Seattle startup Bayou Energy has raised a $1.2 million pre-seed round. The company has developed technology that pulls customer data from U.S. utilities to provide real-time information on energy use as well as consumption over time.
The data are useful to a variety of businesses, particularly those deploying clean energy products. That includes companies installing heat pumps that need to figure out the right-size device for a space. Or a solar installer who needs to tell a customer how much energy they can expect to put back on the grid. Other businesses need the data to track their own energy use and emissions. The list goes on.
More than 40 companies are using Bayou’s product, though not all are paying customers.
“We’re building tools for people to start their energy companies,” said James Gordey, Bayou’s co-founder and CEO.
The company, which launched in late 2022, can access data from 24 utilities, capturing 44% of the U.S. market. Bayou’s goal is to hit 96 utilities by the end of the year, covering 90% of the nation.
Investors in the round include Surface Ventures, CoFound Partners, Leap Forward Ventures, Stepchange Ventures and Very Serious Ventures.
“Accessing utility data today is exactly where banking data and payments was in 2009 — extremely painful, bottlenecked by a long sales process, poor developer and user experience, and slow data access times,” said Ben Eidelson, a general partner at Stepchange.
Stripe, Plaid and other fintech companies upended those transactions, Eidelson said, and when it comes to energy, “Bayou is going to have a similar impact.”
Dimitri Boguslavsky, co-managing partner at Surface Ventures, praised the startup’s focus on building a product specifically for developers to use and predicted it will “accelerate the pace of innovation in the energy industry.”
Gordey lives in Seattle, but came from Louisiana and graduated from Louisiana State University with a degree in civil engineering. Many graduates in his field and in that location follow careers in oil and gas, and so did he — but not for long.
“I figured out that’s not the best fit for me,” Gordey said.
His previous job was senior technical product manager for the battery company Proterra. He met Joris Van Hecke, his co-founder and Bayou’s chief technology officer, on a climate-focused Slack channels.
“Climate felt like the only thing I could and wanted to work on,” Gordey said.
Van Hecke previously worked in healthcare technology in Belgium and now lives in New York. Kalen Luciano, Bayou’s backend software engineering intern, is based in Pittsburgh.
Competitors in the space include UtilityAPI and Arcadia.
