E.On has joined in a financing round for Lumenaza, a Berlin-based energy software developer.
The German-based energy giant invested in Lumenaza alongside existing investors EnBW New Ventures and VC Fonds Technologie Berlin, with the round ultimately raising €2.5 million (£2.23 million).
Those funds will be used to strengthen the firm’s tech leadership in energy services, in particular an ‘utility-in-a-box’ platform which promises to connect distributed energy resources directly with energy consumers, also enabling precise billing.
The scalable solution, Lumenaza said, could find particular prominence in the community and regional energy sector, enabling them to sell locally-generated power directly to local residents, however it is also expected to contribute towards the growth of innovative tariffs and peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading offerings.
The solution bears some similarities to Piclo’s P2P energy connection service which was later adopted by Good Energy and rebranded as Selectricity. That product enables C&I customers to effectively choose which generators to source their energy from.
And the investment also follows a string of major companies looking to bolster their software expertise. Just yesterday Centrica announced a major investment in Israel-based EV charging platform provider Driivz.
Christian Chudoba, founder and CEO at Lumenaza, said the firm was delighted to be working with a second leading utility, having previously worked with Vattenfall on a domestic solar project.
“With this additional investment our software will become even more powerful to support innovative utilities and other energy market players such as hardware manufacturers to offer highly-personalised solutions to their customers based on distributed, clean and affordable energy sources,” he said.
