A few weeks ago we announced that Watty had closed a €3M investment round with EQT Ventures and other investors. We’re thrilled about having such great partners on-board to help us grow our company.
We also released a new homepage showing our latest product offering and a a pretty cool real-time tracker that shows the data passing through our platform. Everything is based on real data, no estimates!
We started Watty almost 3 years ago now with a simple observation: Energy companies already have a hardware installed in every home in the world (the energy meter) and there is a lot of value for both consumers and businesses in the data coming from this hardware. This value is not being captured by anyone today because the tools for ‘extracting’ or making the data relevant is missing. If Watty can build the software that does that job really well, then we could create massive benefits for consumers, their service providers and society in general by reducing emissions substantially.
During our 3 year journey we’ve had to revise and re-think many of those assumptions, but our core technology bet remains the same: The only way to deliver a cheap, convenient and user-friendly ‘smart home’ experience is to use a single hardware device paired with great data analytics.
In the beginning of this year we released our platform for doing this to the market. You can now push energy meter data to our platform and we will identify when each appliance in the home was used and how much energy it used. No gateway. No smart-plugs. A truly easy and low-cost solution. Since then we’ve attracted several partners who are now using our platform to take their customer experience to the next level.
Why did we raise more money and where are we going?
We believe that our industry is in it’s infancy. Just in the past 3 months we’ve seen Tesla offer to acquire SolarCity in order to develop a new solar/battery product, Oracle acquire Opower, Sonnen closing new financing, Google releasing Google Home, Tado raising 23 MUSD.
These and many other developments are indicating that we are going to see millions and millions of home getting connected in different ways over the next few years. The technology we’ve built at Watty seem to be beneficial to most of these projects, and we’ve been unable to keep up with demand for some time now. This new round enables us to expand our market activities and to double-down on certain strategic partnerships.
There seem to be a growing consensus that this is going to be a valuable segment. Speaking at the Symposium conference in Stockholm earlier this year, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Alphabet (parent company of Google), was asked when AI was going to solve a ‘real’ problem. Eric answered that applying AI to understanding how electricity is consumed and managed (in the grid) was one of the biggest problems to solve in order to stop global climate change.
Over the coming year we’re making a big swing to go after this opportunity. If you’re interested in partnering with us don’t hesitate to get in touch, now is a great time.
If you think working on this problem seems like a good way to spend your time, check our jobs page. Finally I want to thank all the people who have helped us get to this point. And most of all I want to thank the amazing Watty team for delivering outstanding results the past 6 months!
