PowerLabs, a Nigerian energy and climate technology startup, has raised an undisclosed sum of pre-seed money to expedite the deployment of its flagship AI-enabled energy orchestration platform throughout commercial and industrial businesses.
PowerLabs creates, develops, and implements intelligent, customized energy consumer applications, devices, and services that enable consumers to obtain electricity at the most affordable prices with zero emissions and downtime.
Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures participated in the startup’s pre-seed funding round, which was led by Breega. In addition to laying the groundwork for growth into important West African markets, it will expedite the implementation of Pai Enterprise, the company’s flagship AI-enabled energy orchestration platform, across commercial and industrial enterprises in Nigeria.
The Pai Enterprise platform uses real-time sensing, communication, and actuation across various dispersed energy sources. The platform allows organizations to manage their own intelligent microgrid by continuously modeling supply, demand, and operational constraints. Consequently, the platform turns energy from a reactive issue into a strategic, proactive resource.
“Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that don’t speak the same language. At PowerLabs, we believe decentralisation doesn’t have to mean disorder. We’re building the intelligence layer that will prove that distributed energy resources can operate as a unified source while leveraging its disaggregation to offer flexibility, cost efficiency, carbon neutrality and redundancy … more than a centralised energy system ever could,” said Tobe Arize, CEO and co-founder of PowerLabs.
“We backed PowerLabs at the pre-seed stage because we believe intelligent orchestration will be essential to solving Africa’s energy reliability challenge. The team is building the software and hardware layer that enables businesses to coordinate multiple distributed energy sources in real time. We’re excited to support them as they prove the impact of this model across critical sectors over the next 12–18 months,” said Tosin Faniro-Dada, partner at Breega.
