OPOWER, a Smart Grid software company, announced the closing of a $50 million strategic round of financing. The round was co-led by Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with participation from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), OPOWER’s largest investor. The investment will support OPOWER’s rapid expansion and accelerate its product development efforts in order to add new products and features to its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform in 2011. Global demand for OPOWER’s products and services is at an all-time high. The company’s platform has been proven to help electric and gas utilities engage their customers, drive unprecedented gains in energy efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction. OPOWER’s prior financing was in 2008, with capital raised from NEA and early-stage fund MHS Capital.
"We are thrilled to raise this strategic round of financing from three of the best venture capital firms in the business," said Dan Yates, CEO and co-founder of OPOWER. "The addition of Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers builds on the strength of our existing investors, and is an important step forward in achieving our goal of engaging tens of millions of households about their energy use and helping drive the next wave of energy efficiency in the U.S. and abroad."
OPOWER’s SaaS platform is the industry’s leading customer engagement platform, and has quickly gained popularity in the utility industry as an innovative, information-based energy efficiency program, as well as the leading front-end for utilities’ Smart Grid deployments. The platform uses data analytics to evaluate a household’s energy usage patterns – without the need for hardware to be installed inside the home – and applies behavioral science techniques and a multi-channel communication strategy to engage millions of homes and motivate energy saving actions. Currently deployed to more than two million homes, OPOWER is delivering enough energy savings to power nearly 50,000 homes on an ongoing basis. The company expects its deployed customer base to more than quadruple in 2011. OPOWER currently works with 45 utilities throughout the U.S., including seven of the country’s ten largest energy providers.
"OPOWER is an elegant and proven solution for utilities to cost-effectively reach energy efficiency goals," said Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "It is a straight forward value for customers – clearly measuring savings on their energy bills."
"We believe OPOWER has a profound opportunity to leverage the power of the Internet and social media to deepen consumer engagement in the energy world, and to use this engagement to drive critical gains in efficiency," said Peter Wagner, partner at Accel Partners. "We look forward to supporting OPOWER’s continued growth as the next-generation SaaS leader of the energy sector."
