Beebop.ai raised a $5.5 million Seed round led by Angular Ventures, with support from Contrarian Ventures. Already used by leading utilities and manufacturers across Europe, the UK and the Middle East, Beebop expects to control over 100K residential assets under management in the coming year.
Around the world, household electricity consumption is increasing as consumers switch to electric vehicles, heat pumps and other appliances. Adding this to the overall increase in electricity consumption due to data centers fueling the AI revolution brings new stress on the power system, and higher energy bills for the end consumer.
At the same time, increased penetration of intermittent and decentralized renewable energy makes it increasingly difficult to keep the power grid reliable and stable. Investment in new network infrastructure and generation capacity is needed, but other solutions are needed to prevent rising electricity prices.
As households electrify, consumers install – mostly unknowingly – extremely valuable resources to the power system. Home storage devices, heat pumps and EV chargers all have flexibility when drawing power from the grid, and this flexibility is what the power system needs to maintain balance.
In recent years, the connectivity of household appliances has matured, bringing new capabilities of data logging and power control of these appliances. It now enables consumers to become active participants in the power system, by intelligently steering their devices to consume power when it is abundant and green, and to support the power grid when needed.
This revolution towards a smarter grid, where millions of devices dynamically respond to the needs of the power system, requires new energy market design and new software to control these swarms of devices so that they are transformed into useful resources for the grid.
Regulating winds occur to enable participation of “distributed energy sources” in the power system. In the US, FERC Order 2222 outlines the framework of efficient market design. Ultimately, the trade-off is simple: either you invest billions a year in grid upgrades and generation capacity, or you use the available idle capacity and share the benefits with end consumers. In the US alone, this is estimated to save over $15B and +100M tons of CO2 per year.
At the crossroads of these technology and regulatory changes, a team of veterans in grid flexibility founded Beebop. Beebop’s software is used by utilities and OEMs to seamlessly integrate residential appliances into the power grid, saving their end customers up to 50% on their energy bill while reducing emissions. By leveraging recent breakthroughs in AI, Beebop can manage the enormous complexity when controlling millions of devices and forge them into ultra-reliable “Virtual Power Plants” in a highly scalable and cost-effective way.
Beebop’s orchestration software enables utilities, network operators, manufacturers and Virtual Power Plant (VPP) technology leaders to efficiently control complex fleets of residential assets. This solution empowers partners to deliver more value from the power system to end customers, spanning solar and energy storage, EV chargers and heat pumps.
Beebop brings together a uniquely experienced team in the power grid flexibility market. Beebop is led by Jan-Willem Rombouts, who previously founded and expanded Virtual Power Plant pioneer REstore NV (acquired by Centrica in 2017). He is joined by Sandra Trittin, who previously founded and scaled Tiko Energy Solutions, a cleantech energy aggregator (acquired by ENGIE in 2019). The founding team is completed by prof. Bert Claessens, former CEO of REstore NV.
Jan-Willem Rombouts, CEO and founder of Beebop, said: “We are at a crossroads where improved device connectivity, regulatory changes and advances in AI enable new solutions. Beebop is the new abstraction layer in the power system that drives material cost and emissions savings for the end user. We are excited to build Beebop with a team of industry veterans and now backed by outstanding investors.”
David Peterson, partner at Angular Ventures, said: “Energy markets are changing. Renewable energy is taking over. Electrification is on the rise. To be resilient, the grid of the future must be flexible. But orchestrating “behind-the-meter” devices at scale is a deeply technical, and more or less unsolved, challenge. However, the founders of Beebop are exactly the right team to crack it. They have been leaders in the space for over a decade, and from our very first meeting it was clear that they had both the vision and the technical acumen to execute. We are incredibly excited to lead Beebop’s seed round and support Jan-Willem and team on their mission to build the critical infrastructure layer that will power the network of the future.”
Tomas Kemtys, partner at Contrarian Ventures, said: “As a fund we have wanted to invest in this space for a very long time – however it took us a long time to find a team that we have the conviction to support, capable of the building the infrastructure technology to get the best out of our ever-evolving energy networks Jan-Willem, Sandra, Bert and team are exceptional founders who are able to build an exciting business in a challenging, fragmented space – the most capable we have encountered in this category. With impeccable market timing, we believe Beebop’s solution is uniquely positioned to ultimately empower end-users as critical contributors to network resilience.”