Invertix: Munich Energy A.I. Start-Up Earns Its Y Combinator Knighthood
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Seven months after its founding, it has already made it to Silicon Valley: Invertix, a Munich start-up building A.I. to run energy infrastructure, has been admitted to Y Combinator’s fall batch. Joseph Perrotta, the chief executive, and Kaan Durmaz, the chief technology officer, founded the German-Italian company only in February. That makes Invertix one of the few European energy A.I. companies in the program of what is arguably the world’s most prestigious start-up accelerator.
Why Y Combinator Counts as a Knighthood
For founders from Europe, getting into Y Combinator (YC) is something like a seal of approval. Since 2005, YC has funded more than 5,000 companies, including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Dropbox, DoorDash and, in energy, the fusion company Helion. OpenAI also has its roots at YC: the A.I. lab started in 2015 as a YC Research project under Sam Altman, then YC’s president.
Admission brings money but, above all, access. Under its standard deal, YC invests $500,000 (about 427,000 euros) in every start-up: $125,000 for 7 percent of the company, plus $375,000 through an uncapped SAFE. On top of that come a three-month program in San Francisco, a network of thousands of alumni and Demo Day, where the start-ups pitch to hundreds of investors. Having YC on your website makes it easier to get meetings with U.S. investors.
From Austria, start-ups that have made it into the program in recent years include PothAI, founded by Mojmir Horvath, the Vienna brother trio behind SF Tensor and the fintech Fizz, as well as Glasskube, Gustav and the Carinthian video start-up Bitmovin, now one of the country’s best-known tech companies.
The knighthood comes at a price, though. YC generally expects a U.S. entity, so many European teams formally move their company to the United States and often relocate to San Francisco themselves. Value creation and talent partly leave Europe as a result, a concern the European start-up scene has debated for years.
The Problem: The Energy Transition Is Running Out of Experts
Invertix targets a bottleneck that grows with the expansion of renewables. Solar, wind and storage capacity is increasing faster than operators can hire and train skilled staff. Assessing alarms, analyzing plant performance, coordinating maintenance and meeting regulatory obligations: this work is still largely done by hand. Before founding the company, Mr. Perrotta and Mr. Durmaz say they reached out to more than 5,000 people in the industry and spoke with over 500 experts, from operators and asset managers to engineers and investors.
“Everyone talks about how much energy A.I. needs. Hardly anyone is building the A.I. that actually runs the energy system. That’s exactly what we do,” Mr. Perrotta said. With YC, he added, the start-up can move at the pace this market demands.
The Approach: Its Own A.I. Layer on Top of Big Models
Invertix is not competing with the big A.I. labs. Instead, it builds on their models and adds its own layer trained on energy operations. The models learn from work orders, human interventions and other operational data, and are based on physics-informed neural networks and differentiable simulators. A dedicated security layer is meant to keep sensitive operator and grid data under customers’ control and prevent it from being used to train outside models.
The traction is impressive. Invertix has four ongoing pilot projects with European energy companies and counts TotalEnergies On as a customer. According to the company, more than 50 gigawatts of renewable capacity are now under contract, and its sales pipeline exceeds 100 gigawatts, up from about 10 gigawatts in May. In day-to-day operations, the start-up says, technical proposals are produced 50 to 100 percent faster, and procurement processes shrink from about 60 hours to roughly one. Three agent teams are said to do the work of about 20 people.
The Team and the Funding
Mr. Perrotta was a professional volleyball player, sold more than $17 million worth of real estate at 18 and later helped the Italian cloud storage start-up Cubbit raise more than $25 million. Mr. Durmaz has worked in computer vision, differential privacy and A.I. for chemistry. The two met at Brightdale and built Invertix out of Munich’s TUM.ai community. In May, Invertix closed a pre-seed round of 1.7 million euros, led by Vireo Ventures, with participation from the Italian Founders Fund and business angels from the energy and A.I. sectors.
The Alternatives to YC
Y Combinator is not the only path to capital and a network. In Europe, programs such as Entrepreneur First, Antler and Techstars compete for founders at very early stages, alongside university-linked initiatives such as UnternehmerTUM in Munich. When it comes to standing with U.S. investors, however, hardly any of them has matched YC so far.
