Today Finnish energy tech startup Synergi, announces the launch of its smart electricity platform, which will cover electric vehicles and most major home electrical devices.
Synergi was founded in 2022 and aims to help mitigate the pressing challenges transitioning to fully sustainable energy sources will bring, such as grid inflexibility and increased electricity price volatility.
Its industry-first platform allows households and individuals to optimise their consumption when it's the cheapest and produced from sustainable energy sources.
It leverages demand response to manage spikes in peak hours and flexible energy consumption, which enables customers to shift their usage away from times of high demand and towards times of lower demand.
Free to home consumers, users set their electricity consumption preferences, and Synergi will automatically optimise a user's consumption by using electricity when it's cheap.
I spoke to CEO and co-founder Antti Hämmäinen to learn more.
Interestingly, Synergi's competitors are the energy companies themselves – companies like Octopus Energy (UK), Tibber (Sweden), and Ostrom (Germany) offer comparable product offerings.
However, the vast majority of Europe's 10k plus utilities providers are, according to
Hämmäinen more preoccupied with customer complaints in response to the increased energy prices:
"They're not software companies; in general, they just don't have the technical knowledge or tools to build these kinds of software solutions. We're quite flexible because we can work with whomever we want.
We can offer our services to utility companies, mobility players, and whoever else we want because we're a software company. We can provide them with the necessary tools, ready for deployment to their customers, and they can get the benefits of smart electricity management through us.
This will also enable us in the long term to be very agile in how we move from country to country because we don't have to set up electricity sales processes in every country."
The company is starting with EV charging after a successful pilot with over 100 EV drivers. Users can join the Synergi platform for free by opening an account and linking their electric vehicles to start smart charging.
But the company's larger goal is to make households part of the demand response markets. "It makes the electricity market more efficient overall as we can use electricity when it makes sense."
The platform will introduce new electrical devices such as heating, cooling, solar systems, and more in the upcoming months.
According to Hämmäinen:
"Having this kind of platform thinking extends to the value of partnerships. How can we access smart metres? How can we access the new heat pumps which are being installed? How can we create partnerships with the installer companies?
How can we build a solid ecosystem around us of distribution channels that we can grow, they can grow, and we can create a coherent solution for every household, not only the kind of upper middle-level income households which own the EVs? Then we can scale."
Synergi raised €800K in a pre-seed round last November.
Interestingly, Hämmäinen has a background in climate finance and impact investing, having worked as an analyst at Cooler Future, a technology company, creating an impact-first climate investment platform and served as the Head of Global Operations at Junction, the world's leading hackathon and tech community Junction, and Program Co-Director at Finnish startup accelerator Kiuas.
He is also part of the World Energy Council's Future Energy Leaders program, and mentors people to help increase their knowledge about renewables because:
"The energy industry has always been a kind of boring industry that everyone looks down on, but now things are changing, and it's becoming more interesting."
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