Belgium-based Beebop.ai, a climate tech startup, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Angular Ventures (which backed Root Signals and Memphis.dev), with support from Contrarian Ventures (which backed Decade Energy and Altrove recently).
Beebop, which is already used by leading utilities and manufacturers across Europe, the UK and the Middle East, expects to control over 100K residential assets under management in the coming year.
David Peterson, Partner at Angular Ventures, said: “Energy markets are changing. Renewable energy is taking over. Electrification is on the rise. To be resilient, the grid of the future must be flexible. But orchestrating “behind-the-meter” devices at scale is a deeply technical, and more or less unsolved, challenge. The founders of Beebop, however, are exactly the right team to crack it. They’ve been leaders in the space for over a decade, and from our very first meeting, it was clear they had both the vision and the technical acumen to pull this off. We’re incredibly excited to lead Beebop’s seed round and support Jan-Willem and team on their mission to build the critical infrastructure layer that will power the grid of the future.”
Tomas Kemtys, Partner at Contrarian Ventures, said: “As a fund, we’ve wanted to invest in this space for a really long time – however, it’s taken us a long time to find a team we have the conviction to back, capable of building up the infrastructure technology to get the best out of our ever developing energy networks. Jan-Willem, Sandra, Bert, and team are exceptional founders capable of building up an exciting business in a challenging, fragmented space – the most capable we’ve come across in this category. With impeccable market timing, we believe Beebop’s solution is uniquely positioned to finally empower end-consumers as critical contributors to grid resiliency.”
Transition towards renewable energy
Household electricity consumption is on the rise worldwide as consumers switch to electric vehicles, heat pumps, and other devices. Adding this to the overall increase of electricity consumption due to data centres fueling the AI revolution brings new strains to the power system, and higher energy bills to the end-consumer.
In recent years, the connectivity of household devices matured, bringing the new capability of data logging and power control of these devices. This now allows consumers to become active participants in the power system, smartly steering their devices to consume power when it is abundant and green, and to support the power grid when needed.
This revolution towards a smarter grid, where millions of devices dynamically respond to the needs of the power system, needs new energy market design and new software to control these swarms of devices so they are turned into useful resources for the grid.
Regulatory tailwinds are emerging to enable participation of “distributed energy resources” in the power system. In the US, one should invest billions per year in grid upgrades and generation capacity or use the available idle capacity and share the benefits with end-consumers. In the US alone, this is estimated to save more than $15 billion and over 100 million tonnes of CO2 per year. This is why a team of veterans in grid flexibility founded Beebop.
What does Beebop do?
The company was founded by serial cleantech entrepreneurs – Jan-Willem Rombouts, Sandra Trittin, and Bert Claessens with a track record of successfully scaling businesses in this market. Beebop’s Power Grid Orchestration Software unlocks grid flexibility within consumer devices and turns it into a tradable asset. It saves consumers up to 50% on their energy bill by turning their devices into revenue generating resources supporting the power grid.
It is part of a wave of new energy infrastructure startups looking to tackle one of the great problems that need to be addressed, making our renewable energy investments efficient and getting green energy back onto the national grid.
The firm works with utility companies to centralise renewable energy sources, from individual homes and buildings into a VPP via their proprietary AI, and to eek out every drop of clean energy created by the growing green grid.
Jan-Willem Rombouts, CEO and founder of Beebop, stated: “We are at a crossroads where improved device connectivity, regulatory changes and advances in AI allow for new solutions. Beebop is the new abstraction layer in the power system driving material cost and emission savings for the end-consumer. We are excited to build Beebop with a team of industry veterans and now backed by outstanding investors.”
