The Fire Awards: SparkMeter

Editor's note: Each year, DC Inno and the Washington Business Journal publish the Fire Awards spotlighting the founders, funders and fast-growing companies helping to power Greater Washington’s innovation economy. Click here to read our other profiles.

Ten-year-old SparkMeter’s work simplifying access to electrification is more important than ever as governments across the world are prioritizing the transition to clean energy.

It’s that important work that helped the D.C. company recently land a $5 million investment from Honeywell Smart Energy, a unit of Honeywell International. That investment brings with it the backing of a multinational brand with its own global reach and seems poised to turbocharge SparkMeter’s growth.

Indeed, after the commitment was announced at the tail end of 2023, Honeywell said it would begin making available SparkMeter’s technology to its customers throughout the U.S. while giving SparkMeter additional resources to help it reach more customers in emerging markets.

Founded in 2013, SparkMeter helps utilities across the globe assess how grids are performing, monitoring things like the quality of power and whether there are efficiencies the utility can tap into. 

SparkMeter co-founder and CEO Dan Schnitzer said it is crucial that domestic utility providers gain greater insights into the efficiency of their grids as electricity loads evolve.

Outside of the U.S., in roughly 30 countries and with a focus on Africa, Asia and Latin America, it also provides smart metering hardware that cuts out the manual step of collecting utility use data and automates it. Last year, it helped issue the first smart metering project in Somalia and began piloting one of the first such projects in the Philippines.

About half of SparkMeter’s more than 30 employees are based in its Nairobi, Kenya, office. Its D.C. office includes a lab for hardware testing.

SparkMeter