London's Boldr raises €4.2M to connect home HVAC systems into a grid-scale demand-response network — through contractors, not apps

Boldr (London) has raised €4.2 million ($5 million) in a pre-Series A round led by Unconventional Ventures, with Ada Ventures, Tetrad Ventures, Davidovs Venture Collective, Roxbury Asset Management, Inclimo Climate Tech Fund, Prosegur, Techstars, S20 Fund, and PropelX participating. The round follows an oversubscribed €2.7 million ($3.2 million) Seed in 2025. The company was founded in 2022 by Madi Ablyazov (CEO), Toma Paro, and Matheus Marotzke.

Boldr builds an energy management platform that connects HVAC systems — heating, ventilation, and air conditioning — in homes and commercial buildings into a demand-response network. What distinguishes the model from previous smart-thermostat plays is the distribution channel: Boldr works through HVAC contractors, not consumers.

The contractor-first thesis

The argument is straightforward, even if it cuts against a decade of consumer-app thinking in energy tech. Connected thermostats require installation. The person who installs them — and who services them, replaces them, and recommends them to every customer they service — is the contractor, not the homeowner. Most demand-response platforms have treated contractors as a distribution nuisance rather than a commercial lever. Boldr treats them as the product.

The company's Universal Thermostat is hardware-agnostic: it works with existing HVAC equipment without rewiring, which the company says saves contractors up to €428 per installation in labour. That saving is the commercial pitch to the contractor — a faster, cheaper installation that they can offer at the same price point. Once installed, each thermostat sends real-time telemetry to Boldr's cloud, where the fleet becomes a demand-response asset: clustered units adjusting draw at peak moments in exchange for utility incentives.

Established US distribution partnerships with Daikin and Bosch-owned Source 1 give the platform reach into the North American market through existing HVAC supply chains — a go-to-market architecture that most European climate hardware startups spend years trying to build from scratch.

The demand-response layer

The grid-intelligence play sits above the contractor relationship. Each thermostat enrolled in the Boldr network represents a controllable load — one unit is negligible, but at the tens of thousands of units that a contractor network provides access to, the aggregated capacity becomes meaningful to utilities running demand-response programmes, particularly during summer peak cooling hours and winter heating stress events.

The energy transition has created a structural demand for residential flexibility: as more variable renewables enter the grid, utilities need dispatchable loads they can call on. Boldr's bet is that HVAC is the single biggest controllable residential load, and that the contractor channel is the fastest way to reach it at scale.