To Help Businesses Save On Energy Costs, Redaptive Inc. Raises $20M

Redaptive Inc. has closed on a $20 million funding round led by commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE.

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ENGIE New Ventures, GXP Investments, the VC arm of Great Plains Energy Inc., and Linse Capital also participated in the round. The San Francisco provider of commercial Efficiency-as-a-Service (EaaS) plans to use the new capital infusion to expand its product offerings and reach a larger market of commercial customers by growing its sales and marketing teams.

Arvin Vohra, Co-CEO at Redaptive, described the funding as a growth equity round. The company currently has 40 employees and projects it will increase its employee base by more than 25 percent by the end of 2018.

Since its inception in 2014, Redaptive said it has secured around $200 million in contracts for commercial and industrial customers such as McKesson, Aramark, and other Fortune 500 companies. The company claims to have generated about a total 423 million kWh of saved energy.

Redaptive’s EaaS model gives businesses a way to conduct portfolio-wide efficiency upgrades that have the potential to generate immediate utility savings with customers only paying for verified avoided energy, according to the company.

“Last year alone, our solutions generated savings of $250 million in avoided kWh,” Redaptive Co-CEO John Rhow told Crunchbase News. “Redaptive brings a deeper level of visibility into assets, empowering our customers to measure their energy assets as currency.”

The company’s offerings provide efficiency upgrades that include materials, installation, and maintenance. Redaptive plans to target new customers across the industrial, manufacturing, retail and healthcare sectors.

For its part, CBRE said that it invested in the startup because Redaptive gives its clients “an opportunity to save them money, be better stewards of the environment, and track their energy use at a deeper level, across their real estate portfolios.”

ENGIE New Ventures Managing Director Hendrik Van Asbroeck said in a statement that Redaptive’s offerings remove the barriers that “a lack of capital and uncertainty over savings” has created for the energy efficiency industry in the past.

“Redaptive’s energy solutions are unique and compelling, and we believe the team is ideally suited to bring Efficiency-as-a-Service swiftly to scale,” he said.

“We’re capitalizing in part on the nexus of the development of building IoT, which is making some of these fixtures smart enough that we can get a more granular understanding,” Vohra said. “Because how can you understand how to reduce consumption without getting to the granular level of it?”

Since many of Redaptive’s customers don’t have the internal staff or resources to roll out technologies across disparate assets or utilities located in hundreds of geographies, the startup does the work for them.

“We will invest in their building portfolios so they can get full transparency on an isolated basis,” he added.  “We then only bill a customer effectively on a per kWh basis verified through our data in a method that is similar to a power purchase agreement.”