Companion.energy, a Ghent-based startup helping large industrial and commercial enterprises manage energy in real time, has closed a €7.8 million Seed round to deepen the platform’s multi-asset, multi-market optimisation capabilities, and expand commercially across Europe, starting with Germany and Spain.
The round was led by Realyze Ventures (Germany) and Pi Labs (United Kingdom), with participation from Asterion Ventures (France) and existing investors.
Dhruv Gupta, Principal at Pi Labs, said, “Enterprise energy management is moving from static procurement and reporting toward 24×7 real-time optimisation. Large enterprises spending tens of millions annually on energy still rely heavily on spreadsheets, dashboards and manual workflows. Companion has built a deeply technical AI platform that fundamentally changes software from a recommendation engine to a system of execution. This is what makes this category so important.”
Founded in 2022 by Thomas Vyncke and Jonas Verstraeten, Companion.energy helps large industrial and commercial enterprises turn energy from a risk into a competitive advantage. The company states that its software platform gives them complete transparency on their energy economics and runs AI-driven optimisation workflows that improve their contract mix and steer their assets in real time.
According to Thomas Vyncke, co-founder of Companion.energy, “European energy markets are undergoing a structural shift. As penetration of renewables increases and industrial demand becomes more electrified, electricity markets are becoming significantly more volatile and operationally complex. Energy prices that once moved seasonally now fluctuate in real time.
“At the same time, enterprises are deploying growing fleets of batteries, solar installations, EV charging infrastructure and electrified industrial systems. Most companies still manage this environment through fragmented tooling, spreadsheets and static procurement processes but they need a system that runs and optimises energy operations continuously.”
Jonas Verstraeten, co-founder of Companion.energy, said, “We started Companion because we believed the energy transition would force every large industrial enterprise to manage energy actively, and that they would not be able to do that with spreadsheets and quarterly check-ins. The work of the next decade is to give those teams software that can keep up. This round lets us bring that software to many more enterprises, and help them turn their energy from a competitiveness risk into a competitive advantage.”
The company states that it connects energy contracts, operational systems and distributed assets into a single optimisation platform that continuously forecasts demand, models market exposure and automates energy decisions in real time. The platform helps enterprises optimise procurement decisions, steer assets dynamically and improve the economics of electrification at scale.
Companion.energy also notes that, through the platform, clients benefit from autonomous decision-making to maximise energy assets in real time, reducing energy costs by 10–30%.
The company serves more than 30 enterprise customers across Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, including TotalEnergies, KPN, Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Interparking and Proximus Group. Its customers include manufacturers, logistics operators, telecom operators, EV charging operators, energy companies and other large energy consumers. Over the past year, the company reportedly expanded its customer base and revenue ten times, exceeding €1 million in annual recurring revenue.
It manages more than 2 TWh of annual energy consumption and production across customer portfolios, representing approximately €500 million in annual energy spend and revenue. Its platform already supports more than 200 MW of distributed energy assets, including solar PV, wind, batteries, e-boilers and EV charging infrastructure
