Washington, D.C.-based energy analytics and management startup Aquicore has raised $3.1 million in seed funding led by D.C. tech incubator 1776. Aquicore is one of the first rounds of startups funded by 1776's new $12.5 million seed fund. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and Efficient Capacity LLC also joined the round.
"We started talking to 1776 while we were in the middle of our fundraising efforts," said Aquicore CEO Logan Soya. "It seemed to be a good fit with 1776 from a timing perspective."
Aquicore was a portfolio company for the Crystal Tech Fund acquired by 1776 earlier this summer. The company, and its plans for a funding round, meshed with 1776's own plans.
"Aquicore has such significant potential"
"Aquicore has such significant potential," said 1776 co-founder Donna Harris. "There's such great synergy with what they're trying to do and and the industries we're interested in digging into."
Aquicore offers customers sensors and a software platform to help improve the commercial real estate energy efficiency. Over 500 buildings already use the two-year-old company's platform, and there's a big opportunity for growth. According to Soya, there are over 50 million points monitoring six million commercial buildings in the U.S. buildings. If they all used Aquicore, the energy savings could hit $40 billion a year.
"Our scope is definitely growing," Soya said. "And our potential capabilities are huge."
Those capabilities are what makes Aquicore a natural investment for 1776, Harris said.
"There's enormous opportunity for them, really across the entire globe as everyone tries to collect and use data," Harris said. "They have a combination of a really strong team and a tremendously scalable business."
The money will be used to scale up Aquicore's presence, with a dozen new hires in sales and marketing planned. That will lead to future sales all over the U.S., Soya said. While the competition for energy management is growing, Soya said it's hardly reached a point of being maxed out.
"The market is fragmented and frothy, which is great." Soya said. "We're past the first adopters and there's still a lot of room to grow."
"The market is fragmented and frothy"
1776 is interested in industries that involve substantial government regulation, such as healthcare, education and, in Aquicore's case, energy. But new initiatives for energy efficiency at the state and federal level are only aiding Aquicore in enticing new clients, Soya said. And while it may seem impossible to imagine Aquicore or its competitors used universally, that's very much where things are heading, he said.
"We're changing an entrenched industry," Soya said. "But there's a tailwind on our side."
