€3m · Seed · Energy · Antwerp, Belgium
Antwerp-based NOX Energy has raised €3m in seed funding to expand its software for connecting household heat pumps and solar panels to electricity markets. Rise PropTech and Volve Capital co-led the round, with Seeder Fund, Uneti Ventures, Fair Capital Impact Fund and 100in participating.
The company plans to expand beyond Belgium and the Netherlands and deepen integrations inside energy suppliers' and equipment manufacturers' apps. NOX says it has connected more than 10,000 devices, works with customers including Eneco and Frank Energie, and has grown to 13 people.
Turning heat pumps into dispatchable flexibility
Heat pumps consume meaningful power, but their timing can move within limits because a home can be pre-heated when electricity is cheap or abundant. NOX forecasts demand, electricity prices and weather, then adjusts connected equipment while keeping temperatures inside limits set by the household. The same control layer can reduce bills, increase solar self-consumption and sell short periods of flexibility back to the grid.
The attraction for utilities is a software service rather than another piece of household hardware. Energy Tech Summit reporting says NOX charges a monthly platform fee plus a fee per connected asset, with utilities able to use its thermal models for their own trading or pay NOX to run optimisation. Utilities gain a new revenue stream and a product that may improve retention; households receive savings and a share of flexibility revenue.
A February pilot announcement from Eneco Belgium gives an early measure of that value. Participating customers saved an average €16 per month on consumption and received another €13 per month for flexibility, according to the supplier. Those figures are pilot results rather than a guarantee, but they show how NOX's commercial proposition can be shared across the utility and end user.
Integrations are the route to scale and the constraint
NOX distributes through existing supplier and manufacturer apps, which can remove a separate consumer-acquisition step. The trade-off is integration work: the company told Energy Tech Summit that heat-pump makers require lengthy technical validation to ensure outside control does not damage equipment or disrupt comfort. The seed round therefore funds more than geographic expansion. It supports the integrations needed to turn a collection of device connections into infrastructure that utilities can deploy repeatedly across markets.
The next test is whether NOX can translate its current device base into a growing network of manufacturer and utility partners before larger virtual-power-plant platforms close the same gap. Its heat-pump focus offers a specific entry point, but the value of the platform will depend on how quickly each new integration can unlock many homes at once.
