Energy Tech Company Novele Raises $17M Series A

Applied artificial intelligence energy company Novele announced Wednesday that it raised a $17 million Series A round to further expand its services nationally.

Venture capital firm Boisei Labs led the oversubscribed round, with participation from VC Locke Health; Arup Ventures, the venture investment arm of the global built environment consulting firm Arup; national construction firm Barton Malow; and several of the largest commercial real estate owners and operators, according to Novele’s announcement.

Based in Stamford, Conn., Novele provides a full-stack energy system for commercial buildings. Originally founded in 2015 to help build net-zero emissions buildings, Novele was relaunched in its current form in 2023. The startup’s autonomous energy platform combines BoardOS, Novele’s AI-powered energy software, with EnergyBoard, its distributed energy storage hardware.

“Our goal was always to make buildings intelligent and utilize energy storage to do that,” said  Charles Conwell, CEO and co-founder of Novele. “As the technology was rolling out, it allowed us to get more precise and predictive data. However, AI has allowed us to do a lot of pre-work and early analysis. The machine learning was always built into the system, and that’s all done through our proprietary algorithms, and optimization and measurement of how we’re consuming energy in the building — learning the patterns of the energy consumption based on external factors that need to be overlaid to understand why the consumption is the way it is when it is, like weather, occupancy, time of year and day.”

Novele plans to use the funding to grow nationally from its primary customer base in the mid-Atlantic region, expanding its engineering, deployment and commercial teams, as well as deliver product to more customers, Conwell said. It will also scale installations across its active pipeline, while continuing to develop and train BoardOS.

Novele’s CRE customers include owners of multifamily buildings above five units, as well as office, retail, hospitality and industrial owners.

The company offers a full-stack operational dashboard, and a 2-inch-thick, wall-mounted energy board battery system that is distributed throughout the building, giving the customer the ability to monitor and manage energy performance using Novele’s proprietary hardware. Its BoardOS software can provide data reporting from the circuit level to portfolio-wide. 

The Series A financing follows a period of rapid progress for Novele, with live deployments to Fortune 50 customers, and more than 2,000 buildings engaged across a 2.6 billion-square-foot pipeline.

“Novele represents exactly the kind of technology we believe can create transformative impact at scale,” George Perry, president and founder at Boisei Labs, said in a statement. “Building owners have a clear economic and operational reason to adopt the platform — lower costs, greater resilience, and more intelligent control of their energy, while every deployment also creates a more flexible and efficient electric grid. The striking alignment across customer value, technological innovation and broader societal benefit is what made Novele such a strongly compelling investment for us.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.