Deutsche Sanierungsberatung raises over €10M Series A to scale independent home energy renovation advice across Germany

Deutsche Sanierungsberatung (Berlin) — operating under the brand dsb — has raised over €10 million in a Series A round co-led by Simon Capital and VERBUND X Ventures. IBB Ventures, Vireo Ventures, and Atlantic Food Labs participate in the syndicate. The round follows a €3.6 million seed closed in February 2025 and was announced 21 July 2026.

The company was founded in 2024 by Sebastian Schmidt (CEO), Niclas Kern, and Adam Khenissi — three former employees of Enpal, the German residential solar installer. Their founding thesis addresses a gap Enpal and others exposed: the typical German homeowner who wants to renovate for energy efficiency encounters a procurement problem before a product problem. Subsidy applications are complex, contractor quotes inconsistent, and coordinating multiple trades across a whole-home renovation is opaque. Dsb offers independent consulting as the entry point — advice that is not tied to selling a specific product or contractor.

The independence thesis

Most home energy renovation businesses in Germany begin from a product position: a solar installer, a heat pump supplier, an insulation manufacturer. Dsb starts from a different premise. Its network of more than 300 certified energy consultants advises homeowners on the optimal scope and sequencing of renovations, identifies the applicable subsidies (Germany's federal KfW and BAFA programmes are the primary vehicles), and then coordinates the contractor network required to execute. The company reports it is on track for more than €15 million in revenue in 2026.

VERBUND, the Austrian energy company, is invested through its strategic venture arm VERBUND X Ventures. An energy utility taking an equity position in a home renovation advisory platform is not a purely financial bet: it reflects a strategic read that the transition to heat pumps, insulated envelopes, and decarbonised home energy is primarily a customer relationship business, and that whoever earns homeowner trust earliest holds a durable commercial position.

IBB Ventures (the Berlin investment bank's VC arm) and Vireo Ventures (climate-focused) round out a syndicate that mixes regional German capital with climate-thesis investors. Atlantic Food Labs is an outlier in the mix — an agri-food-focused fund whose dsb position is not immediately obvious from the company's description.

Revenue beyond the project fee

The Series A funds an expansion beyond the current advisory and project coordination model. Dsb is entering the B2B market — advising businesses and housing associations on building efficiency alongside its consumer business — and plans to launch a proprietary electricity tariff that would generate recurring revenue alongside project-based income. The electricity tariff play repositions dsb from a one-time service provider into a recurring energy relationship, but it also moves the company into competitive energy retail territory, where margins are thin and switching friction is the primary retention mechanism.

The founding team's Enpal heritage is visible in both the ambition and the pace: a seed in February 2025, a Series A 17 months later, and a revenue target that implies a business already generating meaningful volume. Whether independent advisory can sustain margin and trust at the scale the Series A implies — as client acquisition shifts from referral-driven to marketing-driven — is the central question the round must help answer.