Furo Raises $4 Million to Make Industrial Battery Storage Pay Off
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Furo, a Munich startup that runs software for commercial and industrial battery storage, recently closed a $4 million seed round. The round was led by New York based TQ Ventures, with participation from the US accelerator Neo, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners (Sheryl Sandberg’s fund) and CDTM Venture Capital. The money is going into product development, expansion into further European markets and hiring.
The company operated as Lumera Energy until recently and now trades as Furo. It was founded last year.
Three Founders Who Turned Down Silicon Valley
Furo was started by Lena Sophia Voß, Leonie Wagner and Simon Wittner, who met in the master’s program at the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), a joint institution of LMU Munich and the Technical University of Munich that has produced a steady stream of German startups. Between them they have worked at Apple, Google X, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Boston Consulting Group.
The choice of headquarters is the more unusual part of the story. According to TechCrunch, all three had full time offers with visa sponsorship from their former US employers and went back to Munich anyway. Their reasons: engineering salaries are considerably lower, industrial customers and technical universities are close by, and the CDTM network opens doors. “We’re currently moving faster in Europe than if we’d have stayed in the U.S.,” Voß told TechCrunch. Furo is incorporated as a Delaware C Corp while the team operates out of Munich, and the founders keep US investor relationships warm with three or four trips a year.
In 2025 Furo was the only European startup accepted into Neo, the US accelerator that has since become an investor.
The Problem: Storage Systems That Run on Fixed Rules
The starting point is an economics problem. German industrial companies pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world, and the pressure is building. Data center power consumption is projected to nearly triple by 2035, and wholesale prices could climb by as much as 50 percent over the next five years. Furo puts the global cost of inflexible energy demand for industrial companies at roughly $580 billion a year, driven by price volatility, high grid fees, load peaks and a lack of flexibility on the consumption side.
Battery storage is the obvious answer, and most installed systems still fall short of it. They run on preprogrammed rules that take no account of how weather and exchange prices are actually moving. Germany’s power market is among the most volatile in the world thanks to the speed of its wind and solar buildout, which makes static control strategies expensive.
The Approach: Forecasting, Real Time Control, Trading
Furo’s software forecasts electricity prices and weather up to 48 hours ahead and decides in real time when a battery charges, when it discharges and when selling power is the better option. Unused capacity is monetized on energy markets. The company says customers cut their electricity costs by up to 40 percent. Similar figures come from other vendors in the market, among them the German startup Voltfang with its Energy Trader, as Trending Topics has reported.
Furo sells through installers, project developers, storage manufacturers and utilities rather than direct to end customers. More than 800 companies use the platform across over 6,000 sites in Germany and Europe, Deutsche Bahn among them. The interface adapts to each role, covering system sizing, day to day operation and capacity trading.
One of those channel partners is the solar provider Enpal. “We and our customers gain transparency about what our battery is actually doing and why,” says Ben Rohloff, Director Commercial & Industrial at Enpal. “We have significantly more storage projects today than we did a year ago.”
Lead investor TQ Ventures points to the market behind the product. “Combined with a global market for storage flexibility that is likely to multiply in the coming years, we see one of the biggest opportunities in Europe and beyond,” says co-founding partner Schuster Tanger.
Furo is positioning itself in a segment that is drawing a lot of capital right now: software layers for distributed energy assets that turn a hardware investment into recurring returns. The field is crowded, running from specialized storage optimizers to the trading desks of established utilities. The founders’ argument is that bundling forecasting, operational optimization and trading into one platform is what sets them apart, and that Germany’s volatile market is the place to prove it.
