Beebop.ai raises $5.5 million seed round

Beebop.ai raises $5.5 million seed round to accelerate the energy transition by integrating residential devices into the power system

Founded by a stellar team of early cleantech pioneers, Beebop is building power system middleware bringing significant energy and CO₂ savings to end-consumers

• Beebop’s Power Grid Orchestration Software unlocks flexibility of consumer devices and turns it into a tradable asset.
• Beebop saves consumers up to 50% on their energy bill by turning their devices into revenue generating resources supporting and decarbonizing the power grid.
• Beebop is founded by serial cleantech entrepreneurs - Jan-Willem Rombouts, Sandra Trittin and Bert Claessens - with a track record of successfully scaling businesses in this market.‍
• Angular Ventures led the round, with support from Contrarian Ventures.

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Antwerp - 11th September - Beebop.ai today announces its $5.5 million Seed Round, led by Angular Ventures, with support from Contrarian Ventures. Beebop is already used by leading utilities and manufacturers across Europe, the UK and the Middle East, and expects to control more than 100K residential assets under management in the coming year.

The power system is bursting at its seams

Across the globe household electricity consumption is going up as consumers switch to electric vehicles, heat pumps and other devices. Adding this to the overall increase of electricity consumption, incl. also data centers fueling the AI-revolution,  brings new strains to the power system, and higher energy bills to the end-consumer.

At the same time, increased penetration of intermittent and decentralized renewable energy makes it increasingly hard to keep the power system reliable and stable. Investing in new grid infrastructure and generation capacity is necessary but additional digital solutions are needed to prevent skyrocketing electricity prices.

Idle capacity to the rescue

As households electrify,they are installing extremely valuable resources to the power system. Household storage devices, heat pumps, solar and EV chargers all have flexibility when they draw power from the grid, and this flexibility can be used to keep the  power system in balance.

Since connectivity of household devices matured, bringing new capability of data logging and power control of these devices and allowing an efficient management by the Beebop platform. This now makes consumer devices become active elements in the power system, smartly steering them to consume power when it is abundant and green, while supporting the power grid when needed.

This revolution towards a smarter grid, where millions of devices dynamically respond to the needs of the power system, needs new energy market design and new software to control these swarms of devices so they are turned into useful resources for the grid.

Changing markets and new technology

Regulatory tailwinds are emerging to enable participation of “distributed energy resources” in the power system. In the US, FERC order 2222 outlines the framework of efficient market design. Ultimately, the tradeoff is simple: either you invest billions per 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 more than $15BN and +100MM tons of CO₂ per year.

Beebop’s orchestration middleware efficiently enables utilities, grid operators, manufacturers and Virtual Power Plant (VPP) technology leaders to 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 and to integrate more renewable  energy into the power system.

It allows end-customers up to 50% savings on their energy bills while significantly reducing emissions.

Leveraging recent breakthroughs in AI allows Beebop to manage the enormous complexity when controlling millions of devices and forging them into ultra-reliable “Virtual Power Plants” in a highly scalable and cost-effective way.    

An experienced dream team with a unique storied history of success:

Beebop brings together a uniquely experienced team in the power grid flexibility market. Beebop is led by Jan-Willem Rombouts, who previously founded and scaled 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 former REstore NV executive Prof. Bert Claessens.

Jan-Willem Rombouts, CEO and founder of Beebop, commented: “We are at a crossroads where improved device connectivity, regulatory changes and advances in AI allow for new solutions. Beebop is the new abstraction layer in the power system driving material cost and emission savings for the end-consumer. We are excited to build Beebop with a team of industry veterans and now backed by outstanding investors.”

David Peterson, Partner at Angular Ventures, commented: “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. The founders of Beebop, however, are exactly the right team to crack it. They've been leaders in the space for over a decade, and from our very first meeting, it was clear they had both the vision and the technical acumen to pull this off. We're 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 grid of the future.”

Tomas Kemtys, Partner at Contrarian Ventures, commented: “As a fund, we’ve wanted to invest in this space for a really long time - however, it’s taken us a long time to find a team we have the conviction to back, capable of building up the infrastructure technology to get the best out of our ever developing energy networks. Jan-Willem, Sandra, Bert and team are exceptional founders capable of building up an exciting business in a challenging, fragmented space - the most capable we’ve come across in this category. With impeccable market timing, we believe Beebop’s solution is uniquely positioned to finally empower end-consumers as critical contributors to grid resiliency.”

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Press contact:

Harry Ashcroft | Boiling Blue

harry@boilingblue.org | (44) 7429108277

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