xWatts funding fuels real estate decarbonisation
VenturesxWatts, the intelligent energy management platform on a mission to decarbonise the most complex global real estate, has today announced a £1.6M seed funding round.
The investment was led by Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, with participation from Cambridge Angels, Parkwalk and R42.
Using AI/ML-led technology and engineering excellence, xWatts is decarbonising the most complex global real estate, cutting cost and carbon emissions while enhancing comfort and control.
The London-based startup is addressing the massive energy consumption of non-domestic buildings across Europe, a market worth £550 billion per year. By focusing on complex estates with energy intensive systems, xWatts targets a core market of £53 billion where typical savings of 20% can be achieved. This represents a potential saving of over £10 billion annually for the industry.
Yigit Akar (left) and Alex Allen (right)
Unlike platforms that only report data, xWatts connects directly to energy systems to model facilities in real time and automatically optimises assets from generation to demand, including HVAC, solar and CHP engines. The technology has already been proven across NHS Hospitals, Community Diagnostic Centres and College facilities at the University of Cambridge, where energy consumption is reduced by over 25%, and manufacturing sites where the use of the xWatts platform has optimised operations to reduce carbon while reducing energy cost by over £2 million a year.
The company has tripled its revenues annually over the last two years. The capital will also be used to accelerate product development and support growth in core European markets, focussing on healthcare, higher education and industrial sectors.
Yigit Akar, CEO and Co-Founder of xWatts, comments,
“Our mission is straightforward but ambitious: to decarbonise the world’s most complex real estate in a way that is intelligent, automated and scalable. We don’t just tell you what to do, we do it for you. This funding allows us to double down on the growth and product investment needed to compete at scale.”
“xWatts’s AI-driven energy management platform for commercial buildings not only taps into a large market opportunity, but importantly, provides a path to net zero whilst driving meaningful cost reductions for asset owners. Cambridge Enterprise Ventures is proud to support the company as lead investor.”
Anne Dobrée, Investment Director at Parkwalk, comments, “Our investment in xWatts through the University of Cambridge Enterprise Fund reflects our strategy of backing breakthrough technologies emerging from the UK’s leading universities. xWatts’ ability to intelligently optimise complex, energy-intensive estates is already delivering meaningful cost and carbon savings, and we believe the team is exceptionally well placed to scale this impact across Europe.”
xWatts was founded in 2022 by Yigit Akar and Alex Allen during an Antler founder residency. Yigit is an electronics engineer who previously commissioned large-scale wind and solar plants across Europe and Turkey. Alex brings a background in computer science and control systems engineering, having spent years working on big corporate infrastructure and building energy simulations. The pair met at the University of Cambridge and launched xWatts to fix the root causes of energy waste in large estates.
