Philipp Schröder, CEO and co-founder of 1KOMMA5°. Photo: Christoph Neumann / 1KOMMA5°.
Around €70m · Other round · Cleantech · Hamburg, Germany
Hamburg-based 1KOMMA5° has raised around €70m in a new financing round at a pre-money valuation of $1.35bn. b2venture led the round, while Japanese cleantech fund Marunouchi Innovation Partners joined as a new shareholder. Existing investors CalSTRS, eCapital, G2 Venture Partners and Eurazeo also participated. Handelsblatt reported the financing on 12 October, one day before the company published its detailed announcement.
The new capital is intended for Heartbeat AI, 1KOMMA5°'s energy-management platform. The company plans to invest more than €100m in the product during 2027, combining the financing with around €35m from operating cash flow. It says the budget will fund AI development, broader software capabilities and faster go-to-market execution.
Heartbeat connects household batteries, heat pumps, solar panels, EV chargers and air-conditioning systems, then coordinates when those assets produce or consume electricity. 1KOMMA5° says the software can also sell power on customers' behalf. That turns a collection of home-energy devices into a virtual power plant rather than leaving each installation to operate independently.
The installed base is the software distribution channel
1KOMMA5° operates around 80 locations in seven markets and says it has installed more than 300,000 controllable energy systems. Heartbeat currently optimises over 100,000 systems and aggregates more than 1GW of flexible capacity across five markets, according to the company.
That installed base is the commercial link between the hardware business and the software investment. Each completed solar, storage or heating project can become another controllable endpoint for Heartbeat, giving the company a distribution channel that pure software providers have to build through integrations and utility partnerships. In return, software can create ongoing value from equipment after installation by responding to electricity prices and grid conditions.
The financing therefore backs more than product development. It supports the integrations, market access and customer adoption needed to make a larger fleet behave as a reliable energy resource. Device compatibility, regulatory differences and customers' willingness to hand over automated control will determine how quickly installed hardware becomes recurring software revenue.
Marunouchi Innovation Partners brings experience from US investments in energy, AI and flexibility, and 1KOMMA5° told Handelsblatt that it is considering a US market entry. The immediate test is still operational: whether the company can expand connected capacity while maintaining dependable control across different devices and markets. The clearest milestones will be growth in systems actively managed by Heartbeat, flexibility capacity and software revenue, rather than installations alone.
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EUVC · 29 September 2026. NOX Energy's software-only route into heat-pump flexibility shows the integration work that distributed-energy platforms must solve before many household devices can behave as one grid resource.
Sources checked:
1KOMMA5° company announcement · Handelsblatt reporting · Sesamers analysis · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
