Companion energy Raises $9 Million in Seed Funding for Energy Optimization Software

Companion.energy has raised €7.8 million ($9 million) in an oversubscribed seed funding round, betting that Europe’s largest industrial power consumers will need autonomous software to navigate increasingly volatile electricity markets. The Ghent-based startup, founded in 2022 by Belgian engineers Thomas Vyncke and Jonas Verstraeten, builds a platform that automates energy procurement and asset management for commercial and industrial enterprises. The round was co-led by Germany’s Realyze Ventures and London-based Pi Labs, with participation from Paris impact investor Asterion Ventures, which deployed capital through a special purpose vehicle in its first investment outside France, alongside existing backers Übermorgen Ventures and NAP.

The fundraise arrives at a moment of structural upheaval in European energy procurement. Electricity prices that once tracked predictable seasonal patterns now fluctuate by the minute as renewable penetration accelerates and heavy industry electrifies operations ranging from heating systems to vehicle fleets. For commercial and industrial enterprises spending tens of millions of euros annually on power, the complexity of managing that exposure has outgrown the tools most still rely on. “Energy prices that once moved seasonally now fluctuate in real time,” Vyncke said, adding that most companies still manage the resulting complexity “through fragmented tooling, spreadsheets and static procurement processes.” It is a problem that grows more acute with each gigawatt of renewable capacity added to the European grid, and one that legacy procurement workflows were never designed to handle.

That gap between what the market demands and what incumbent tooling delivers is the opening Companion.energy was built to exploit. Vyncke and Verstraeten identified that large enterprises lacked a unified system capable of connecting their energy contracts, on-site generation assets, battery storage and operational data into a single decision-making layer. The platform they built ingests data from solar PV arrays, wind turbines, battery systems, electric boilers and EV charging infrastructure, then continuously forecasts demand, models market exposure and executes energy decisions autonomously in real time. The company describes the architecture in two parts: Prism, a financial and operational modelling engine that surfaces optimisation opportunities across a company’s entire energy portfolio, and Propel, an execution layer that acts on those insights without waiting for human sign-off. Together, the two modules are designed to close the loop between identifying a cost-saving opportunity and capturing it, a process that in most enterprises still requires multiple teams, manual approvals and days of elapsed time.

The distinction between advising and acting is central to how Companion.energy positions itself against the broader energy management software market. Established players such as Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure platform and Honeywell Forge have historically focused on monitoring, reporting and advisory functions, offering broad enterprise infrastructure suites with energy modules bolted on rather than autonomous execution. SAP’s Sustainability Control Tower takes a similar approach, unifying energy and sustainability data for tracking and benchmarking but stopping short of real-time intervention. At the startup end, Germany’s Ecoplanet has raised €18.6 million for AI-powered industrial energy management, while Norway’s Enode has secured $17.2 million to build APIs connecting distributed energy assets to management platforms. The common thread across all of these ventures is a conviction that energy management is shifting from a periodic procurement exercise to a continuous, software-driven discipline. Dhruv Gupta, a principal at Pi Labs, described the shift as one that “fundamentally changes software from a recommendation engine to a system of execution.”

The commercial traction behind Companion.energy suggests the thesis is landing with buyers. The company now serves more than 30 enterprise customers directly, including TotalEnergies, Dutch telecoms group KPN, the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, parking operator Interparking and Belgian telecoms provider Proximus Group. Through partnerships with energy suppliers, the platform reaches an additional 75-plus organisations. Companion.energy says it manages more than 2 TWh of annual energy consumption and production across its customer portfolios, representing roughly €500 million in combined energy spend and revenue, and supports upwards of 200 MW of distributed energy assets across Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Revenue grew tenfold in the 12 months to mid-2026, surpassing €1 million in annual recurring revenue. The startup claims its automation reduces clients’ energy costs by between 10% and 30%, though those figures are self-reported and have not been independently verified.

“We started Companion because we believed the energy transition would force every large industrial enterprise to manage energy actively, and that they would not be able to do that with spreadsheets and quarterly check-ins.”

Jonas Verstraeten, Co-founder of Companion.energy

The fresh capital will fund two priorities. First, Companion.energy intends to deepen the platform’s multi-asset and multi-market optimisation capabilities, extending support for more complex portfolios that span multiple asset types, contract structures and national energy markets simultaneously. Second, the company plans to expand commercially into Germany and Spain, two of Europe’s largest industrial energy markets and natural stepping stones for a platform already operating across Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The round follows a €2.1 million raise in 2024, bringing total disclosed funding to roughly €10 million.

The broader venture capital appetite for energy software infrastructure has intensified across Europe over the past 18 months as investors have grown increasingly comfortable with the thesis that the energy transition will generate as much value in the software layer as it does in physical hardware. Grid-edge optimisation, demand response and procurement automation have all attracted dedicated funding rounds, and the category is beginning to consolidate around a handful of well-capitalised players in each sub-segment. The risk for early movers is that the very traction they demonstrate validates the market for incumbents with deeper pockets and existing enterprise relationships. Schneider, Honeywell and SAP all have the distribution networks to absorb a category once it matures, and none of them are standing still. For Companion.energy, the question is whether a seed-stage startup operating from Ghent can scale fast enough across fragmented European markets to establish category leadership before those larger vendors or better-funded competitors close the gap. With €7.8 million in fresh capital and a customer roster that already includes some of Europe’s most recognisable industrial names, the startup has bought itself the runway to find out.