Our Investment in Rock Rabbit
Hopping into Residential Decarbonization
Buildings account for nearly a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, so it’s no surprise that governments and electric utilities offer nearly $60B of incentives to encourage building owners to electrify everything from furnaces to water heaters to appliances and otherwise improve energy efficiency.
BUT… accessing these incentives can be an utter nightmare for contractors and building owners, so much so that many incentives go unclaimed or fail to motivate building owners to reduce carbon emissions.
That’s why we invested in Rock Rabbit, a startup company on a mission to streamline the way we manage and access clean energy incentives. Rock Rabbit’s software platform cuts through the noise, simplifying the process of understanding incentive eligibility and making it seamless for building owners and contractors, even for incentive providers, to enable the financial rewards that drive change.
Rock Rabbit’s vision goes beyond just easing this frustration. They’re creating a platform with robust enough data to facilitate financial transactions, allowing businesses to trust that their rebate will arrive on time and in full. They’re making incentive information available to contractors via both a mobile and web application, as well as via API, enabling integration into popular contractor software. Rock Rabbit also sorts out and automates submission claims, meaning contractors no longer have to navigate all over the web filling out forms and uploading information. They even help incentive providers administer these programs which can be complex and resource intensive.
Rock Rabbit CEO Aimee Bailey is uniquely qualified to solve this problem. With a PhD in physics from Imperial College London and a long career driving decarbonization programs at utilities like Silicon Valley Clean Energy and National Grid, she understands incentive problems from an industry insider’s perspective. CTO Riyad Muradov, with his deep expertise in AI from his time at C3.ai, energy engineering background from Stanford University, and work experience at BP, brings the technical chops needed to build a platform that not only works but scales. Together, they’ve created a company that addresses one of the most critical bottlenecks in the decarbonization movement.
Our investment in Rock Rabbit’s $3.1M seed round, alongside Powerhouse Ventures and MUUS Climate Partners, fits nicely into our electrification investment theme, which we’ve written out in The Climate Revolution Runs on Software. In that post, we outline our strategy to invest in startups electrifying mobility, buildings, industry and enabling grid agility. We have been looking for something in residential electrification, but we were frustrated with the options until we discovered Rock Rabbit. Now we are working with excited anticipation to see how we can help make incentive programs that work.
