Storio is helping other businesses unlock more value from solar energy

Meet Storio, a French startup that’s focused on providing smart energy storage for commercial and industrial customers. Founded in 2023, the startup raised a €5 million seed round earlier this year (around $5.5 million at current exchange rates) and has signed its first client.

Storio believes solar panels have a bright future. But the company also wants every solar panel to come with a battery to optimize production. Its target customers are other businesses who may not feel they have the time or expertise to join all these technical pieces themselves.

Instead of building or selling standalone batteries, Storio has a more interesting distribution strategy: after performing a technical and revenue simulation, it partners with battery suppliers and civil engineering companies to turn a project into an energy storage installation.

Over the past few years, many commercial and industrial companies have built large solar panel installations to lower their electricity bills. Storio wants to complement (and tap into) these existing installations by offering an energy storage solution that can enable its customers to optimize their consumption of solar energy — thanks to Storio’s battery management software.

Once batteries are live, Storio remotely manages them to optimize consumption, as well as energy storage and release in general.

Typically, batteries are charged during the day and energy is released in the morning and evening — but Storio’s software allows for smarter stuff like price-conscious energy management.

“That’s the starting point. You have solar panels. Solar panels produce a lot of energy in the middle of the day. Let’s store it, so you can use it yourself and save money,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Yves Stephan told TechCrunch.

For example, Storio can charge batteries from the grid during off-peak hours so that a client doesn’t need to use as much electricity during peak times. As many industrial companies have suffered from expensive energy contracts over the past few years, partnering with Storio is a way to reduce the risks associated with fluctuations in the energy markets.

“The core of our value proposition is to optimize energy flows, either to create savings on our customer’s bill, or to generate additional income from the power grid,” Stephan said.

Storio batteries are also certified in France by Enedis and RTE to contribute to the stabilization of the grid. This means Storio can elect to release energy from the fleet of batteries it manages into the grid for a short period of time when there’s a demand peak — enabling it to generate revenue as a result of this contribution to the grid.

In this case it can even be more lucrative for a Storio customer to release energy from their batteries instead of consuming the energy themselves for their core business purpose.

“Stabilizing the network involves fairly technical mechanisms, such as stabilizing the network frequency. The grid frequency must be 50Hz [in Europe]. As it rises a little above or falls a little below, the battery reacts. It can also be used to buy and sell energy, like an ‘energy trader,’” Stephan added.

The energy trading part is an essential component of the startup’s proposition as it can greatly reduce the time it takes to amortize a Storio installation.

The company estimates a customer can get a return on investment after five or six years — but batteries can last for up to 15 years (when they end up with roughly 70% of their initial capacity).

Storio and each industrial partner that hosts its battery management installation will have a profit-sharing agreement. “It’s very important to align interests because, as you say, we have to make some tradeoffs. If we were saying ‘savings are for you, network revenues are for Storio,’ that would be unfair,” Stephan said.

Lowercarbon Capital is leading Storio’s seed funding round with Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund also acquiring an equity stake in the startup. Kima Ventures and several business angels are also investing in the startup, including the founders of Bump, Electra, Elum Energy, Enspired and Greenly.

Several other companies that have been working on on-site battery management include GridBeyond in the U.K., Stabl in Germany and Stem in the U.S. As regulation varies from one region to another, Storio seems well positioned to tackle the French market and potentially other European countries in the future.