Boulder, CO -- Tendril has completed a Series B round of funding worth $12 million that will fuel the company's rapid expansion in providing energy management solutions to the utility industry. The lead investor in this round is RRE Ventures in New York, who joins Vista Ventures, Access Venture Partners and Appian Ventures as major investors in Tendril. This investment follows Tendril's announcement earlier this quarter regarding the beta release of the Tendril Energy Management System (EMS), which facilitates dialogue between consumers and utilities for more intelligent, consumer-centric control of energy consumption.
"RRE invested in Tendril because it provides critical technology for energy management and because its open-standards approach is exactly what companies in the utility industry are looking for," said Stuart Ellman, Managing Partner of RRE Ventures. "A number of trends such as rising energy costs and environmental awareness are driving dramatic growth in the deployment of technology to manage electricity demand and usage. Tendril's message of open standards and its consumer-centric approach to solving this problem has solid traction with major utilities that are planning large-scale rollouts of residential energy management solutions, and we expect continued progress based on the strength of Tendril's EMS product."
"There was very strong interest in this round of investment, and we felt that RRE would be an ideal partner because of its amazing track record in helping startups reach their potential," said Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril. "Tendril is experiencing very strong customer-led growth, and this funding combined with RRE's expertise will go toward building out the infrastructure to deliver the Tendril Energy Management System to an increasing number of utility companies."
Tendril's unique, user-centric approach to energy management contrasts strongly with previous, centrally-driven efforts to control energy consumption in residential markets. By providing consumers with real-time information about their consumption and by innovative approaches such as real-time benchmarking and verifiable pay-for-performance programs, Tendril is committed to helping utilities and their customers reduce consumption and improve customer service.
The Tendril Energy Management System is a mixture of software and in-home hardware that has an open architecture to provide seamless integration to any ZigBee Smart Energy products for the home. It improves operational efficiency for utilities by engaging residential consumers in a dialogue about reducing load both continuously and at critical peak times, and it provides consumers with real-time information about energy consumption in a variety of formats including in-home displays, a web portal and smart thermostats. In addition, the Tendril Energy Management System offers a full, open API to integrate with existing back office enterprise systems including meter management and billing systems as well as load monitoring and security applications.
About Tendril
Tendril is bringing 21st century energy efficiency to the energy industry by providing technology that enables an important dialogue between consumers and their energy providers, allowing them to manage consumption and supply of energy in a smarter, more efficient way. Tendril's technology plays a critical role in creating an open, extensible, standards-based, end-to-end energy ecosystem that connects consumer devices (like thermostats) to utilities' back office applications, enabling consumers and energy companies to understand and generate smart energy for life.
ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works
The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. The ZigBee Alliance membership comprises technology providers and manufacturers worldwide. Membership is open to all.