The Venture Codex

Led · Equity · Dec 2023

Renew Home combines Google Nest Renew and OhmConnect to offer load-shifting services that shift household energy use to off-peak or cleaner-grid times via smart thermostats and other devices. The offering today builds on Nest Renew functionality and OhmConnect’s platform, which has about 225,000 customers across thermostat brands and other devices; Google has not disclosed how many Nest devices use Nest Renew. OhmConnect is active in California, Texas and New York, and Renew Home plans to expand into new markets post-launch. The company intends to broaden beyond thermostat-based load shifting into whole-home energy management, including EV charging, solar systems, additional hardware partnerships and more nuanced energy-management software. Renew Home has set targets of accounting for 30 GW of shiftable load and serving 10 million homes by 2030. Financially, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners is providing a $100 million investment and will be the majority owner, while Google will remain a minority shareholder and is not investing in this transaction; no valuation was disclosed. OhmConnect operates a residential energy flexibility platform that rewards customers for smarter at-home electricity use. Led by CEO Cisco DeVries, the company helps hundreds of thousands of customers manage their electricity and pays them for saving power when the grid is stressed and likely to utilize dirtier generation. OhmConnect has paid more than $17 million in rewards to customers. Customers of Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric and Con Edison can sign up for free, and Texas residents can select OhmConnect as their retail electric provider. The company plans to use its new funding to integrate with dozens of technology and appliance companies, expand into new markets and support the build-out of several gigawatts of flexible electric load across the United States. OhmConnect operates a residential demand-response program that pays customers for reducing electricity use during peak events and sells the collective savings back to the grid. The company enables hundreds of thousands of customers to earn cash and prizes for timely, smarter home energy use and to reduce their utility bills and carbon footprint. An estimated 40% of OhmConnect customers are low-to-moderate income families, and the platform aims to enroll users in disadvantaged communities. OhmConnect says its community cut 1 GWh of energy during the August 2020 heat wave—equivalent to taking 600,000 homes off the grid for an hour—and users earned $1.3 million from the company for those efforts. Future plans tied to the new funding include expanding flexible demand capacity, increasing connections with grid-responsive smart devices, and maintaining reliable reductions during grid events. The company was founded in 2014 and operates from Oakland, Calif. OhmConnect operates a demand-response platform that aggregates residential energy reductions via push notifications and payouts to users, effectively creating a virtual power plant. The company has about 150,000 users on its platform and has paid out roughly $1 million to customers during recent California brownouts and blackouts. OhmConnect has demonstrated material grid impact, engaging customers to reduce almost one gigawatt-hour of usage during peak stress events. Leadership includes CEO Cisco DeVries and a CTO who previously served as Zynga’s CTO. The company is positioned to scale as part of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners’ Resilia initiative and to expand rewards-based demand-response participation across California. OhmConnect’s future plans with partners include rolling out smart devices, expanding residential participation, and integrating into broader distributed and bi-directional grid architectures. OhmConnect is an energy sharing service that lets households and apartment communities know when to share energy and pays participants for taking part. The company is led by CEO Matt Duesterberg and is based in San Francisco, California. OhmConnect's community of 300,000 energy sharers generates over 100 megawatts, the equivalent of four peaker power plants. The service coordinates residential load reductions and compensates users for participation. OhmConnect plans to use new funding to expand into markets beyond California, including New York, Texas and the rest of the country. Following the Series B, reported total funding stands at $15M.

Participated · Series C · May 2023

Amp Robotics builds AI-powered robotic sorting systems that use cameras and robotic arms to identify and pluck recyclables from conveyor belts. The company shifted its business model from placing robots in existing plants to running entire sorting facilities as a service. Amp handles operations, maintenance, and upgrades while contracting partners handle waste sourcing, offtake of valuable materials, and disposal of non-recyclables. The company charges customers per ton of waste sorted. The decade-old company has deployed around 400 robots and operates three facilities with another in the works. Amp recently raised $91M in a Series D, a round that was slightly smaller than its prior Series C, which raised $104M per SEC filings, highlighting fundraising headwinds for mid- to late-stage startups. AMP Robotics develops AI-powered robotic sorting systems (its flagship product is AMP Cortex) to pick and reclaim plastics, cardboard, paper, cans, cartons and other packaging types. The company says Cortex can perform 80 to 120 picks per minute and its AI platform has identified over 75 billion objects to date. AMP offers a more compact AMP Cortex-C and an integrated, standalone facility offering, and also resells recyclable commodities to end-market buyers. The startup employs around 200 people and reports a robotic fleet of roughly 275 units deployed in over 100 centers, with Waste Connections as its largest customer. AMP plans to grow its secondary sortation business across three U.S. production facilities in the Denver, Atlanta and Cleveland metro areas and pursue larger fleet-wide and international deployments. The company says new capital will help scale operations, retrofit existing recycling infrastructure and build technology and team capacity for upcoming opportunities. AMP Robotics develops AI-driven computer vision and high-speed robotics systems (AMP Cortex and AMP Neuron) that identify and sort recyclables from mixed material streams. Its technology recognizes materials by color, size, shape, opacity, and brand, and can recover items as small as bottlecaps or specific items like Keurig pods. AMP has hundreds of deployments across North America, Asia, and Europe and a coast-to-coast U.S. presence spanning more than 20 states, and signed its largest contract to deploy 24 systems with Waste Connections. The company will use the new funding to scale operations, develop new AI product applications for materials recovery facilities, and support market expansion with CPG partners such as Keurig Dr Pepper to help meet recycled-content goals. AMP's technology aims to improve material quality, worker safety, productivity, and reduce costs and greenhouse gas emissions while increasing recycling rates and resource recovery. Headquartered and manufactured in Colorado, AMP positions itself as the leading provider of AI-guided robotics systems for recycling globally. AMP Robotics is a Denver-based company that builds recycling robots combining computer vision, machine learning and robotic automation to improve sorting efficiency and material quality. Its systems can identify branded packaging and are used to sort plastics, cartons, fiber and metals, with deployments across multiple U.S. states. In October the company completed a 14-robot installation at Single Stream Recyclers, the largest single deployment in the recycling industry, and its robots can sort and pick about twice as fast as people with higher accuracy. AMP has two revenue streams: a robotics-as-a-service offering and a direct sales option, and it has made installations in California, Colorado, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. The company plans to use new funding to expand manufacturing capacity, broaden its market scope and push into international markets, and it is building out reporting capabilities tied to its vision systems. AMP is also exploring applications beyond recyclables, including automotive scrap and construction waste.