Companion.energy Raises €7.8 Million to Scale Real-Time Enterprise Energy Management Across European Markets

Companion.energy, the software platform helping large industrial and commercial enterprises manage energy in real time, has closed a €7.8 million seed round led by Realyze Ventures and Pi Labs with participation from Asterion Ventures and existing investors. The Ghent-based company grew its customer base and revenue tenfold over the past year, surpassing €1 million in annual recurring revenue, and now serves more than 30 enterprise customers across Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland including TotalEnergies, KPN, Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Interparking and Proximus Group. The platform manages more than 2 terawatt hours of annual energy consumption and production across customer portfolios representing approximately €500 million in annual energy spend and revenues, supporting more than 200 megawatts of distributed energy assets across solar, wind, batteries, electric boilers and EV charging infrastructure.

 

The Problem Companion.energy Solves

 

European energy markets are undergoing a structural shift as renewable energy penetration increases and industrial demand becomes more electrified, creating electricity price volatility that once moved seasonally but now fluctuates in real time. Thomas Vyncke, Co-founder of Companion.energy, said that while enterprises are deploying growing fleets of batteries, solar installations, EV charging infrastructure and electrified industrial systems, most companies still manage this environment through fragmented tooling, spreadsheets and static procurement processes that cannot keep pace with the operational complexity of modern energy markets. The mismatch between the real-time nature of energy market signals and the slow-moving tools most enterprises use to respond creates significant value destruction through suboptimal procurement decisions, poor asset utilisation and missed opportunities to monetise flexibility.

Jonas Verstraeten, Co-founder of Companion.energy, said the company was founded on the belief that the energy transition would force every large industrial enterprise to manage energy actively and that spreadsheets and quarterly check-ins would be inadequate for this task. He described the work of the next decade as giving enterprise energy teams software that can keep up with the pace of change and turning energy from a competitiveness risk into a competitive advantage. The platform connects energy contracts, operational systems and distributed assets into a single optimisation engine that continuously forecasts demand, models market exposure and automates energy decisions in real time, delivering cost reductions of 10 to 30 percent for clients through autonomous decision-making on energy asset optimisation.

 

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Investor Rationale and Market Opportunity

 

Dhruv Gupta, Principal at Pi Labs, said enterprise energy management is moving from static procurement and reporting toward 24-hour, seven-day real-time optimisation and that large enterprises spending tens of millions annually on energy still rely heavily on spreadsheets, dashboards and manual workflows. He described Companion.energy as having built a deeply technical AI platform that fundamentally changes software from a recommendation engine to a system of execution, which is what makes the category strategically important. Marnix Roes, Investment Manager at Realyze Ventures, said Germany alone represents a massive opportunity as industrial and commercial enterprises increasingly seek to optimise flexibility, electrification and energy exposure operationally rather than manually.

The customer base already spans manufacturers, logistics operators, telecom operators, EV charging operators and energy companies, demonstrating the breadth of enterprise segments that face significant energy management complexity as electrification advances. The Port of Antwerp-Bruges and Proximus Group among the customer list signal that both industrial and service sector enterprises with complex distributed energy footprints are finding value in the platform, validating the multi-sector applicability of the optimisation approach. Revenue growth of tenfold over a single year alongside crossing the €1 million annual recurring revenue threshold provides a commercially credible foundation for the European expansion the seed round will fund.

 

Expansion Plans and Platform Development

 

The new funding will support two priorities: deepening the platform's multi-asset, multi-market optimisation capabilities and expanding commercially across Europe, starting with Germany and Spain. Germany represents a particularly large addressable market given the combination of high industrial energy intensity, ambitious renewable energy targets and the complexity of the German electricity market's balancing mechanisms and flexibility incentives. Spain's high renewable energy penetration and growing industrial electrification create similar conditions where real-time energy management software provides measurable economic value relative to conventional procurement approaches.

Platform development will focus on expanding the capacity to optimise across multiple asset types and multiple electricity markets simultaneously, a capability that becomes increasingly valuable as enterprise energy portfolios grow in complexity and geographic scope. The ability to coordinate solar generation, battery dispatch, EV charging schedules, industrial load flexibility and procurement positions across multiple markets within a single optimisation framework is technically demanding and difficult to replicate, creating durable competitive moats for platforms that achieve this level of integration at production scale.

 

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Outlook for Enterprise Energy Management Software

 

The Companion.energy seed round reflects a growing recognition among European energy technology investors that the combination of renewable energy growth, electrification and real-time electricity markets is creating structural demand for enterprise-grade energy management software that goes well beyond conventional energy monitoring or procurement tools. Whether Companion.energy can sustain its growth trajectory as it expands from its Benelux and Swiss base into Germany and Spain will depend on the transferability of its technology to new market structures, the depth of its sales and implementation capabilities in new geographies and the competitive response from larger energy software incumbents. Sustained execution would establish the company as a leading platform for enterprise real-time energy management in Europe and demonstrate that the energy transition is creating a new category of mission-critical operational software for large energy consumers.

 

 

Source: Companion.energy