- Nomos raised €20 million in a financing round led by Index Ventures, which was quickly subscribed due to strong demand.
- Through local installers, Nomos connects home batteries, electric vehicles, and heat pumps to Germany’s electricity market.
- According to Stefan Gerbes, Nomos’ co-founder, the biggest challenge is the high energy costs in Europe.
Heat pump and solar installers usually stop selling once the hardware is on the wall. Nomos wants them to keep going, enabling each one to offer a licensed electricity retailer under its own brand, with Nomos as the regulated power company behind it.
This energy tech startup just raised €20 million from Index Ventures to do it. Markus Villig, CEO of Bolt; Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath; and Tomas Okmanas, co-founder of tesonet, also took part.
For Stefan Gerbes, who co-founded the Berlin company with Nils Bitzer in 2023, the reason is both personal and strategic. “Our aim is to address, in our view, Europe’s most serious problem — high energy costs. We are paying twice as much as people in the US and China for electricity, a situation which makes it difficult for both the quality of life and for Europe’s competitiveness,” he tells Tech Funding News.
Statistics support this claim: the International Energy Agency states that electricity prices for industry in the EU are more than double those in the United States, and German households already pay some of the highest rates in Europe.
Nomos acts as a regulated electricity supplier and as a balancing responsibility holder, or, in Gerbes’ words, a full-stack power company. It links “your EV, your home battery, and your heat pump” with the wholesale market for original equipment manufacturers and installers such as thermondo, Energiekonzepte Deutschland, and IKEA’s Svea Solar-powered service.
These partners provide energy plans under their own brands, while, behind the scenes, Nomos handles procurement, metering, balancing, and billing.
Unaddressed competition
When asked about its competitors, Gerbes does not mention Ostrom, Cloover, or Tibber. Instead, he states, “Our greatest competitor is the state of inertia together with the high energy costs which we are now experiencing,” and points out that there are large established companies which “have not necessarily provided customers with innovative products.”
Nevertheless, this perspective omits a number of well-funded start-ups that have similar ideas.
Ostrom has recently raised €20 million from Eneco, making its total amount over €40 million, and it offers dynamic tariffs directly to households. Cloover, which describes itself as an AI-native neo-utility, combines solar power, batteries, and heat pumps into virtual power plants and has obtained a $100 million credit facility based on an expected $350 million in revenue. Norway’s Tibber has raised about $180 million for its direct-to-consumer model.
Focus on Germany before European expansion
The €20 million, together with the €1.9 million pre-seed round led by Speedinvest in October 2024, brings the total funding to around €22 million, which will be used to launch products, hire, and later expand across Europe.
According to Gerbes, once the appropriate investors had joined the room, the share raising moved very quickly: “The round came together quite quickly and was oversubscribed.”
Bastian Hasslinger, the Index partner in charge of the deal, stated that Nomos is “technically uncompromising” and “ambitious enough to aim at the whole market.”
Gerbes ends with the most ambitious assertion of the discussion: “Europe has the opportunity to build one of the biggest companies in the history of the energy industry and we have the opportunity to be one of them.”
The unanswered question is whether the invisible utility model will reach that position faster or be overtaken by competitors willing to take ownership of the customer relationship.
