Delfos, a virtual engineer software for renewable energy assets, today announces its €6.3 million seed round, led by Contrarian Ventures and Headline. Existing investors including DOMO.VC and EDP Ventures participated.
The funding round will be used to drive expansion in Europe – targeting partnerships with renewable energy asset owners, operations/maintenance providers, and utility companies across the continent. This includes asset management firms, corporations, and public bodies. Delfos will seek to expand to the US in 2025, once sufficient traction has been gained in Europe and LATAM.
Delfos has developed real-time virtual engineer software, which harnesses both artificial intelligence and big data to provide owners and managers of renewable energy estates with automated performance and reliability workflow management. Providing all the information an engineer or C-level executive would require to manage and optimize an asset’s ROI, performance, and reliability.
Guilherme Studart, CEO of Delfos Energy, commented: “If we are to enable a green energy transition fully, the renewables at the heart of our future energy supply chain must be as efficient and reliable as possible. This is where Delfos comes in – our technology is designed to drive up the energy produced by each renewable asset, making them more lucrative to run, more efficient, and more appealing to investors looking to back the energy transition to net zero.”
Delfos’ software platform – offered as a SaaS to B2B customers, allows utilities companies and renewable energy asset managers to identify potential performance improvements, maintenance issues, downtime risks, and faults in real-time via a performance & reliability x-ray – before they cause a loss of power generation.
Delfos’ technology is advanced enough to allow engineers to identify a performance issue in 24 hours, and fix an upcoming major component fault between 3-5 months before a major downtime event occurs through part failure.
This is particularly critical for remote renewable energy assets – such as solar. According to research conducted by KWH Analytics, 92% of EBITDA loss in solar energy production comes from underutilization of assets, and underproduction. In stark contrast, only 1% of lost profit from solar comes from unforeseen operating costs. Implying that the great barrier to improved profitability in renewables comes from making existing assets as efficient – and low on downtime – as possible.
Rokas Peciulaitis, Managing Partner at Contrarian Ventures, added: “Infrastructure investors in renewables want efficiency, stability and to be able to make timely decisions well in advance of failures to ensure their sites are up-and-running 24/7 with no down-time. Delfos’ predictive management platform is a critical software infrastructure layer to ensure resilience of those assets. We are excited to partner with an exceptional Delfos team, and are really impressed by their existing client trust and traction and believe they will be the leading product in the market as they scale across Europe and US in the coming years. ”
Across the renewable energy sector, many solar, hydro, or wind farm operators are underperforming – on energy generation, downtime reduction, and overall site efficiency by as much as 10%. In 95% of cases, the main cause of downtime is reliability and maintenance issues, which could be minimized with real-time reliability X-rays that flag potential failures before they occur.
Romero Rodrigues, Managing Partner at Headline, said: “Delfos combines management and AI in one of the most attractive sectors today, which is renewable energy. With the need for sustainable development and the growth of the ESG agenda around the world, businesses like theirs stand out for solving real issues. Additionally, we were especially excited about the startup’s potential for international expansion.”
Delfos moved to Europe recently, establishing a new headquarters in Barcelona, Spain. Delfos’ operations also maintain a LATAM HQ in Brazil with 55 employees in total. The company is seeking to hire 12 employees in Spain and remotely across Europe within the next 6 months, which it now counts as its global HQ location.
