GridBeyond secures £9m investment to fund research and expansion

GridBeyond has secured a total of £9 million from investors including the Portuguese and Irish utilities EDP and ESB, as well as the venture capital arm of the French oil giant Total.

The firm operates in the UK and Ireland and has developed a smart energy platform named Point for aggregating and optimising distributed generation and demand-side response in order to provide grid services and backup capacity.

The funding will support a doubling of its workforce over the next three years, an increase in research and development and expansion into other markets.

Chief executive and co-founder Michael Phelan said: “The newly completed financing round sets GridBeyond on the path to increase the reach of our intelligent energy platform, delivering world leading AI and powerful automation capabilities to smart grid and energy markets.

“This supports our ambition to advance the transition of the global energy networks towards digitalisation, decarbonisation, and decentralisation, all while enhancing commercial and operational benefits for market participants through fast-acting automation and optimisation of demand and distributed generation.”

Vera Pinto Pereira, chief executive of EDP Commercial, said: “This investment is driven by our ambition to gain experience in managing flexibility in distributed assets and seek new energy products and services that meet the changing needs of the energy customer, as well as by our objective to strengthen EDP’s international expansion.”

And Brian Ryan, strategy manager at ESB, commented: “ESB is pleased to announce today our further investment in our strategic partnership with GridBeyond, following a significant investment in 2016.

“This relationship has allowed ESB’s smart energy services division to leverage from GridBeyond cutting-edge technology, as part of our overall portfolio of energy solutions, to significantly reduce energy costs for large-scale energy users.”