We were thrilled to learn that Clean Urban Energy, the first place winner of Clean Energy Trust's inaugural business contest held in March of this year, last week announced a $7mm A round investment led by Battery Ventures whom CUE met at our contest. Matt Garrett of Battery was a judge at the event along with 19 other industry experts from Chicagoland and elsewhere. From CUE's press release:
“Smart building technologies are quickly becoming a significant new category of investment in cleantech, where energy efficiency meets mainstream IT,” said Jason Matlof, Battery Ventures Partner. “CUE’s a perfect example of this trend. Their solution uniquely combines proven building physics, a robust hosted software analytics platform, and a SaaS business model to deliver dramatic energy spending savings to commercial office buildings. Rich Earley is a proven entrepreneur and leader and we’re excited to partner with him to help grow CUE into a category leading, sustainable business.”
CET is seeing significant momentum in the Energy IT space locally. Because this subsector of cleantech is more capital efficient, the financial benefits are very tangible and the technology solutions are relatively cost effective to deploy, venture investors around the country are taking notice and funding a wide assortment of commercial, industrial and residential product companies. Chicago is a great region to deploy the commercial solutions because of the high concentration of large, aging buildings.
On the residential side, demand response management is a way to educate consumers about how to reduce their overall energy consumption and how to shift demand to off-peak hours when energy prices are cheaper. Advanced metering infrastructure, or smart meters, is critical to deploying these software solutions because the data generated by the meters is what the technologists use to provide feedback to the consumers. Illinois lags other states in deploying this technology, and compared to the coasts, we have relatively cheap electricity. Thus the entrepreneurs are turning to the commercial and industrial markets.
While we'd like to think our mentors and coaching helped Rich Early and Vince Cushing make a more effective pitch to the audience of investors and energy executives back in March, we know that there is a fair amount of luck in these things... and over four years of Vince methodically building a meaningful solution. We are just grateful to have a success story to share with the community.
Congratulations to Rich and Vince and the team at Clean Urban Energy. Who's next?
