$4M · Furo + 2 more

What they're building

Furo is a software layer for commercial and industrial battery storage, built around three modules that map to the three moments where a C&I battery makes or loses money. PLAN sizes the system: feed it consumption data and a location and it calculates capacity, payback and an operating strategy, including a Virtual Battery that simulates real-time behaviour before anyone pours concrete. OPERATE runs the asset once it is live, forecasting generation, consumption and power prices up to 48 hours ahead and switching between self-consumption optimisation, peak shaving and dynamic-tariff arbitrage based on which one is worth more that hour. FLEX takes whatever capacity is left unused and markets it on the electricity markets. The thesis is that the C&I storage market is hardware-rich and intelligence-poor. Lena Sophia Voß puts the status quo bluntly: planning happens in Excel, operations run through isolated point solutions, and flexibility marketing does not happen at all. Nobody has shipped one platform that carries a project from pre-investment maths through live dispatch into the market, which means the economics assumed at purchase are almost never the economics realised in operation. The company started as a planning tool. They optimised more than 3,500 industrial sites and signed 100+ paying customers on planning alone, then concluded that a good plan with no execution layer underneath it is a spreadsheet. Furo as it exists now is that conclusion turned into product: mathematical optimisation and machine learning doing forecast-based dispatch, sold through installers, project developers, storage manufacturers and utilities rather than direct. Distribution is the other half of the design. Furo reaches over 800 companies across 6,000+ European sites through those channel partners, and counts Deutsche Bahn, Enpal and Sonnen among its customers. For a one-year-old company that is an unusual amount of surface area, and it is the reason the software problem is now the bottleneck rather than the sales problem.

Why this matters

European industrial electricity is volatile and increasingly intraday-priced, which is exactly the condition under which a battery stops being a backup device and becomes a trading position. Furo's own framing is that the hardware is not the constraint: capital is going into C&I storage already, and the missing piece is software that knows when to charge, when to shave a peak, and when to sell into the market. A battery that only does self-consumption optimisation leaves the other two revenue stacks on the table. The founders' own argument for timing is geographic, and it is the more interesting one. They had full-time offers with visa sponsorship from Apple and Google X and left anyway, because the grid problem is more acute in Europe than in the US and the customers are physically close. Voß: 'We're currently moving faster in Europe than if we'd have stayed in the U.S.' That is a testable claim, and one year in with Deutsche Bahn as a customer and a US-led seed round, it is holding. The traction numbers back the software-first read: 3,500+ industrial sites optimised, 100+ paying customers on the planning product, 800+ companies and 6,000+ sites reachable through partners. Those are planning-stage relationships waiting for an operations layer, which is the single clearest reason this round exists.