EQT Ventures in €3m round for Watty

Mikkel Stern-Peltz
13 July 2016

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The venture arm of EQT, EQT Ventures, has participated in a тЌ3m funding round for Stockholm-based electricity consumption software developer Watty.

The round was led by Cleantech Invest, a Nordic accelerator focused on environmental technology, and saw participation from existing backers as well as the Swedish Energy Agency, which provided a grant.

EQT Ventures founding partner Hjalmar Winbladh said in a statement the VC had been monitoring Watty since it span out of Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology in 2013.

Watty founder and CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne told unquote" the investment from EQT had been the result of long-running talks.

"We've known the EQT people for a while and have been discussing our strategy with them for over a year. Once we reached a few critical milestones around the end of last year, we started looking at the next steps together," he said. "However, it is my job to take competing offers, so we were certainly talking with a number of investors before ending up with this constellation. We couldn't be happier with the end result though."

Nilsonne's company will use the new funding to expand its team and roll out Watty to more customers. "Our highest priority now is serving existing customers and signing on new ones, so we're investing in building out our sales and project management team, engineering and our product team," he says.

The company generated around €60,000 of revenue in 2015, according to Nilsonne. He said revenue generation is still in its early days, but that the company does have paying customers. "Scaling up with them would mean break-even within 24 months so we're aiming to have that choice as we grow," he said.

Previous funding
Watty raised €1m of seed funding from an undisclosed investor in 2014.

Company
Headquartered in Stockholm, Watty develops software for energy usage monitoring and efficiency improvement.

The company's software-as-a-service product collects data on energy usage from the customer and breaks down consumption by appliance, allowing for comparison across users.

Watty was founded in 2013 as a spinout from the Royal Institute of Technology in the Swedish capital.

People
Watty – Hjalmar Nilsonne (founder, CEO).