Eneida is an innovative SME, founded in 2012 in Coimbra (Portugal), strongly connected to the city’s university. Eight years later, this new financing round will allow the Eneida team to further develop and grow internationally, with a capital increase of 4.5 million euros with Korys and 200M as lead investors. Existing shareholders HCapital, Portugal Ventures, EIT InnoEnergy and the Founders also take part in this new round to confirm their belief in the company’s potential. Eneida is already active in Europe, Australia and New Zealand and aims to become the world leader in LV grid monitoring, forecasting and controlling services.
With the actual rise of residential solar panels, EV charging stations, heat pumps and behind the meter storage, network operators are faced with a strong increase in variability of supply and demand in the local grids. As a result, distribution system operators (DSO) are faced with challenges previously only addressed at the level of transmission operators (TSO).
Eneida provides new insights to these network operators by installing specially designed smart sensors in neighbourhood substations. The data retrieved from these sensors, and from other neighbourhood sources, is transformed into actionable information on the Eneida DeepGrid® platform, supporting DSOs in real-time monitoring and optimisation of the grid.
The company focuses on the low voltage market, which consists of the grid segment situated between the secondary substation and the residential metering point.
Eneida already services customers on a worldwide basis. However, the ambition is to scale the solution and further build on the data analytics capabilities in terms of grid forecasting and grid planning.
“Thanks to this new financing round, we will be able to accelerate on our mission of Zero Emissions Neighbourhood through Neighbourhood Grid Intelligence, by further innovating and expanding our portfolio of operational analytics applications for the low voltage network”, says Carlos Pina Teixeira, CEO of Eneida.
Carlos also emphasized that this investment “will help to cement our current relationships with DSOs and New Energy Players, in the geographies we are already operating as well as new, one neighbourhood at a time”.
“This investment has a strong fit with our focus on energy transition technologies” says Loïc de Schaetzen, Investment Director at Korys. “The electricity grid is one of the bottlenecks for the further integration of renewable energy assets. To further enable the integration of these renewables, the grid requires significant investments and optimisations. Grid operators need to be able to reduce these investments through innovative technologies and we firmly believe that Eneida’s technology is the perfect answer here”.