Companion.energy raises €7.8M to run big enterprises' energy in real time

Ghent-based Companion.energy has raised a €7.8 million seed co-led by Germany's Realyze Ventures and the UK's Pi Labs, with France's Asterion Ventures and existing investors joining.

Energy as a position to manage

Companion's premise, in co-founder Jonas Verstraeten's words, is that the energy transition turns every large industrial buyer into an active energy manager — and that "spreadsheets and quarterly check-ins" cannot do that job. Its platform connects a company's energy contracts, operational systems and distributed assets into one place, then continuously forecasts demand, models market exposure and automates energy decisions in real time. The company says it cuts clients' energy costs by 10–30%.

Past the early adopters

What makes the seed notable is the customer list, which already reads like a late-stage company's. Companion says it serves more than 30 enterprise customers across Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland — including TotalEnergies, KPN, the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Interparking and Proximus Group — and grew its customer base and revenue roughly tenfold over the past year, passing €1 million in ARR. Its platform manages more than 2 TWh of energy a year across customer portfolios and supports over 200 MW of distributed assets.

Founded in 2022 by Verstraeten and Thomas Vyncke, the company will use the round to deepen the platform's multi-asset, multi-market optimisation and to expand commercially across Europe, starting with Germany and Spain. It is the enterprise-software counterpart to the same decarbonisation push that lifts a hardware play like GALVANY: as energy gets volatile and distributed, the layer that manages it becomes its own market.