Transform energy It betting on a more integrated approach to accelerating the decarbonization of the built environment. The startup, founded in Munich in Germany in May 2024, is run by a team with knowledge about scaling of energy enterprises, including the German department Platforma Energy Energy and Energy prices PORATION VERIVOX. He focuses on selling the update of the energy system on commercial real estate, guided by the owners of real estate in building portfolios.
Carbon dioxide emissions from heating buildings significantly contribute to climate change. Therefore, accelerating the transition to heat management to lower coal, corresponding to heat pumps and solar panels, is a key element of achieving climate goals. That is why there is a significant regulatory pressure in Europe for building owners to modernize energy.
At the same time, access to specialized skills required to perform these energy modernization projects-even simply understanding what to do to optimize a specific building-can decelerate the rush to install low carbon solutions.
Reshape Energy hopes that the comprehensive store model will help to throw away a part of the friction from the system-from the German market, but with the eye to expand elsewhere in Europe, when the approach scale.
Employment of energy improvement
“Why is it not enough to happen” was a key query that the founders kicked because they thought how to structure a company addressed to commercial buildings with energy modernization, CEO and co -founder Benjamin Stanzl, says TechCrunch.
“We saw a lot of momentum [energy upgrades for] Single -family houses … But when you look at commercial real estate, which is really our goal, it is very, very slow, “he says. “The largest [competitive] The threat is definitely the “do nothing” option.
The the explanation why the sector was so slow to download, are complex, suggests – this is not one missing song that, say, a recent piece of technology could fix; Rather, it is the systemic complexity of organizing all the different bits needed to effectively deliver such projects that stop the rate of change.
“The complexity of these projects is incredibly high,” he says. “The owners of commercial real estate simply do not have specialist knowledge. And some of them do not even want to deal with it, because this is not their basic business. “
Stanzl also indicates that construction is a sector that depends on trust – so a low level of trust may also decelerate progress.
The startup undertakes this inertia of energy update through the acquisition model, in which he buys existing firms in this sector to introduce key possibilities and relationships with clients-clients-the offer of energy optimization as a service.
The idea is to cover all stages of the project – from preliminary assessments and determining what is needed, to install recent systems and continuous service and maintenance. This also includes financing when customers want to spread the cost of putting in recent energy systems.
By covering the full chain of what is required to update energy, the startup believes that it will possibly unlock the scale performance, while leaning (and using) trusted customer relationships. It pours out of a muted work flow, which is normally more characterised by the sector, on Stanzl.
He says that the startup has so far raised more fragmentary work related to the update of energy, attached to the possibilities he brought. But the idea is to further expand what it will possibly offer and work on taking projects with many movable parts and much more complexity – say, corresponding to district heating installations – because they are still building activities.
Injection of financing
Reshape has already made some acquisitions to build its offer. There is more on cards – and the company will use the recent funding round price EUR 5 million, its first increase in external capital.
By buying smaller, often regional firms, they will shorten customer acquisition and connect relations and contacts, other firms have collected over the years, in addition to on the deck of key project implementation skills. Stanzl says that the acquisition model also provides full control over where and how skills are implemented.
“They served tons of of those firms all their lives, if not 1000’s [of customers]- He notes that Reshape brought a house. Until now, he has received an energy consulting company and a company dealing with planning, installation and maintenance of commercial planning, installation and maintenance.
“The control song is crucial because we need all companies to cooperate – and we need them to use common systems and common technology,” he adds, sketching their strategy to unlock their performance in the implementation of the project by combining trust and risk.
The founders put money where their lips are, contributing to an increase in EUR 5 million, which is loosely marked as the seed round. Although Stanzl claims that they are not convinced that a typical project financing model is for them, different approaches, corresponding to private equity, could also be higher matched.
Other investors in this round are PostScriptm Ventures, Vireo Ventures and some unnamed industry insiders.
Various models
In recent years, Germany has recorded a boom in startups of energy modernization, after a Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the resulting increase in gas prices. But the first wave of energy modernization activity – most of which focused on single -family houses – after this shock “definitely calmed down,” says Stanzl.
He says that players in space have more motivation to leave the lanes and a more connected approach to supplying one other wave of improvements. In turn, it allows you to solve more complex challenges, corresponding to commercial real estate updates.
“You cannot arrange a heat pump if you do not know what the electrical infrastructure of the building is, right? And if you do this, you’ll be able to suddenly promise your client a whole lot of savings, and then he’ll come back and you realize that they have to improve their transformer or something. Then all of your savings go out the window – he suggests.
“So I think that many people realize that if they simply focus on their little silo, it’s not enough.”
The Reshape model offering energy optimization services for building owners looks more efficient than some other approaches – corresponding to people who include the purchase of real estate to transform by modernizing energy infrastructure.
German startup ReneoOn the other hand, the Reneo property model implies that it is able to profit from any increase in the value of real estate – while Reshape stays only the service provider, but with much lower capital requirements to increase operations.
Stanzl claims that they developed activities that they were considering taking ownership of real estate – which might mean the need to do things, corresponding to real estate and tenants management services – but they decided that this is not the basic transitional mission of energy. He also indicates that commercial property owners may not want to sell their buildings – which might create barriers to scaling.
Another element that is often associated with energy transitions is updating the building’s insulation, because higher isolation will be a profit for the efficiency of the energy system. When asked about this, Stanzl says that although they will provide him, they are not “looking for him” – again, because it will possibly increase the complexity of the project.
They also categorically decided to get involved in cosmetic improvements in buildings.
“We are focused on energy, right? We want to look at energy infrastructure and energy material, “he emphasizes. “So problems [for target customers] Is more … how can we use waste heat? How do you optimize this, along with cooling loads – less around “How do you insulate the partitions?”