As energy bills soar and Europe gets swept up with talk of an energy crisis, Finnish startup Synergi has just raised €800k to help households cope. The young startup is aiming to give people simpler tools to make their electricity consumption smarter and more flexible and now plans to launch to a growing market need.
Across Europe, households are coming to grips with an escalating energy crisis. As prices rise, supply chain issues appear and the climate crisis worsens, the need to become more sustainable and more innovative with our energy use is greater day-by-day.
One approach that is helping people better cope with electricity problems is by giving them tools that are easy to use to manage consumption. Finnish startup Synergi, is aiming to provide this to the market and has just raised new funding.
The details:
- €800k raised in pre-seed funding
- Raise was led by Finnish VC Lifeline Ventures and German VC APX
- Capital will be used for product development and to launch in Finland
Antti Hämmäinen, the CEO of Synergi, said: “We aim to provide flexibility to the markets and while doing so, we can also lower the emissions from the grid. By giving consumers more choice and control over how they use energy, we can collectively make a difference.”
Juha Lindfors, partner at Lifeline Ventures: “We are very happy to team up with Antti, Harri and Petrus. They are one of the most promising and most ambitious teams from the Finnish startup ecosystem – building an important company with a substantial addressable market
Smart and Controllable Energy Consumption
Founded during the summer by Antti Hämmäinen, Harri Iisakka and Petrus Holm, Synergi is on a mission to make electricity consumption smart and controllable for households, giving Europeans more power over their energy bills and emission output and balancing the electricity grid.
The startup’s solution aggregates energy resources that are found in homes and enables them to participate in the demand response markets. By leveraging demand response and flexible consumption, the startup will help to alleviate the challenges associated with rising electricity prices and an imbalanced electricity grid. In particular, demand response can help to manage spikes in demand during peak hours, while flexible electricity consumption enables customers to shift their usage away from times of high demand and towards times of lower demand.
Antti Hämmäinen: “The energy crisis we are facing this winter poses a new kind of threat to the electricity grid – energy becoming a scarcity at certain times. This is naturally a problem we acknowledge with our product. However, the bigger problem we are targeting is the disparity between electricity supply and demand, which will grow as we move increasingly towards sustainable and inflexible energy sources in the upcoming years, such as wind power and nuclear power. While sustainable energy supply can’t be controlled that easily, we have to control the demand to keep the grid in balance.
“We aim to provide flexibility to the markets and while doing so, we can also lower the emissions from the grid. By giving consumers more choice and control over how they use energy, we can collectively make a difference.”
As a starting point, users can connect their electric vehicles (EVs) or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) to the software and smartly charge them. Later in 2023, Synergi will enable individuals to connect their solar production, heat pumps, water boilers and other major household energy resources to the platform and use them smartly
The funding will be used to develop Synergi’s technology further, with plans to launch to a wider audience in Finland and an additional target market during 2023.
Joerg Rheinboldt, Managing Director of APX: “Synergi is an exciting team working on a progressively pressing challenge – demand response. We are thrilled to support them in realizing their vision to turn households into active contributors in the energy sector.”
