NEW: Slater Commits Second Round of Funding to Energy Startup Alektrona
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The Slater Technology Fund today announced that it has provided $200,000 in a second round of seed-stage funding to Alektrona. The commitment, made alongside multiple co-investors including the city of Providence, brings Slater’s total investment in the smart grid company to $450,000. Alektrona will use the funding to further penetrate the smart grid application and energy efficiency markets with its energy services enablement platform for utilities and energy services companies.
Alektrona
Providence-based Alektrona specializes in networking energy devices and applications for the smart grid with a compatible energy management platform for energy solutions providers to residential, small commercial, and multi-dwelling units. The advanced metering system monitors and controls energy devices to simplify how the grid interacts with these devices, including electric meters, gas meters, water meters, plug-in vehicles, and more, and maximizes consumer choice in utility deployments. The platform is now in beta and is being implemented by multiple partners and utilities for demand-side management, consumer monitoring and control, and energy efficiency improvement.
Founded by Christopher Leidigh and James Higgins, the former director and chief architect, respectively, of American Power Conversion Corporation’s (APC) embedded networking business unit, Alektrona is positioned to expand the application of its innovative IT solution to energy to take advantage of the burgeoning smart grid architecture.
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“Utilizing green wireless technology for the smart grid is a natural fit for our unique, open standards-based networking solution,” said Leidigh. “The evolution of the smart grid is only just beginning, and Alektrona is ideally suited to capitalize on the growth of the market and focus on energy efficiency in utilities and energy management. Working with the Slater Fund has provided an invaluable level of market understanding of the greentech sector.”
“Slater’s reinvestment in Alektrona is evidence of our belief that the networking of millions of energy nodes is a broad and unstoppable trend” said Thorne Sparkman, managing director of the Slater Technology Fund. “When internet management and control technologies permeate the grid and our homes as fully as they have our desktops and telephones, the results will be transformational. Ours is a bet that this team who cut its teeth embedding technology in the computer peripherals at American Power Conversion over the last 15 years will repeat its success, and enable energy management techniques we haven’t even glimpsed yet. The Slater Fund is excited to be a part of it.”
