Energy platform for residential solar, heat pumps, and home electrification, Cloover, has turned profitable three years after launch, at a revenue run rate of more than $350 million. The company has also secured a new $100 million facility, taking its total financing capacity to more than $1.3 billion.
It is underpinned by a $350 million guarantee from the European Investment Fund and pays for energy equipment and installations across Cloover’s markets, which will soon include the UK, France and Poland.
For decades, upgrading a home meant tens of thousands of euros upfront, with financing, hardware, paperwork, and the energy contract all in different hands. That kept most households out of the market.
Cloover built the alternative on AI end-to-end. Founded in Berlin in 2023 by Jodok Betschart, Peder Broms and Valentin Gönczy, the company supplies independent installation businesses with financing, software and energy products, and reaches households through the installers they already trust.
The systems financed through the platform are pooled into a virtual power plant, making Cloover an AI-native neo-utility.
Rather than building a sales force of its own, Cloover built an AI-native operating system for the independent installers who serve around 85 per cent of the market. The installers keep their name, their customers and their choice of hardware, and sell everything from solar and heat pumps to energy-efficient renovations, with financing embedded at the point of sale.
Cloover supplies the financing, the software, and now the energy products, and end customers get a decision in under two minutes, pay nothing upfront, and can spread the cost over up to 25 years.
Cloover is one of the top three residential energy players in Europe’s largest energy market, and every one of its projects was sold by an independent installer. It serves clients in five European markets. Around 20,000 installations a year run through its installer partnerships, and Cloover grows only as they do.
Jodok Betschart, Cloover co-founder, said:
“We reach households through the installers they already trust, and then we turn each of those homes into a power plant, and each homeowner into a participant in the energy market.
That is a relationship that lasts for decades, not a single transaction.”
Once a system is installed, Cloover helps the household make the most of it. Through Cloover Energy, a home energy management system runs the house, dynamic and fixed tariffs cover the supply, and a virtual power plant aggregates distributed solar, batteries, heat pumps, and EV chargers into a single tradeable pool of flexibility. That combination is an AI-native neo-utility.
A conventional supplier owns power stations, buys and resells power, and competes on price at the next comparison.
A neo-utility owns no generation at all. Its capacity is the installed base itself, and its product is what that base can do for the grid.
Cloover’s models forecast generation and consumption, house by house, and schedule storage and flexible loads within the limits each household sets, so a battery charges when power is cheap, and a heat pump runs when it costs least, without anyone in the house noticing.
Pooled across thousands of homes, that flexibility earns money in several ways. The same batteries feed power back when it is scarce. Shifting consumption lowers grid fees. And the fleet trades in the intraday market, where prices move by the quarter-hour. Power market processes are fully automated.
Installers offer the virtual power plant to their customers under their own name, and Cloover carries the complexity in the background.
Valentin Gönczy, Cloover Co-Founder, added:
“Everything we do runs on AI, from the underwriting to the way we optimise energy in each home. The incumbents are adding AI to systems built decades ago.
We can do in seconds what takes them days, and the gap widens as we scale.”
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