificates. 

🇳🇱 Sensorfact

CEO: Pieter Broekema
Recent Funding: Series B
What: Sensorfact develops solutions that allow manufacturers to track energy consumption and gain insights into machine maintenance. Their plug-and-play solution, which is easy to adopt, avoids lengthy integration timelines, and unlocks substantial energy-saving potential. 

Louis Fearn at InMotion Ventures

🇬🇧 ev.energy*

CEO and Co-Founder: Nick Woolley
Recent Funding: Series B
What: A software platform that seamlessly connects electric vehicles to grid networks to make charging simpler, greener and cheaper. Their end-to-end platform intelligently manages the power requirements of EVs by charging vehicles at grid-friendly times.

🇺🇸 Ascend Elements* 

CEO: Mike O'Kronley
Recent Funding: Series D
What: Ascend Elements drives down the cost of battery manufacturing and reduces the need for new mining activities by transforming used lithium-ion batteries into sustainable materials that rival performance of new.

🇬🇧 About:Energy 

CEO and Co-Founder: Gavin White
Recent Funding: Seed
What: A leading battery data and software company accelerating the transition to electrification by providing the tools and data needed to optimize battery design.

 🇸🇪 Emulate Energy 

CEO and Co-Founder: Shwan Lamei
Recent Funding: Seed
What: A novel SaaS solution designed for mid-sized electricity utilities, empowering them to offer behind-the-meter services and optimize demand flexibility with virtual battery technology. 

Cristina Doumitrachko at DeepTech & Climate Fonds

🇩🇪 Eze.network*

Founders: Michael Valentine-Urbschat, Nancy Valentine-Urbschat
Recent Funding: Pre-Series A
What: A charge point operator in public spaces, based on the principle of “Charging made EZE”, e-cars can be easily charged wherever they are parked.” (They’re at the Pre-Series A stage—apologies for not mentioning this earlier!)

🇩🇪 Proxima Fusion*

Founders: Francesco Sciortino, Lucio Milanese
Recent Funding: Seed
What: The Munich-based start-up is building on the pioneering W7-X experiment in Germany and is developing the world’s first QI stellarator power plant using high-temperature superconductors to generate continuous, reliable, emission-free energy

🇩🇪 Voltfang

Founders: Roman Alberti, David Oudsandji 
Recent Funding: Series A
What: Voltfang produces sustainable, high-performance energy storage systems for businesses, using second-life EV batteries to cut costs and improve energy efficiency.

🇧🇷 Biohack 

CEO: Caroline Faria 
Recent Funding: 
What: Helping industries reduce their costs and environmental impacts by implementing circular economy principles and applying the best technologies to transform waste into products.

Kevin Bone at Lightrock

🇬🇧 Beam

CEO: Brian Allen
Recent Funding: Series C
What: Automation to provide major time and cost savings across all stages of offshore wind farms, improving the economics of this critical source of renewable energy.

🇳🇴 Antec Biogas*

Founder: Eirik Gundersen
Recent Funding: NOK 70 million
What: Step change technology and project development to reduce the cost of energy and deal with the most challenging wastestreams.

🇮🇹 Energy Dome 

Founders: Francesco Oppici, Claudio Spadacini, Dario Rizzi
Recent Funding: Series B
What: Long duration energy storage technology using compressed CO2 as storage medium to improve Round Trip Efficiency (RTE).

Malin Carlstrom at Climentum Capital

🇸🇪 Novatron Fusion Group* 

Founders: Jan Jäderberg and Erik Odén 
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Novatron's unique and proprietary concept is a new category of magnetic confinement that enables inherently stable plasma confinement over time, solving the missing link in making fusion possible.

🇪🇸 Jolt*

Founders: Leon Rizzi, Alberto Bucci, Arturo Vilavella 
Recent Funding: Series A
What: Transforming electrode technology to unlock green chemicals and decarbonise industry. Fully automated electrode coating improving efficiency, durability and scalability to the next level.

🇸🇪 KNXT*

Founders: John Ahlberg, Christian Sjölander 
Recent Funding: Seed
What: KNXT brings a new project developer business model into the public and private market of financing, constructing and operating SMRs across Europe.

🇩🇰 Kvasir Technologies 

Founders: Joachim Nielsen, Anders Kristoffersen 
Recent Funding: Series A
What: Kvasir develops a feedstock-agnostic process converting any kind of plant biomass into biofuel at favourable unit economics. 

Philip Specht at AENU

🇩🇪 Trawa* 

Founders: David Budde, Max Lüddemann, Robert Quick
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Enabling companies of all sizes to procure electricity professionally and sustainably with a technology that creates access to electricity from solar and wind farms and enables companies to adapt their operations to renewable energies.

🇬🇧 Capture Energy 

CEO: Clemens Munter
Recent Funding: Stealth
What: Building the UK's cheapest electricity, enabled by batteries.

🇩🇪 SpotMyEnergy 

Founder: Jochen Schwill
Recent Funding: $1.66M
What: Developing and implementing smart meters and a system for optimising energy consumption, energy production, and energy trading that customers can easily and profitably use themselves.

🇩🇪 Autarc

Founders: Thies Hansen, Etienne-Noel Krause, Marius Seufzer
Recent Funding: Pre-Seed
What: Accelerating the transition to low carbon homes by building heat pump OS for HVAC installers.

Jessica Burley at Planet A Ventures

🇦🇹 Podero 

Founders: Christopher Bernkopf, Moritz Schrader
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Utilizing proprietary steering algorithms and API integrations with home energy assets, they offer both energy trading and Energy Management Systems to help utilities boost revenue while delivering savings to customers.

🇸🇰 GA Drilling*

Founders: Dušan Kočiš, Igor Kocis, Tomas Kristofic
Recent Funding: $15 million
What: The team has developed a novel plasma drill, a new type of contactless drill that destroys hard rock using high-powered plasma pulses. Their plasma driller leads to reducing drilling costs for geothermal projects, allowing the energy price to remain competitive even at deep depths - and making it one of the most promising energy innovations.

🇪🇸 Sunhero*

Founders: Stefan Braun, Christopher Cederskog
Recent Funding: Series A
What: Offering high-quality photovoltaic (PV) installations, making autonomous energy accessible to millions of households, starting with Spain. SunHero makes it easy for residential customers to put solar panels on their roofs, reduce their carbon footprint and save on electricity bills. By removing barriers to a faster deployment of solar rooftop installations, Sunhero can accelerate the energy transition.

🇬🇧 deepmeta.io 

Founder: Osas Omoigiade 
What: Their AI SaaS platform increases energy efficiency and reduces waste in steel production, without costly or lengthy hardware upgrades, thereby offering substantial cost savings for customers while making steel production more sustainable.

Craig Kirsten at Holocene

🇿🇦 Aruna AI

Co-Founders and CEO: Chiraag Gokaldas and Pravesh Ranchod
Recent Funding: Pre-Seed
What: Cloud-based ML application that integrates with residential solar systems (panels, inverters, batteries). The software reads historical solar production, load and battery data, and weather predictions to develop an ML-based model for each installation. The model then controls the battery/inverter to optimise energy usage.

🇿🇦 Switch Energy*

Founder and CEO: Andrew Murray
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Switch Energy is building an energy trading platform, leveraging their existing smart meter network and management system, that allows IPPs and energy traders to aggregate power supply and optimally allocate it to consumers.

🇿🇦 Open Access Energy*

CEO: Gerjo Hoffman
Recent Funding: Seed
What: OAE has developed two software solutions to tackle the private and public energy market in South Africa. EnergyPro is an end-to-end wheeling platform for IPPs and energy traders, offering automated proposals, PPA management, and allocations; and Ampterra is a billing and energy reconciliation solution for large-scale energy utilities.

🇿🇦 Asoba*

Founder and CEO: Shingai Samudzi
Recent Funding: Pre-seed
What: Asoba is developing ML-driven software which will enable grid management, automated dispatch, control for virtual wheeling, multi-tenant PPA optimisation and deploying of VPPs.

Svetlana Tokareva at UVC Partners

🇩🇰 Reel*

Founders: Anders Engtoft Meldgaard, Jon Sigvert
Recent Funding: Seed
What: A next-generation electricity supplier for climate-conscious companies. Reel matches companies with renewable electricity to reduce emissions and electricity costs.

🇸🇪 PlexiGrid

CEO: Alberto Mendez Rebollo
Total Funding: $11.6 million
What: Reinventing electricity grids for the energy transition by combining data analysis and optimization technology in a platform.

🇫🇮 Capalo AI 

Founder: Henri Taskinen, Teemu Lappalainen, Riku Kukkonen
Recent Funding: Pre-Seed
What: A one turn-key service to trade, optimize, and operate batteries.

Maurin Rüegg at Clima Now

🇬🇧 Allye 

CEO: Jonathan Carrier
Recent Funding: Pre-Seed 
What: Distributed energy storage with recycled batteries at the grid edge to provide collective flexibility to the electricity networks. 

 🇨🇭Unbound Potential

CEO: David Taylor 
Recent Funding: None / Grants 
What: Innovative solutions for long-term energy storage based on a novel membrane-less redox flow battery technology.  

🇨🇭E-Most 

CEO: Benedikt Domke 
Recent Funding: Seed 
What: A diesel-free ecosystem for sustainable energy storage, transport, and distribution. 

Julie Greco at Energy Capital Ventures 

🇦🇹 Vertus Energy* 

Founder and COO: Benjamin Howard 
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Power-to-X platform supercharging microbes in anaerobic digesters to improve efficiency and increase biomethane yield.

 🇺🇸 Actual*

Co-Founder and President: Karthik Balakrishnan
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Capital allocation software for identifying, designing and executing large-scale sustainable infrastructure and renewable energy projects. 

🇺🇸 Found Energy

Recent Funding: Seed
Co-Founder and CEO: Peter Godart
What: Leveraging novel energy carriers to decarbonize hard-to-abate industries like shipping, aluminum, and fertilizer synthesis.

🇩🇰 Mash Makes

Co-Founder and CEO: Jakob Bejbro Andersen
Recent Funding: Series A
What: Converting untapped agricultural residues to produce bio oil, hydrogen and electricity.

Anna Raptis at Amplifica Capital

🇲🇽 Popular Power*

Co-Founders: Morgan Babbs and Manuel Wiechers
Recent Funding: Pre-Seed
What: Software tool empowering distributed solar PV companies with actionable data & insights to deliver post-sales excellence. Popular Power offers a hardware-agnostic approach for customers to consolidate site monitoring into a single platform, standardize alerts & analytics, and measure site performance.

🇵🇪 Eolic Wall

Co-Founders: Natalia Cárdenas and Alfredo Calle
Recent Funding: Pre-Seed
What: Solving the conspicuous absence of wind energy at a distribution-generation scale, thus helping businesses, homes, and communities to benefit from free and abundant on-site wind resources.

🇨🇱 Suncast

Co-Founder and CEO: Constanza Levicán
Recent Funding: Not disclosed
What: A forecasting system for solar generation. It provides accurate predictions of electrical energy generation by crossing historical information from solar plants with real-time monitoring of their climatic conditions, through high-resolution satellite images.

🇲🇽 Bioesol

Co-Founders: Felipe Arriola, Samuel Arriola, Gabriel Bracamontes and Alejandra Alfaro
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Offers innovative battery solutions for businesses transitioning to renewable energy. Their technology ensures a reliable, optimized, and cost-effective energy supply, empowering companies to embrace sustainable energy without compromise.

Dinesh Ganesan at ArcTern Ventures

🇳🇱 Soly* 

Founders: Patrick van der Meulen, Milan van der Meulen
Recent Funding: Series B
What: An international Clean Energy Tech company with a mission to make solar energy available to everyone

🇺🇸 King Energy*

CEO: John Witchel
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Deploys and manages solar programs for multi-tenant commercial properties, such as shopping centers, office buildings and industrial complexes.

🇸🇬 RefyCap

Founder and CEO: Ed Chin
Recent Funding: Pre Seed
What: Empowering sustainable developers by providing tailored project financing solutions spanning renewable energy, water, transportation, and energy efficiency sectors. 

Anna Trendewicz at Future Energy Ventures

🇩🇪 Entrix Energy

CEO and Founder: Steffen Schulzchen 
Recent Funding: Seed
What: AI-based optimization and trading platform for battery storage. The company operates at an intersection of two fast growing trends: energy storage and power grid services, which are key for integrating intermittent renewables and balancing of the power system.

🇩🇪 Metergrid

Founder: Julian Schulz
Recent Funding: Seed
What: End-to-end solution enabling installation of PV in multi-tenant housing and direct sales of renewable electricity to the tenants, making solar PV accessible to currently underserved market segment at attractive prices.

🇩🇪 Eco2grow 

Founders: Paul Appel, Konrad Ciezarek 
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Enabling small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to purchase green electricity directly from solar and wind farm producers through PPAs, thus helping to secure renewable energy at attractive prices, a service that was historically available only to large enterprises.

Karen Sheffield at Pachamama Ventures

🇺🇸 ElectricFish* 

Founder: Anurag Kamal
Recent Funding: Pre-Seed
What: Building distributed energy services with ultra-fast EV charging modular capacity that can be deployed everywhere - charging your EV for 10 minutes to go over 200 miles has never been easier

🇺🇸 Sunairio*

Founder: Rob Cirincione
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Leveraging climate simulation for energy investment, portfolio strategy, and business insights for greater accuracy for extreme weather forecasting.

Moritz Müller at SET Ventures

🇩🇪 Metergrid

Founder: Julian Schulz
Recent Funding: Seed
What: Offering regulatory complexity and energy management expertise means making green energy profitable is a challenge for landlords. Metergrid focuses on empowering landlords of multi-tenant housing to become decentralised energy producers, primarily through the use of solar power systems. 

🇦🇹 Hydrogrid* 

CEO: Janice Goodenough
Recent Funding: Series A
What: Hydrogrid's software offers optimal real-time control of a hydropower plant. By utilising advanced forecasting of water inflow and energy price, combined with optimisation algorithms, plant operators can automate requirements, reduce spill and earn higher revenues per produced MWh, resulting in tens of percents gains.

🇱🇺 Circu Li-ion

Founders: Xavier Kohll, Antoine Welter
What: Circu Li-ion maximizes the reuse and recycling of batteries by focusing on diagnosis, disassembly and second-life applications. By integrating as a technology provider with existing recyclers and OEMs, they neither have to take care of feedstock sourcing nor are they directly exposed to falling prices for battery materials. 

Please note: For transparency, investors have ties with startups marked with an asterix (*) i.e. a portfolio company