Seattle-based LevelTen Energy, a startup facilitating the deployment of clean energy projects, raised a $65 million Series D round from tech giants Microsoft and Google, among other high profile backers.
“We see a massive opportunity to bring our transaction infrastructure to new, really important adjacent climate technologies and to expand geographically and to add some new customer types to the platform,” LevelTen CEO and founder Bryce Smith said in an interview with GeekWire.
The new investments will allow the business to spread beyond the 29 countries in North America and Europe in which it currently operates. The funds will help LevelTen bolster its marketplace for clean energy that’s available 24/7, and collaborate on efforts to grow the hydrogen power sector.
LevelTen describes itself as the world’s largest online marketplace connecting buyers, sellers, advisors and financiers of clean energy projects. The company’s platform has been used for transactions totaling more than $14.8 billion.
Smith launched the business in 2016. The company has raised a total of $125 million and has 130 employees.
The funding round comes as the artificial intelligence boom is starting to strain energy supplies. Tech giants including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta are hustling to expand their renewable energy options in order to meet their climate goals while still embracing AI, which requires massive amounts of energy for training models and computing.
There’s also the push to electrify transportation, heating and cooling buildings, industrial processes and other operations that traditionally relied on fossil fuels.
The challenges are “certainly real but at the same time, I think we’re fully capable of accommodating that new load,” Smith said. “There are a portfolio of technologies that I think make us more than capable of accommodating new demand.”
That can include energy storage using massive batteries and improvements to grid operations, Smith said.
“I’m very optimistic on the deployment front,” he added. “It doesn’t mean we don’t have lots of work to do. But we do know how to do it.”
On Monday, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell helped host an energy summit in Seattle to discuss the daunting energy demands looming on the horizon. Many event participants shared more anxious outlooks about meeting demand, citing challenges with costs and community buy in, among other issues.
LevelTen began as a matchmaker between developers that wanted to build wind farms and solar projects, and smaller businesses, universities and other institutions who wanted to invest in clean energy but couldn’t afford funding an entire project. The startup created portfolios of projects that allowed smaller buyers to pay for slices of the different projects through Power Purchase Agreements, or PPAs.
Over the years, the company has grown to offer a suite of projects, services and data collection that support the deployment of carbon-free power. Smith said the platform is power-source agnostic and can be quickly adapted to support sales of new technologies such as nuclear power and hydrogen.
In early 2023, LevelTen and Google Cloud teamed up to develop a new platform called LEAP that accelerates energy deal making. Current agreements can take more than a year to hammer out, but the redesigned approach can cut that down to two or three months.
In December, the company announced a collaboration with Google, Microsoft, AES and Constellation to develop what it says is a “first-of-its-kind” trading and management platform for power deals that track when the power was produced.
These so-called “granular certificates” help companies including Google and Microsoft that have pledged to use clean energy around the clock. Traditional purchase deals lacked that time element in their accounting.
The Series D round was led by global firm B Capital, with participation from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Aster, Constellation, Google, Intercontinental Exchange, NGP Energy Capital, Prelude Ventures, ZOMA Capital and others.
https://ift.tt/R7QES9X July 16, 2024 at 10:00AM GeekWire
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