Power supply is one of the biggest issues affecting how technology will evolve over time—a challenge that may be closer when you’re looking at batteries for things like cell phones or electric vehicles, but it’s certainly not limited to only in consumer technology. Call a startup Instagrid uses software to scale the mountain when it comes to enterprise-grade portable chargers. It has garnered a lot of attention, selling 30,000 units of its flagship product ‘One’ to date and growing 100% annually, and today it announces a $95 million Series C to bolster its growth strategy. The funding is valued at between $400 million and $500 million, post-money.
For now, lithium-ion remains the main game in town when it comes to rechargeable batteries, and while materials are bound to change and improve, the lithium-ion battery, while improving, has some key limitations. “In lithium-ion in the last 10 years, the cost has dropped by 90% and the energy density has increased by 300%, and the power density has even increased by 400%. But the power conversion didn’t continue,” Andreas Sedlmayr, the co-founder and co-CEO, said in an interview. “So for us, we really looked at why it’s broken and how can we fix it? In the end, what we did is we took a hardware problem and turned it into software.”
The company, he said, has written “about 500,000 lines of software code” to improve power extraction from its battery, which currently weighs 20 kilograms, measures just 42x21x42 cm and can be fully recharged in a few hours when connected to a regular electric drift. electrical outlet.
Funding is provided by Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) — the later-stage investment arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s (MSIM) private equity strategy 1GT also participated, as well as previous investors Energy Impact Partners, SET Ventures, blueworld.group, Hightech Gründerfonds and Pierre-Pascal Urbon (who chairs Instagrid’s advisory board). .
Instagrid, based in Stuttgart in Germany’s industrial heartland, had only previously raised about $55 million since its founding in 2018.
Sedlmayr co-founded and leads the company with Sebastian Berning. Both have PhDs in materials science and worked in battery technology at Bosch, seeing the challenges from the other side: batteries that power different devices, used by people on the move, that need recharging regularly.
“But Sebastian and I are entrepreneurs at heart, so we decided this is the time to go out and build something from the ground up to help with that,” he said.
Instagrid’s focus on business scenarios—industrial customers, utility providers, medical and emergency services, and media companies are among its customers—stemmed directly from that. Bypassing direct competition with her former employer, among other things, she is not (for now) looking at how to manage batteries in devices, but the generators used to charge these electrical machines when the power grid is not available. Sedlmayr, in fact, told me about this story from Las Vegas, where he was attending a concrete industry conference: This is a sign of the company’s target user, but also of the area where the company is now focusing its business. development.
One of the problems that Instagrid is going to solve is environmental: existing, old-style generators are first of all expensive, powerful and harmful to the environment, and organizations are looking for alternatives to power their work.
There are probably many tens of thousands of these already in use in the world – Instagrid’s lead investor here puts the number of combustion engines in the world, of a wider range of products, at 50 million – and they need replacing.
Only one study, covering the humanitarian aid sector, found that they exist possibly 11,000 fuel powered generators are used in various aid organizations.
“Our initial conservative estimates are that humanitarian agencies spend more than $100 million on fuel annually, emitting nearly 200,000 tons of CO2,” the report notes. (He also happens to suggest a different alternative to what Instagrid has built: solar systems, which represent another alternative that exists today that Instagrid could also adopt.)
The other problem Instagrid seeks to solve is controllability: as “dumb” machines that just fill up and run, these generators can be difficult to manage and control. The software component of the Instagrid system essentially allows an organization to manage its batteries like a remote fleet: you can understand where power needs to be used and where it can be turned off, how much power is left, and more.
This is the key aspect of what attracted TVG, essentially a technology investor, to the company.
“We were drawn to Instagrid’s new use of software to extract higher performance from battery cells and were particularly excited after discussing the company’s technology with other parts of the OTPP portfolio,” European MD Avid Larizadeh-Duggan told TechCrunch. “Through our real estate and infrastructure investments we have been able to assess that thousands of generators are deployed in the field and that these present significant disadvantages in terms of cost, health and safety and the working environment in addition to the associated carbon emissions. But until now there was no viable portable battery solution for professional use. Existing portable battery packs are aimed at consumers and lack the top power output for professional application. Instagrid solves this through proprietary electronics and software that deliver unmatched peak power and allow Instagrid products to power anything with a plug.”
The focus on software and cloud-based access looks in some ways like the future of how batteries are developed and improved. (Research at a UK university, for example, has found a way to help better understand battery health on mobile devices, another indirect way of improving their efficiency.)
This also potentially opens the door to malicious hacking, but Sedlmayr said he is focused on strong security around his system and that there have been no hacking attempts to date. However, this threat could increase with its development.
Larizadeh-Duggan said areas of opportunity for the company include more accessories to improve cloud monitoring, including more emissions and energy usage monitoring and analysis. improving the startup’s power management algorithms to focus on “three-phase power and uninterruptible power supply as required in special use cases.” and more material.
That’s an area currently centered around lithium-ion, though Sedlmayr describes the company as “materials agnostic” and willing to work with other kinds of battery designs over time as they emerge.
