Wattmore Turns 6 years old.
A Climate Tech Startup Adventure
Six years ago I officially formed Nikola Power (now WATTMORE). We incorporated with the State of Colorado, created our first cap table and opened a bank account.
It has been a long, hard journey - a classic startup story for sure. My kids were little, my dogs Finley and Phoebe were puppies, Donald Trump had just been elected, Elon Musk was still cool, Chat GPT didn’t exist, and Meghan and Harry got together and we started a SaaS energy storage software company at my old dining room table.
I want to take this moment to thank a ton of people who helped me create, launch, build, fund and operate our climate tech company.
First, my amazing wife Jennifer Evans, our founding investor, aggressive supporter with unfailing loyalty to me, her husband during some very difficult economic and emotional times. Without her we have no company.
Second, to my early team members - many of which were fellow “refugees” from Clean Energy Collective, a Community Solar Company. I had been COO, managing some great people in a difficult place. When I got fired on a Monday morning in early February 2017, I was at a very low place. But after a few days of moping - my wife said it is time to start your own renewables company.
I had been researching energy storage for the last few months, and was intrigued about using software to “share” the value and capacity in a battery - similar to community solar where I had spent many years.
Folks that helped and started showing up at my house to talk about the future, plan a business and collaborate about a company - were Tom Feiler, Bernadette Jendrusch, Leslie Fredrickson, Evan Hung and Ben McConahey. A few months later Ben Joseph offered to intern for us for free. I laughed as we were all working for free, I provided lunch most days, almost burned my house down cooking up smoked meats, but other than that we were all putting in time and ideas for sweat equity. I also want to thank my friend, former colleague and attorney David London who helped me with legal set-up and advice.
By September of 2017, we had narrowed our team and focus and acquired some BMS patents from the University of Colorado as well as the name Nikola Power from Dr. Dan Rivers. Dan became a friend, mentor and board member of Nikola Power. Evan Hung and Ben McConahey became co-founders, as well as Leslie Fredrickson becoming part of the day to day team, with Ben Joseph working most days as well. Together we came in second place at Denver Start-up week, got into the Rockies Venture Hyper Accelerator and began to raise our first Seed Round. By Thanksgiving of 2017, we had raised $1.5 M in a priced round and placed a valuation on the company of $5.5 M, post-money. A big shout out to my early investors and board members Laurence Chang, Ric Tan, Mike Gallagher, Mark Eddy and Ron Binz and many others.
That core team hit the ground running in 2018, we got small office space, started building software, talking to industry folks and trying to figure out the business model. We hired two amazing young energy storage folks, Dr.Mahdi Motalleb, a postdoc at MIT and recent PhD from University of Hawaii, and Saurabh Mishra, a brilliant young engineer from Carnegie Mellon. Together we started brainstorming BMS vs. EMS software and found our niche was better in Energy Management Systems. We saw an opening for Intelligent energy optimization, control and dispatch. We added Austin Kinzer, from the University of Colorado, as an intern, but he quickly earned a full-time role doing business development and engineering work. We also added Scott Huennekens and Navaneeth Balakrishnan as business and engineering interns.
In the summer of 2018, we got into the Techstars Sustainability program, which was a transformative program for climate tech start-ups. Big shout out to my program mentors, and program leaders Jenna Walker, Hannah Davis, Ryan Martens, Sarah Brown, Kathy Keating and August Ritter. The program helped us build a stronger culture, a rapid software development process through KPIs, based on customer empathy interviews, and not sales. They helped us get new partners with major players like Panasonic. We began testing our earliest version of software at Solar TAC in Denver, we had a pipeline of projects and partners and things were going pretty well. In fall of 2018, we hired Bret Labadie as CFO, who had been a key finance person at Clean Energy Collective. We also added Emerson Reiter, an overall technology and product person, who had a major impact on our products and momentum.
But venture capital eluded us in early 2019. We were struggling to raise more money or deliver products. We decided to focus on two things. Delivering our pre-project modeling tool Ratio to the industry at SPI 2019 and finding a project investor to bring both project and corporate capital leadership. We got to definitive docs with a major fund investor but were left at the altar when they had major delays in Indian projects they were funding. Our tech team, led by Dr. Madhi Mottaleb, Emerson Rieter and Dr. Qiao Li, delivered Ratio for SPI. Samantha Kemper, our marketing and UI/UX person ran a ton of demos with Emerson and we had over 100 firms testing and using the tool.
But things were financially and emotionally challenging at this point. Our amazing CFO Bret Labadie and I were trying to find capital partners. Our co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Ben decided to leave the company, and Evan Hung, our COO needed to earn money, and so began to focus on his real estate and coaching business. Our young team, now including Austin Kinzer, Ben Joseph, and Sam, could feel the negative pull of failure.
By December of 2019, with no dollars in the bank and limited hope heading into the holiday, I let the team go and began to close the office. We had one client and I kept Dr. Qiao Li on the team to complete the first phases of that project delivery - successful software testing. But by the end of February 2020, we were dead in the water. I was alone and at home, with the office closed, no team and only one client that would take years to deliver a product to.
With the company dead or least not really breathing, I decided to run for the open State Senate seat in my community. I had been involved in politics over the years and wanted to move on from Nikola Power. But on March 9th, the Covid Pandemic became real, my campaign for Senate was unable to really get going and 26 days later I ended up failing to get on the ballot via our caucus system by only four votes. I was literally twice cooked, twice failed. It was my birthday and I was locked in my house with no company and no State Senate seat. It was a dark day.
I spent April of 2020, like a lot of people in lockdown. I was alone with my thoughts in my home office, as my kids went to school in their rooms and my wife moved her law practice into our living room.
In May 2020, I decided the mission and work we were doing in energy storage was too important to just walk away. I huddled with my board, my seed investors and my wife and decided to try for the PPP Covid loans. We were successful and were able to use that money to begin our next chapter.
I worked with Dr. Qiao Li to assess our software and team, and met with each of my former team members. Dr. Mahdi Motalleb suggested I reach out to his mentor Dr. Reza Ghorbani at University of Hawaii. After a few months Dr. Reza and I decided to relaunch Nikola Power. We focused on building scalable software with a focus on intelligent optimization and control. We wrapped up 2020 with some solid momentum and interest from venture investors, hardware providers and investors.
2021 started with remote work and attempts to find investors, partners, and customers. We finished our testing for our first paid customer and that was a giant moment. Dr. Qiao and I worked in the cold outside at this test center to show our customer, Sustainable Living Innovations and their CTO Eric Hinckley, we could communicate, control and integrate with the Blue Planet battery and Delta Inverters. I want to thank Eric for his years of friendship, support and technical advice. Eric is now a board member of WATTMORE.
In 2021, we added key talent to the team, hiring Dan Lenz, Mathis Mayo, Roya Karmian and Petra Melounova. Dr. Reza Ghorbani and this new team transformed Nikola Power into a true EMS company. Each has been invaluable to our growth and success. They joined a tiny start-up on the rebound, with big ideas but a spotty track record. They believed in me and our mission, and vice versa, I learned to believe in them. They have been integral to our momentum.
We continued to pursue strategic collaboration with major companies vs. trying to find a few additional small pilots. By summer 2021, we were able to secure a convertible note round from a serious venture firm and strategic Fortune 1000 company, and then led directly to the term sheet for a new Series A.
With the term sheet negotiated, we began looking for other venture and strategic investors to join us in the fall of 2021. We had been working with one large developer and they decided to join our round. They saw our EMS software as a key to better managing their large scale solar+storage assets.
In 2022, with the Series A closed, we opened a small office in the Uptown area of Denver and added Lauren Glaess from the University of Colorado as an intern. Lauren is now a senior manager of sales and a fantastic example of our startup culture. We also added a tiny office in Hawaii for our CTO and tech team near the University of Hawaii. We secured six more pilot projects, passed two sets of Factory Acceptance Software Testing and began global partnership with key hardware partners. I want to thank our lead investor, Arosa Capital and our board member Lillian Shattock, for their investment and confidence in our mission. I’d also like to thank Max Duckworth at MaSa Impact Fund, and Pine Gate Renewables, Cross Timbers Capital, and Sanjay Krishnan at Tetra Tech, our largest corporate customer and supporter.
In 2023, we launched our next round of capital, and now have secured a transformative investment partnership with a major private equity investor to create a JV to deploy our SaaS software at scale. They will support our continued technology growth and together we will deploy over $100 M in sponsor equity into solar+storage, storage alone projects in the US and European Union all with our Intellect EMS software. Big thank you to Margaret-Ann Leavitt for leading our rebrand to WATTMORE and exceptional marketing efforts over the past 6 years. I want to thank all of our current team members who work tirelessly to bring intelligent energy software to the market, including Dr. Kevin Davies, Matt Hosking, Dr. Foad Najafi, Matt Joyal, Jenn Joyal, Mohammad Zaeri Amirani, Lizzy Aldridge and Sarah Kravitz.
During this crazy six year journey I have gone months/years with no paycheck, endured endless nights of stress on how to make payroll, build a team, tech and maintain a positive facade with no capital. I have pivoted, adapted, survived and thrived at different times. In my mind, I have been consistent in building a climate focused, mission driven company to massively scale energy storage, because it is the missing piece to our clean energy future.
Now with the IRA bill in the US and similar action across Europe and Canada, we are poised to deploy our cutting edge AI enabled optimization technology platform at scale. On the sixth year anniversary of our founding, we are on the cusp of closing a truly transformative round of capital, forming a JV with a major private equity firm to deploy over $100 Million of sponsor equity capital into projects with our EMS Intellect technology.
Six years later, I am older, hopefully wiser and grateful I made the decision to launch this company. I have shown myself I can be a successful CEO, an entrepreneur. Together all of the folks I have worked with have created something real, something that can both have an impact on our climate and peoples lives. We have been humbled by the challenges, knocked down by the criticisms, floored by the number of NOs from venture investors, but together we have rallied, pivoted, persisted and built WATTMORE into something special. We are having fun, making an impact and I could not be more proud to call myself founder and CEO of WATTMORE. The next six years will be another wild ride, join us, watch us as we unleash the tools to massively scale energy storage.
