The entrepreneur wants to accelerate the energy transition.
(Photo:فComma5)
Stuttgart, Dusseldorf The Hamburg start-up 1Komma5 Grad has gained new prominent investors and is increasing its forecast. The platform, which wants to enable everyone to live climate-neutral, has now collected more than 200 million euros from investors, as founder Philipp Schröder, former head of Tesla Germany, told the Handelsblatt. This increases the investment scope of the company, which was founded nine months ago, to 300 million euros.
The venture capital consortium consists of eCapital, BTOV Ventures, Porsche Ventures, the French company Eurazeo, Blue Elephant Ventures and now also the Haniel and Schürfeld families. “We will use the funds for further acquisitions, investments in digitization and the development of our energy IOT platform,” said Schröder. The start-up sees the bottleneck in the energy transition in on-site implementation and in digitization.
1Komma5 wants to offer photovoltaic systems, electricity storage, charging infrastructure for electric cars and heat pumps from the product to the installation and the green electricity contract from a single source. The most important technical project is an IoT module for controlling and networking the various components. It is scheduled to be presented in Berlin on April 28th.
Increasing demand for renewable energies
And so Schröder is doing exactly what investors and customers are currently demanding. Providers of solar systems, storage systems and heat pumps report a real “run” on renewable energies. The photovoltaic provider Zolar had already recorded growth of 300 percent at the end of last year. “Now, if you only compare February and March with the previous year, we see a tenfold increase,” reports Zolar founder Alex Melzer.
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With their own solar system in combination with a storage system, on the other hand, homeowners can produce part of their energy much more cheaply. For solar systems, storage systems and heat pumps, industry representatives are expecting double-digit growth for the second year in a row.
More and more people want to use renewable energies themselves.
(Photo: obs)
With his company, Schröder now wants to make the complex processes easier for customers in order to accelerate the energy transition overall. This mission is already reflected in the company name: it stands for the global goal of keeping the temperature increase on earth below 1.5 degrees.
In order to build up advice and service, 1Komma5 Grad buys mostly from larger craft companies. Although they sacrifice their independence, they receive a share of the start-up and the service income as well as access to networking as well as software and hardware. Eight larger companies have already been taken over. Ten more will be added this year.
Schröder wants to have acquired 80 handicraft businesses by 2030. By then, 1.5 million buildings in Europe are to be supplied and connected via the platform with CO2-neutral technology for electricity, heat and mobility. The goal is market leadership. To date, the company has sold and installed around 35,000 CO2-neutral energy systems.
In the second half of 2021, the first months of its existence, the company had achieved sales of 23 million euros. Schröder has now significantly raised its sales target for this year. Instead of the previous 150 million euros, he now expects sales of 200 million euros. This means that 1Komma5 is growing faster than competitors like Enpal, which has been on the market for more than five years. With an investor valuation of more than one billion dollars, Enpal is the first green unicorn in Germany.
But the upheavals in the global economy are also leaving their mark on the renewables sector. Despite the high demand, many companies are expecting noticeable cuts over the course of the year due to supply chain problems and rising raw material prices. The prices also increase at the green companies by ten percent. The shortage of skilled workers is also an issue that is slowing down the acceleration of expansion.
Schroeder is nevertheless optimistic that things will continue at this pace for 1point 5. For his current project, he is increasingly relying on a network of old companions: eCapital was already the first investor in Sonnen GmbH, where, alongside Philipp Schröder, COO Jannik Schall and Sascha Koppe were leading managers. In the course of the most recent financing round, the founder and former CEO of Sonnen, Christoph Ostermann, was also appointed to the Supervisory Board.
More: Solar systems, storage tanks, heat pumps: Renewable energies are experiencing a boom