Furo raises €3.44M to make industrial battery storage pay through software

Furo (Munich) has closed a €3.44 million ($4 million) round led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners (the family venture vehicle associated with Sheryl Sandberg and Tom Bernthal), Neo, and CDTM Venture Capital. The company builds software that replaces the rigid, factory-programmed charge–discharge rules embedded in industrial battery storage systems with a dynamic layer that optimises battery operation against real-time electricity prices — and it claims to reduce electricity costs for its commercial and industrial clients by up to 40%.

Founded in 2025 as Lumera Energy and rebranded to Furo in May 2026, the company was built by three graduates of the CDTM — the Centre for Digital Technology and Management, the joint programme run by LMU Munich and TU Munich — Lena Sophia Voß (CEO), Leonie Wagner, and Simon Wittner. The company now operates across more than 800 companies and 6,000 sites.

The software case for batteries

Industrial and commercial battery storage systems are typically delivered with a Battery Management System (BMS) that governs how the battery charges and discharges — when it draws from the grid, when it dispatches to a load, and when it participates in grid-balancing markets. Those rules are engineered for battery health and safety, not for electricity price arbitrage. In a stable, predictable power market, the distinction barely matters. In the German power market — where renewable generation has created intraday price volatility that can swing by multiples within hours — it matters enormously.

Furo's software layer sits above the BMS and reprograms the operating logic dynamically, using electricity price forecasts and real-time market signals to decide when a battery should charge cheaply and when it should discharge into the grid or to on-site loads at peak prices. The economic logic is straightforward: a battery that was purchased to reduce an electricity bill should be operated the way an energy trader would operate it, not the way an embedded controller programmed five years ago would.

Lena Sophia Voß: "Our customers did not buy a battery in order to own a technology, but in order to lower their electricity bill. In one of the most volatile power markets in the world, that is decided by the software, not by the hardware. That is exactly why we founded Furo."

The market and the competition

Furo operates in a segment that is attracting attention proportional to Germany's energy transition stakes. Several competitors have recently raised capital in the same space: Suena (Hamburg, €8 million), Einklang (Cologne, €2.2 million), and Scale Energy (Berlin, €2 million) are all working on variants of the same proposition — that the industrial energy storage market needs a software intelligence layer that the hardware manufacturers are not well-positioned to provide.

TQ Ventures' participation is notable: TQ Ventures is the venture arm of TQ Systems, a Munich-based electronics manufacturing company with direct relationships in the industrial automation market. That network provides Furo with a distribution path into exactly the kind of mid-market industrial operator that buys batteries but has limited internal capability to manage them dynamically.

The capital will fund product development and European commercial expansion. The 800-company base is a commercial beachhead, not a ceiling; scaling into the larger industrial accounts — with longer sales cycles, more complex procurement, and higher contract values — is the growth path that justifies the round.