Participated · Series A · Mar 2022

David Energy is a technology-driven retail energy provider led by CEO James McGinniss with a mission to run the grid on clean energy 24/7/365. The company builds a network of connected devices that respond to fluctuations in clean energy generation in real time. It operates two business lines and currently serves residential electricity customers in Texas and multi-unit business owners in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Texas. David Energy plans to use new funding to continue scaling both business lines in its active states and to begin expanding across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Since its launch in 2019 the company has raised a total of $50M from venture capital and strategic investors. David Energy offers a software-driven retail electricity platform that integrates with customer devices (smart thermostats, EV chargers, backup generators, batteries, and solar) to analyze and control demand in real time. The platform leverages distributed energy resources directly into electricity markets to buy and deliver power more efficiently than incumbent providers and shares savings with customers. David positions its product to reduce costs, avoid outages, and lower reliance on carbon-intensive peaker plants while introducing transparency and modernity to a traditionally opaque industry. The company has been operating as a retail energy provider in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts and has submitted an application to expand into Texas. Financially, David Energy recently closed a $20.5 million Series A to scale its offerings. The company plans to use the capital to rapidly scale its SMB offering in New York, expand services into Texas, and launch a beta residential product in both markets. David Energy operates a software platform called Mycor that leverages building demand data and on-site assets to shift energy use to times when renewable power is most available and cheapest. The company bundles its energy-management software with a market energy supply contract, selling energy to customers at a fixed price and capturing margins from differences in wholesale pricing. To underwrite customer purchases, David obtained a $15 million monthly revolving credit facility from Hartree Partners that provides working capital to buy power upfront. The startup also raised $4.1 million in venture financing led by Equal Ventures, alongside Operator Partners, Box Group, Greycroft, Sandeep Jain, Xuan Yong, Kiran Bhatraju and Jason Jacobs’ My Climate Journey Collective. David holds retail electricity licenses in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts and says it plans to expand around the country. The company previously raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round in March 2020. David Energy has developed a proprietary machine-learning Energy Operating System that streamlines wholesale energy purchasing, reports sustainability metrics, and optimizes distributed energy resources such as smart thermostats, battery storage, and solar for commercial and industrial buildings. The platform is designed to give building owners and operators control and visibility over energy supply contracts while integrating customer resources into energy markets. The company takes a flat SaaS fee rather than a large markup on procured power to align incentives with customers. David Energy acquired R3 Energy Management prior to the Pre-Seed fundraise and leverages that team and technology as part of its offering. Founders James McGinniss (CEO), Brian Maxwell, and Ahmed Salman (CTO) bring experience in energy management, automation, and renewable project development. The company positions itself to help customers source cleaner energy and comply with new regulations such as New York’s Climate Mobilization Act.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2021

CattleEye develops an autonomous video monitoring product that uses machine vision artificial intelligence to monitor the performance and welfare of cows. The system conducts automatic inspections and analysis to provide a complete solution for livestock farmers. The company plans to use its Seed funding to bring its livestock welfare and performance monitoring product to market. CattleEye emphasizes improving the lives of farmers and their livestock through next-generation AI-powered autonomous monitoring. The company was founded in January 2019 by Terry Canning and is based in Belfast, UK. In October 2021 CattleEye raised £1.8 million in a Seed round led by Techstart Ventures with participation from Seventure Partners and Turntide Technologies. CattleEye offers an AI-backed, autonomous livestock monitoring platform that uses camera footage and computer vision to identify individual dairy cows and analyze health and reproductive signals such as sickness, lameness, estrus, and body condition. The system is installed by mounting a security camera roughly three meters above the dairy building exit; users provide an IP address and CattleEye connects the feed to the cloud. The company provides app-based insights that can integrate with existing farm systems and plans to launch as a subscription service after current pilots. Piloting has scaled quickly — the service grew from monitoring 90 head to 7,500 head in three months. The hardware entry cost for users is about $150 per camera. CattleEye is led by co-founder Terry Canning, who previously built and later sold livestock management platform Farm Wizard.