Startups Archives - Ecosummit

23 January 2024

Instagrid raises €88M Series C led by Teachers’ Venture Growth

Instagrid got rhythm. The mobile battery making machine from Germany grooves and moves ahead with a new financing round every 2 years tripling the capital raised: €8.5M Series A in February 2020, €29M Series B in February 2022 and €88M Series C on 23 January 2024. Teachers' Venture Growth, the venture arm of Ontario Teachers' pension fund ($185 billion AUM), leads the Series C and Morgan Stanley Investment Management ($1.5 trillion AUM) co-invests implementing their investment strategy to avoid 1 gigaton of CO2 emissions. The new funds will be used to expand into North America, scale production to satisfy the unlimited demand and grow the product family with bigger batteries.

Extrapolating, we foresee a €250M Series D in early 2026 bringing Instagrid close to unicorn status and right on track to a potential IPO soon after. So far, 30.000 portable, pollution-free and silent batteries have been shipped to professional customers in construction, events, film, media and emergency services. Replacing millions of diesel gensets with mobile batteries will be a huge accomplishment for the 2 down-to-earth co-founders Andreas Sedlmayr and Sebastian Berning that launched their tiny hardware startup in 2018. In fact, the mission of the more than 120 employees is generating massive impact by enabling 10 million people to access clean mobile energy by 2030.

Existing investors Energy Impact Partners, SET Ventures that sourced Instagrid at Ecosummit 2019, Blueworld Group and High-Tech Gründerfonds make follow-on investments in the Series C to further support their portfolio star and minimise dilution. As you can see, Instagrid is a bright star in our Ecosummit community and a dream come true for every investor in the cap table.

Published by Jan Michael Hess in Startups

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7 June 2023

Ecosummit facilitates Eturnity Series A, ESFORIN Series B and Installion exit

Ecosummit is startup paradise as we bring together fundraising startups and active investors that want to create impact. Our goal is to enable as many new investments as possible in smart green startups that focus on saving our climate, decarbonising our economy and electrifying our planet. It makes us especially happy if startups meet their investors at Ecosummit for the first time as it happened between Eturnity and Klima or ESFORIN and SEB last year. Sometimes we also make introductions during the year. Connecting Installion and their Series A lead Eneco Ventures in 2021 turns out to have been truly impactful. In April 2023, Lichtblick, the German subsidiary of Eneco, acquired Installion. Next week, you all have the chance again to make more deals creating impact at Ecosummit Berlin 14-15 June 2023.

Aerones raises $30M Series A led by Lightrock and Haniel

We love this startup since we got to know it in April 2021. Applying the power of robotics to make the wind industry more efficient is a great idea. Our ecoportfolio company Aerones raises $30M Series A led by Lightrock and Haniel with participation of new investor Blume Equity. Aerones is based in Riga (Latvia), develops and manufactures a family of smart robots and provides their robot-enabled services for the maintenance of wind turbines with a team of 200 employees to more than 100 customers in 20 countries including Vestas, GE, Siemens Gamesa, NextEra and Enel. The goal is to minimise downtime when wind turbines are inspected, cleaned, coated or repaired. In fact, Aerones' services are 6 times faster, 40% more efficient and a lot safer for humans that don't need to climb up wind turbines because the robots do. This enables huge cost savings in the $30B wind turbine maintenance market that is forecasted to grow to $50B by 2028.

Roofit.solar raises €7.85M Series A led by BayWa r.e. Energy Ventures

The Tesla solar roof now has a strong competitor in Europe. Today, Roofit.solar announces its €7.85M Series A (€6.4M new capital and €1.45M converted loans) led by BayWa r.e. Energy Ventures and supported by an outstanding group of Estonian co-investors. The co-investor syndicate includes the family office of Priit Piilmann (largest shareholder of Viru Keemia Grupp), Taavet Hinrikus (Co-founder of Wise, recently listed on LSE) and Sten Tamkivi (ex-General Manager at Skype Estonia), Spring Capital and Helmes Investments. We're super happy about this transaction because Ecosummit advised the 3 co-founders of Roofit.solar during the 9-month fundraising process and successfully introduced the German lead investor BayWa r.e. Energy Ventures, the main piece in the Series A puzzle.