Beebop raises $5.5 million for virtual power plant tech

Beebop.ai has raised a $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.

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 due to 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 grid reliable and stable. Investing in new grid infrastructure and generation capacity is necessary but other solutions are needed to prevent skyrocketing electricity prices.

As households electrify, consumers are – mostly unknowingly - installing extremely valuable resources to the power system. Household storage devices, heat pumps and EV chargers all have flexibility around when they draw power from the grid, and this flexibility is what the power system needs to maintain balance.

In recent years, connectivity of household devices matured, bringing new capability of data logging and power control of these devices. This now allows consumers to become active participants in the power system, smartly 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, needs new energy market design and new software to control these swarms of devices so they are turned into useful resources for the grid.

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 $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 devices in the power grid, saving their end-customers up to 50% on their energy bill while 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.

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.

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.”