Ghent’s Companion.energy raises €7.8M to automate enterprise energy in real time

The seed round, led by Realyze Ventures and Pi Labs, will fund expansion into Germany and Spain as volatile power markets push large industrial firms past their spreadsheets.

Electricity used to move with the seasons. Now it moves by the minute, and the spreadsheets that large industrial firms still rely on to manage it cannot keep up.

Companion.energy, a Ghent startup that automates how big enterprises buy and use power, has raised €7.8mn in a seed round to take that argument across Europe. The round was led by Germany’s Realyze Ventures and UK-based Pi Labs, with Paris impact investor Asterion Ventures, making its first bet outside France, and existing backers also taking part.

Founded in 2022 by two Belgian engineers, Thomas Vyncke and Jonas Verstraeten, Companion.energy sells software to industrial and commercial companies that spend tens of millions a year on energy.

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Its platform connects a firm’s energy contracts, operational systems, and distributed assets, including batteries, solar arrays, and EV chargers, into a single system that forecasts demand, models market exposure, and automates decisions as prices shift.

The pitch rests on a structural change in European power markets. As more renewables come online and industry electrifies, prices that once followed predictable seasonal patterns now swing through the day.

“Energy prices that once moved seasonally now fluctuate in real time,” Vyncke said, adding that most companies still manage the resulting complexity “through fragmented tooling, spreadsheets and static procurement processes.”

Pi Labs principal Dhruv Gupta framed the shift as a move “from a recommendation engine to a system of execution,” arguing that enterprise energy software is becoming something that acts rather than merely advises.

Companion.energy says its platform now oversees more than 2 TWh of annual energy consumption and production, equivalent to roughly €500mn in combined spend and revenues, and that revenue grew tenfold in the year to mid-2026 to pass €1mn in annual recurring revenue.

The company claims its automation cuts clients’ energy costs by between 10 and 30 per cent. Those figures are self-reported and have not been independently audited.

The software splits into two parts: Prism, which models a company’s operational and financial energy data to flag where to improve, and Propel, which turns those forecasts into autonomous decisions that steer assets in real time.

The new capital will deepen that multi-asset, multi-market optimisation and fund commercial expansion across Europe, starting with Germany and Spain. It follows a €2.1mn round in 2024, and signals how quickly investor appetite has moved towards the unglamorous software layer beneath the energy transition.

Verstraeten put the bet plainly: the transition will force every large industrial firm to manage power actively, and they “would not be able to do that with spreadsheets and quarterly check-ins.” Whether Companion.energy becomes the system those firms run on, or simply proves the category exists for larger rivals to chase, is the next decade’s question. For now, it has €7.8mn to make its case.