Blueprint Power raises $3.5 million to enable real estate owners to become clean energy suppliers
The NYC-based tech startup turns buildings into revenue-generating virtual power plants
NEW YORK: Blueprint Power, a real estate and energy tech company, announced today that they have closed a $3.5 million Series A funding round led by Congruent Ventures, MetaProp Ventures, Fred Wilson, and Brad Burnham. Founding investors Lennar and Fifth Wall Ventures participated alongside other investors including 174 Power Global (a subsidiary of Hanwha Energy), Craig Robins (DACRA) and Urban.us and URBAN-X (BMW/MINI accelerator).
Blueprint Power has developed an innovative platform to help buildings sell their excess electricity into a growing number of competitive energy markets, a previously untouchable opportunity for the real estate community. Blueprint’s machine-learning platform transforms buildings into producers of surplus energy by connecting to and managing onsite assets such as solar, battery storage, cogeneration, fuel cells, thermal storage and controllable loads. The company’s marketplace software receives price signals and dynamically matches supply to the best source of revenue, turning buildings into virtual power plants.
“Until very recently, buildings were not able to proactively sell excess energy capacity in the same way that traditional power plants do,” said Robyn Beavers, CEO, Blueprint Power. “Now in states like New York they can. We are helping buildings connect to and transact in these markets in a scalable way.”
The Blueprint Power team includes: Robyn Beavers, co-founder and CEO (formerly of Google, Vestas, NRG and Lennar); Claire Woo, co-founder and head of technology (formerly of Bosch and NRG); Nicholas Squires, co-founder and head of systems integration (formerly of Boeing); Nicholas Schmidt, VP of engineering (formerly of United States Air Force and Boeing); and Savannah Goodman, product manager (formerly of Tesla).
An increasing number of buildings in cities nationwide now host onsite energy equipment that can reduce wasteful consumption of electricity. These onsite resources already provide value by reducing utility bills. But they also have the potential to start generating revenue for real-estate owners by selling excess capacity and services to existing and emerging energy consumers. The financial incentive to add a new level of intelligence and control across these distributed energy systems has not existed – until today.
“Congruent is excited to work with Blueprint Power’s outstanding leadership team and investors base to help grow its business,” said Abe Yokell, co-founder and managing partner, Congruent Ventures. “Blueprint is offering a first-of-its-kind opportunity to real estate owners in New York City enabled by a technology and regulatory evolution, uncovering new revenue streams and driving more sustainable energy solutions for society.”
About Blueprint Power
Blueprint Power turns buildings into urban power plants. The New York City-based company has a mission to help large real estate companies transform their urban portfolios into producers of clean, intelligent suppliers of electricity. Their suite of data-driven, machine-learning tools manage energy assets at buildings to generate excess supply at the right time, which they can then sell to power markets and, eventually, other new types of electricity customers, such as cars, buses, and other buildings. As a result, Blueprint Power is catalyzing new energy marketplaces where buildings, fleets, and the grid can all buy and sell clean electricity to each other.
Blueprint Power is founded by experienced tech innovators and entrepreneurs from firms like Google, Boeing and Vestas. The Blueprint Power team is backed by prominent investors from tech, real estate, and energy, including Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Lennar, Fifth Wall, MetaProp Ventures, and Congruent Ventures, and they have signed up prominent, top-tier real estate firms as their first partners in NYC.
Source: Blueprint Power
