Porsche’s venture arm has taken a minority stake in 1Komma5, a five-month-old German startup that aims to provide households with everything they need for a climate-neutral home, including energy storage, charging infrastructure for electric vehicles and solar energy.
The investment, the amount of which has not been disclosed, follows a number of transactions Porsche Ventures has made over the past two years, including in Israel Sensor technology startup TriEye, online electric Micromobility retailer RidePanda and Virtual Sensing Startup Tactile Mobility.
This investment deviates a little from the typical mobility tech play of Porsche Ventures.
“With this investment we want to underline our ambitions in the area of smart cities and sustainability,” said Patrick Huke, Head of Porsche Ventures Europe and Israel to TechCrunch.
The Hamburg startup was founded by Micha Grueber, CFO, and Philipp Schröder, who previously worked for Tesla and the energy storage company Sonnen.
The company – its name is a nod to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 ° C – is on an interesting path to its one-stop-shop goal.
Today, all companies concentrate on selling components such as solar or energy storage, said Schröder in a recent interview. At the same time, nobody in Europe is focused on bringing these decentralized assets together. That will inevitably lead to problems, says Schröder.
“In a decentralized energy world there will be problems if every house has a heat pump and a charging station and a storage system and they do not communicate at network level (or with each other), there will be problems,” he said.
1Komma5 aims to bring everything together through its software and acquisitions. Specifically, 1Komma is aiming to buy leading electrical installation companies in Germany – and will eventually expand into other countries such as Austria and Switzerland – that focus on renewable energies such as solar, heat pumps and energy storage. 1Komma5 offers these companies the company software for administrative tasks and customer relationship management as well as energy management software that combines charging, solar and energy storage.
What makes the business of 1Komma5 interesting is the plan to combine these components such as solar and energy storage at house and grid level, said Schröder.
The startup has made five acquisitions to date through cash and equity deals.
The young startup has great ambitions to use 100 million euros in cash and shares over the next two years to acquire more of these renewable energy-focused installation companies. It is aimed at installation companies with a turnover between 5 million and 20 million euros and a skilled workforce – not at sales companies that simply outsource to other contractors.
The funding from Porsche will be used to support the expansion of 1Komma5, a plan that includes the opening of retail locations that embody a high-quality Apple-design-like atmosphere where potential customers can learn about the essential building blocks of a carbon neutral home . For example, customers in these stores can see a Porsche Taycan next to a home charger, an energy storage device and a solar system.
The first showrooms are planned at Hamburg’s Inner Alster and in Lingen an der Ems and are expected to open in the first quarter of 2022.
Porsche has no immediate plans to offer 1Komma5 products to its own customer base. However, as Huke noted, Porsche Ventures is making strategic investments and will look at various options in the medium to long term.
