Statkraft Ventures teams up with ETF Partners and leads $5M Series A in Greenbird from Norway

Ubiquitous smart meters are a key infrastructure component for the smart green utilities of the future because they generate a lot of valuable data and enable new energy services and dynamic pricing. In fact, it is a surprise that smart meter rollouts happen rather slowly in most countries due to slow regulators and hesitant utilities that are not yet ready to make substantial upfront investments in millions of smart meters that may bring more economic benefits to consumers than to the utilities themselves. Luckily, the Nordic countries and their resident startups have a headstart. Today, Düsseldorf-based corporate VC Statkraft Ventures leads the $5M Series A in Greenbird teaming up with London-based ETF Partners who were on the top of their potential co-investor list. The Norwegian energy IoT startup is Statkraft’s second investment this year after DEPsys from Switzerland in June.

ECO16 London Matthias Dill Statkraft Ventures

Having moved to Norway in 2003, the German CEO Thorsten Heller co-founded Greenbird in 2010 and generated €4M revenues in 2015 with a team of 30 employees servicing customers in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Last year, Thorsten started fundraising and approached Statkraft Ventures looking for a strategic investor with energy expertise and an international footprint that could help develop a future-proof product strategy and enter new markets in Europe. Coming from an IT consulting background Greenbird only recently decided to focus their software development on one product that can be licensed to many utilities and easily integrated into existing IT landscapes. The result is Metercloud, a powerful software platform for smart meter management that is ready to scale and handle big data. Thorsten and his team also use AI and apply machine learning to identify relevant signals in the big smart meter data stream. The next step is to automatically suggest smart actions to the IT and customer relationship managers at the utilities. Thanks to a deal with Smarthub, a joint venture of 10 Norwegian utilities, there are already 200.000 smart meters live on Metercloud while most of the hardware devices are supplied by Kamstrup.

Matthias Dill Thorsten Heller Arne Morteani

When we called Thorsten today, he was in Oslo celebrating together with Matthias Dill of Statkraft Ventures and Arne Morteani of ETF Partners who both pitched at Ecosummit London 2016 last month. It looks like the German trio have a lot to talk about to position Greenbird as a fast-growing software startup that outperforms the competition to become the first smart meter choice among European utilities.

ECO16 London Arne Morteani ETF Partners


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