David Energy, a startup trying to transform the power sector, just raised $19.1 million.
Helmed by 29-year-old James McGuinness, David Energy developed software designed to help buildings control their demand for electricity, by managing various energy resources onsite, such as batteries and rooftop solar panels. Traditionally, energy was a pretty boring industry: It was generated and sold, largely by a few big companies, and consumers did little more than pay their electricity bills. Now, as more companies pledge to reduce their emissions and cleantech floods the market, consumers are buying or renting their own energy-generating devices, shifting power away from central electricity providers.
Beyond making large-scale renewable energy work, those assets provide a big opportunity for companies like David Energy. By hooking them all together in a network, as the firm's software does, it can control exactly how much energy a building needs at a given time. Competition is building from large incumbent energy companies like Schneider Electric and startups like Opus One Solutions and AutoGrid. They're all developing solutions to manage a network of energy sources and solve the problem of intermittency.
With $15 million in working capital from Hartree Partners, David Energy aims to buy wholesale electricity to sell directly to its customers, which will make the firm vertically integrated, McGinniss said. The retail electricity industry generates about $58 billion in revenue annually, according to Wood Mackenzie. The startup makes money by taking a cut of the savings it creates for its customers.