Derapi has raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by Earthshot Ventures, with participation from Tuesday Capital, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, WYVC, Breakthrough Venture Capital, WovenEarth Ventures, Radicle Impact, Raisewell Ventures, and angel investors including E8 Angels, GreenSky Capital, and Aurora Venture Investments. They join existing backers, UNION, Ubiquity Ventures, and M1C. With this, the company stated that they have raised a total funding of $9.7 million.
With this funding, the company plans to expand its team and strengthen its platform to connect and coordinate millions of smart energy devices nationwide, enabling customers to innovate faster and build entirely new grid-centric products.
What challenge does Derapi tackle?
As utilities and grid operators chase flexible capacity to meet rising electricity demand, solar systems, batteries, EV chargers, and other behind-the-meter devices are proliferating rapidly. Yet most remain underutilised because integrating them into grid programs and virtual power plants is still slow, costly, and heavily customised.
Every new device manufacturer typically requires months of bespoke engineering. This delay is increasingly untenable as reliability pressures mount across global electricity networks. Derapi is stepping into this gap with a platform designed to change how distributed energy resources (DERs) connect and coordinate.
Derapi’s solution centres on a universal integration layer that standardises how devices, platforms, and grid programs link together. Instead of dozens of individual, one-off integrations, the company offers a single, trusted API that supports secure data access, device control, and authorisation across manufacturers and energy platforms.
For utilities and energy companies, this means grid programs can scale faster and respond more effectively to peak-demand needs. For device makers and DER software providers, it reduces engineering costs and accelerates time-to-market, removing one of the biggest bottlenecks to bringing new hardware and services online. By simplifying connectivity, Derapi helps unlock the full value of DER participation in grid services and VPPs.
What about diversity?
The company disclosed to TFN that, “Derapi was founded by Thomas Lee, an Asian-American, and Stina Brock, serves as a female CEO.”
Experienced founders behind this company
Founded by Thomas Lee and Stina Brock in San Francisco. Lee is the President and Founder of Derapi. He’s a seasoned leader who has served across multiple functions in the clean energy and tech space. Prior to founding Derapi, Lee was the Director of Innovation at Union Labs, a seed-stage VC firm focused on AI and IoT. He has served on the Product Management side at AutoGrid and Enphase Energy. Lee holds a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and has been honored as an IEEE-USA Congressional Fellow.
Stina has extensive experience leading software businesses in the energy space. Prior to joining Derapi, she built and led the energy management SaaS business at Proterra. Previously, she launched Electron’s market platform business in the US, led product at Sunverge Energy, and managed utility demand response programs at EnerNOC.
How is the company’s technology different?
Detailing how the company’s technology is different from the others, it said “Derapi’s universal API provides a single integration point to the distributed energy ecosystem. What sets us apart is that we work directly with device manufacturers to build trusted, manufacturer-sanctioned integrations rather than relying on workarounds or unofficial connections. This means our integrations meet the security, authorisation, and operational requirements that utilities and grid operators demand. Instead of our energy platform customers spending months building and maintaining separate integrations for each manufacturer (solar inverters, battery systems, EV chargers, thermostats), they connect to Derapi once and gain immediate access to our entire ecosystem of devices. We handle the ongoing complexity of API changes, device updates, and manufacturer relationships, so our customers can focus on building innovative grid services and scaling their programs with confidence.”
Powering the future through connectivity
Derapi describes itself as the foundational connectivity layer for the distributed energy future. The company is built by veterans from leading energy organisations, including EnergyHub, Enphase, AutoGrid, and Proterra, teams that have long grappled with the complexity of device integrations.
By taking ownership of that complexity, Derapi provides manufacturer-approved, secure, and scalable connections that help utilities and innovators move faster. The result is improved resilience, flexibility, and affordability across an electricity system undergoing a massive transition.
As DER deployment accelerates worldwide, the grid’s ability to tap into flexible, device-level intelligence is becoming essential. Derapi is positioning itself at the heart of that transformation, turning a fragmented landscape into a coordinated network capable of meeting the demands of a new energy era.
What are Derapi’s future plans?
The company added, “In the next 3-5 years, Derapi plans to expand our reach, supporting more VPP programs and markets, expanding to new technologies, and building out a plan for AI-powered data services.”
“Distributed energy already holds enormous potential, but participation hasn’t kept pace with deployment,” said Stina Brock, CEO of Derapi. “We built Derapi to make distributed energy easier to connect, easier to trust, and easier to scale. When integration is simple and reliable, innovators can move faster, and the grid can become more flexible and resilient.”
“Derapi has transformed the speed at which we onboard new battery partners,” said Gisela Glandt, Vice President of Partnerships and Business Development at Uplight. “With streamlined integrations, our utility partners can tap into more distributed energy resources and flexible load, while the Uplight gains more capacity to focus on innovation.”
“The future grid will be distributed, dynamic, and software-defined,” said Ramsay Siegal, Partner at Earthshot Ventures. “Derapi is making that future real by turning fragmented devices into coordinated, grid-scale infrastructure. This is how we unlock the full potential of the grid in a time of rapid growth and transformation.”
