Cloover hits profitability with $350M

Cloover, an energy platform for residential solar, heat pumps, and home electrification, has turned profitable just three years after its 2023 launch. The Berlin-based company is now operating at a revenue run rate of more than $350 million and has secured a new $100 million financing facility.

For decades, the process of upgrading a home with clean energy technology was fragmented and expensive. Households faced tens of thousands of euros in upfront costs, with financing, hardware, paperwork, and energy contracts handled by separate entities. This complexity effectively locked most people out of the market.

Cloover, founded by Jodok Betschart, Peder Broms, and Valentin Gönczy, built an AI-powered alternative. Rather than creating its own sales force, the company developed an operating system for the independent installation businesses that serve approximately 85 percent of the market. These installers retain their brand, their customer relationships, and their choice of hardware while using Cloover's platform to offer financing, software, and energy products.

The Installer-First Platform

Through this network, Cloover reaches households via the tradespeople they already trust. Installers can sell a full range of products, from solar panels and heat pumps to broader energy-efficient renovations, with financing embedded directly at the point of sale. End customers receive a financing decision in under two minutes, pay nothing upfront, and can spread costs over periods of up to 25 years.

The company is now one of the top three residential energy players in Europe's largest energy market. Every project it finances is sold by an independent installer. Cloover currently serves clients in five European markets, with plans to soon expand into the UK, France, and Poland. Its growth is directly tied to its partners, with around 20,000 installations processed annually through these relationships.

Co-founder Jodok Betschart emphasized the long-term nature of this model, stating that they reach households through trusted installers and turn each home into a power plant and each homeowner into a participant in the energy market, creating a relationship that lasts for decades, not a single transaction.

Becoming an AI-Neo-Utility

Once a system is installed, Cloover's role evolves from financier to energy manager. Through its Cloover Energy service, the company operates a home energy management system. This combines dynamic and fixed electricity tariffs with a virtual power plant that aggregates distributed assets like solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and electric vehicle chargers into a single, tradeable pool of grid flexibility.

This combination defines what Cloover calls an AI-native neo-utility. Unlike a conventional supplier that owns power stations and competes on price, a neo-utility owns no generation assets. Its capacity is the collective installed base of its customers' equipment, and its product is the flexibility that base can provide to the electricity grid.

Cloover's AI models forecast generation and consumption for each individual house. They then schedule storage and flexible loads within parameters set by the homeowner. This allows a battery to charge when power is cheapest or a heat pump to run when costs are lowest, all without disrupting the household's routine.

Monetizing Distributed Flexibility

When pooled across thousands of homes, this managed flexibility creates multiple revenue streams. Batteries can feed power back to the grid during periods of scarcity. Shifting consumption away from peak times reduces grid fees. The entire fleet of assets can also trade in the intraday electricity market, where prices change every fifteen minutes. All these power market processes are fully automated.

Installers offer this virtual power plant service to their customers under their own brand names, while Cloover manages the technical and market complexity behind the scenes.

Co-founder Valentin Gönczy highlighted the foundational role of artificial intelligence, noting that everything they do runs on AI, from the underwriting to the way they optimise energy in each home, contrasting this with incumbents who are adding AI to systems built decades ago.

The new $100 million financing facility is underpinned by a $350 million guarantee from the European Investment Fund. It will pay for energy equipment and installations across Cloover's expanding market footprint.