Nigerian energy and climate-tech startup PowerLabs has secured an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding to accelerate the rollout of its flagship AI-enabled energy orchestration platform across commercial and industrial enterprises.
PowerLabs builds, designs and deploys intelligent and personalised energy consumer applications, devices and services that help customers access electricity at the lowest costs with zero downtime and emissions.
The startup’s pre-seed funding round was led by Breega, with participation from Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures. It will be used to accelerate the rollout of Pai Enterprise, the company’s flagship AI-enabled energy orchestration platform, across commercial and industrial enterprises in Nigeria, and lay the foundation for expansion into key West African markets
The Pai Enterprise platform senses, communicates, and actuates across multiple distributed energy sources in real time. By continuously modelling supply, demand, and operational constraints, the platform enables organisations to run their own intelligent microgrid. As a result, the platform transforms energy from a reactive problem into a proactive, strategic resource.
“Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that don’t speak the same language. At PowerLabs, we believe decentralisation doesn’t have to mean disorder. We’re building the intelligence layer that will prove that distributed energy resources can operate as a unified source while leveraging its disaggregation to offer flexibility, cost efficiency, carbon neutrality and redundancy … more than a centralised energy system ever could,” said Tobe Arize, CEO and co-founder of PowerLabs.
“We backed PowerLabs at the pre-seed stage because we believe intelligent orchestration will be essential to solving Africa’s energy reliability challenge. The team is building the software and hardware layer that enables businesses to coordinate multiple distributed energy sources in real time. We’re excited to support them as they prove the impact of this model across critical sectors over the next 12–18 months,” said Tosin Faniro-Dada, partner at Breega.