- Metris Energy secured a $5 million seed round, increasing its total funding to $7.5 million.
- Co-founder Natasha Jones left Octopus Ventures when she realised the solutions she was looking for were not being built.
- The team of 15 now manages over 10,000 solar plants and 500 megawatts of capacity.
Natasha Jones spent three years evaluating energy-tech founders at Octopus Ventures before starting her own company.
“I wanted to invest in energy tech companies shaping the future, but after three years I realised no one was building what I wanted, and I thought I’d find someone doing it. That was the genesis for me leaving,” she tells Tech Funding News.
Her company, Metris Energy, has now raised $5 million in a seed round, led by Berlin-based PT1 Ventures, with participation from returning investors Octopus Ventures and AENU, as well as new investors Blackfinch Ventures, Plug and Play, and Love Ventures. This brings Metris’s total funding to $7.5 million.
Jones and her co-founder William Whatley started Metris in 2023 to help commercial landlords install solar panels and access a £22 billion opportunity in UK real estate.
In January 2024, the company raised a $2.5 million pre-seed round led by Octopus Ventures and climate fund AENU. Since then, Metris has set its sights even higher.
From off-grid villages to digital asset management
Jones’s path to the energy sector was unconventional. She founded a sustainable goods company at university, then worked as an algorithmic trader, observing the shift from traditional trading floors to automated systems. Believing financial tools were not advancing net-zero goals, she pursued a master’s in political economy and became interested in distributed solar as a solution for rural communities lacking grid infrastructure.
“Many communities around the world don’t have power, and their governments must decide whether to invest heavily in pylons and cables to reach rural areas or use modular renewables — solar, small wind, battery — which let them skip that trade-off,” she says.
This interest led her to join the energy team at Octopus Ventures, where she noticed that asset management at portfolio companies was still mostly manual.
“The energy sector needs cheap, clean, abundant energy for our economy to grow, for the intelligence economy to grow. But the way energy assets are managed today is on Excel, which makes no sense to me,” she adds.
A unified platform for asset management
Metris presents itself as a complete solution, filling the gaps left by tools that only handle specific tasks.
“Our competitors focus on one piece of the puzzle — some monitor the system using SCADA data, others just do billing, and that’s all. It’s very hard for humans to make decisions without the full picture,” Jones explains.
Metris brings together inverters, meters, SCADA systems, CRMs, and billing platforms into a single record for each asset, combining financial and technical data. This helps operators find not just where a fault is, but also what it costs. Jones points out that as the grid adds more batteries, heat pumps, community power schemes, and corporate power-purchase agreements, the need for real-time data increases, which old billing models cannot handle.
Metria, the company’s AI agent, is built to act on data rather than just show it. It can address faults, spot underperformance, and handle scheduling. Jones says the next year will be about turning Metria from a tool that suggests actions into one that operators trust to carry them out.
The company says it manages over 10,000 solar plants and 500 megawatts of capacity, with revenue growing eightfold year-over-year. The company’s website lists over 8,500 projects, so this difference should be clarified.
The renewable energy asset management software market was valued at $9.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $23.1 billion by 2032, growing at 13.3% annually, according to P&S Intelligence.
Raptor Maps, based in Somerville, Massachusetts, has raised over $60 million to develop a comparable digital twin for solar assets, primarily serving US customers. IBM recently acquired Bangalore-based Prescinto to incorporate renewable-asset monitoring into its Maximo platform, indicating that major industry players are increasingly seeking to own this technology layer.
The open question
According to Jones, the funding will advance Metria’s autonomous capabilities and expand into Germany, which she calls “the largest solar market in Europe, with the highest proportion of distributed power.” The team currently has 15 people.
“Natasha and the Metris Energy team are building the data infrastructure that makes energy assets visible in real-time, unlocking the opportunity for AI to transform the space. Their platform is already driving down the cost of operating asset portfolios at scale and opening market access to flexible energy contracts,” said Fabian Koenig, partner at PT1 Ventures.
Jones likens the current shift in energy to fintech’s unbundling, predicting that energy will fragment into more distributed power providers, all of which will need new software solutions. While this is a plausible market direction, the central question is whether operators of revenue-generating infrastructure are ready to let an AI agent act on their systems rather than just report on them.
Jones expects this transition within the next year, with the recent $5 million funding supporting this goal.
