A San Francisco home energy management startup has more than doubled its Series B round a year after initially closing on $90 million in capital.
Span.io announced $96 million in fresh funding on Monday in a Series B extension round that was led by Wellington Management and also included Congruent Ventures, Capricorn Investment Group, Munich Re Ventures, Fifth Wall, A/O PropTech, Qualcomm Ventures and Amazon’s Alexa Fund.
The extension brings its total funding to $231 million.
Span has developed smart electrical panels and electric vehicle chargers that allow homeowners to monitor their energy usage.
CEO Arch Rao founded the company in 2018 after spending several years overseeing the development of Tesla's home battery storage product, the Powerwall. He saw a rising need for managing home energy use as more consumers adopted electric vehicles and switched away from gas-powered appliances.
"Homes pretty much anywhere in the world are actually not designed, or don't have the capacity, for rapid electrification," Rao told me. "When you start switching your car from gas to electric, you're increasing the load by adding an EV charger. When you're switching your HVAC system from a gas furnace to heat pumps, you're adding loads. Same with electric water heaters. Now you add in solutions like storage, and you suddenly have a fairly complex electrical system in your home that is just not supported."
Its circuit breaker panel is priced at $4,500, which is separate from installation costs, and integrates with several battery storage solutions from Tesla, Enphase, LG and SolarEdge. Span's EV charger is priced at $750 and can be added on as an accessary.
Consumers can monitor their energy usage through Span's products via an app that shows how much energy they're using and can adjust usage based on where the electrical load is needed most.
Span's software also taps into utility grid data that lets users optimize their usage based on factors like the availability of renewable energy sources, or the cheapest or fastest energy sources.
By managing a home's energy usage and load, Span's panel also reduces the number of battery storage packs a homeowner might need and can speed up the amount of time it takes to charge an electric vehicle. And new EV adoption is growing faster than demand for storage or solar solutions.
"With Span, you can backup your entire home with just one battery because we can control, digitally, all the different loads that are turned on or off during an outage," Rao said. "Most homes may not be able to get solar, or may not need storage, but they're more likely to buy an electric vehicle … You've bought an EV but suddenly, you can't charge your car as fast as you thought you could."
Earlier this year, Span announced a partnership with Kenmore to make its home appliances compatible with Span's panel.
The startup will be focused on increasing the number of products and appliances that are compatible with its software, Rao told me, as it also expands into more homes. He is also eyeing entering the market for condos and small commercial buildings next.
Span is also opening a new research and development facility in South San Francisco.
The company will be hiring about 100 more people this year across engineering, research, development, sales and go-to-market roles. It currently has more than 200 employees, and will likely continue hiring into next year, as well, Rao said.
Span isn't profitable yet, but Rao told me it has seen five- to six-fold annual revenue growth over the past couple of years, and his goal is to get Span's products into 10 million homes by the end of the decade.
"Our immediate goal is not profitability as much as it is delivering a complete set of products and services that enables electrification at-large," Rao said, and "scaling our business and our brand to become synonymous with home electrification at scale."
