Energy platform lands €7.8 million funding boost

A Belgian energy software company is expanding across Europe after securing multi-million-euro backing to accelerate the development of its platform for large energy users.

Ghent-based Companion.energy has raised €7.8 million in a seed funding round led by Cologne-based Realyze Ventures and London-headquartered Pi Labs, with participation from Paris-based Asterion Ventures and existing investors.

The company provides software that helps industrial and commercial organisations manage energy consumption and renewable assets in real time. 

Its platform connects energy contracts, operational systems and distributed assets, enabling businesses to optimise energy use, reduce costs and improve the performance of electrification projects.

Thomas Vyncke, co-founder of Companion.energy, said: “European energy markets are undergoing a structural shift. 

“As penetration of renewables increases and industrial demand becomes more electrified, electricity markets are becoming significantly more volatile and operationally complex. 

“Energy prices that once moved seasonally now fluctuate in real time. 

“At the same time, enterprises are deploying growing fleets of batteries, solar installations, EV charging infrastructure and electrified industrial systems. 

“Most companies still manage this environment through fragmented tooling, spreadsheets and static procurement processes but they need a system that runs and optimises energy operations continuously.”

Companion.energy currently serves more than 30 enterprise customers across Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, including TotalEnergies, KPN, Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Interparking and Proximus Group.

The business has experienced rapid growth over the past year, increasing both its customer base and revenue tenfold while surpassing €1 million in annual recurring revenue.

Its platform manages more than 2 TWh of annual energy consumption and production across customer portfolios, representing around €500 million in energy spend and revenues. 

It also supports more than 200 MW of distributed energy assets, including solar, wind, battery storage and EV charging infrastructure.

Bosses say the new investment will be used to enhance the platform’s optimisation capabilities across multiple energy assets and markets, while supporting commercial expansion into new European territories, beginning with Germany and Spain.

Jonas Verstraeten, co-founder of Companion.energy, added: “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. 

“The work of the next decade is to give those teams software that can keep up. 

“This round lets us bring that software to many more enterprises, and help them turn their energy from a competitiveness risk into a competitive advantage.” 

Marnix Roes, investment manager at Realyze Ventures, added: “We were deeply impressed by the robustness of Companion.energy’s software and its ability to manage highly complex enterprise energy environments across multiple sites and markets. 

“Germany alone represents a massive opportunity as industrial and commercial enterprises increasingly look for ways to optimise flexibility, electrification and energy exposure operationally rather than manually.”

Dhruv Gupta, principal at Pi Labs, added: “Enterprise energy management is moving from static procurement and reporting toward 24x7 real-time optimisation. 

“Large enterprises spending tens of millions annually on energy still rely heavily on spreadsheets, dashboards and manual workflows. 

“Companion has built a deeply technical AI platform that fundamentally changes software from a recommendation engine to a system of execution. 

“This is what makes this category so important.”

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