Heila Technologies, the five-year-old Somerville startup that develops hardware and software to integrate renewables and batteries on a microgrid, has pulled in a $2.5 million seed round to build out its technology platform.
The round was led by Table Rock Infrastructure Partners, an equity firm focused on helping municipalities with critical infrastructure projects, with support from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) and other individuals. The seed round is not yet closed: Heila wrote in a press release that it will remain open for additional strategic investors.
Heila's flagship product is a platform called Heila EDGE, a modular energy platform that connects distributed energy resources into single power networks. In a July interview with BostInno, co-founder and development lead Albert Chan likened Heila's technology to running a Google search. Since the search engine is decentralized, it goes through different routers to give you an answer. Similarly, Heila's grid optimization allows customers to add or remove energy sources over time without much configuration.
"To be able to orchestrate all of these resources together, you have to have a really good control system, you have to have a really good way of making them talk to each other," Chan said. "It’s a really complex thing, and our solution basically supplies all of that by having a distributed brain.”
Heila plans to use the new funding to build on its existing modular controls and optimization product and develop partnerships with strategic equipment vendors, project developers and utilities. Chan said earlier this year that Heila was actively looking to expand its partnerships; in May, the startup partnered with lithium-ion battery maker SimpliPhi Power to deploy intelligent energy storage and solar systems at a demonstration project in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Founded out of MIT and now a member of cleantech incubator Greentown Labs, Heila won the MIT Clean Energy Prize in 2016 and has additionally secured prize funding through the 2016 Cleantech University Prize and MassCEC's InnovateMass program.
