Dive Brief:
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German storage company Sonnen Group has raised $85 million in equity capital with investments from Envision Energy and from Thomas Putter, former CEO and ex-chairman of Allianz Capital Partners.
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Sonnen says it will use the capital to develop new products and to further expand its business in its home market of Germany, as well as in markets in the U.S. Australia, the U.K. and Italy.
- The capital building exercise comes in advance of Sonnen’s plan to possibly launch an initial public offering in one or two years to raise additional capital, Bloomberg reports.
Dive Insight:
Sonnen is building up its capital as it expands its business and continues to take on its main competitor, Tesla, for a greater share of the global energy storage market.
In June, GE Ventures took an undisclosed stake in Sonnen that the company, at the time, said was a “mid double-digit million-euro” investment. The investment was aimed at helping Sonnen expand its presence in the residential energy storage market in Europe and the U.S.
Other investors in Sonnen include eCAPITAL, MVP, SET Ventures, and Inven Capital.
Sonnen also uses partnerships to help expand its business. Most recently, the German software and storage company formed an alliance that combines AutoGrid Systems’ grid integration software with Sonnen’s energy storage capabilities in order to aggregate storage into virtual power plants that can sell services to utilities.
In June, Sonnen signed a deal with Enbala Power Networks, a maker of distributed energy aggregation and control platforms.
Envision Energy, based in China and now one of Sonnen’s newest investors, manufactures wind turbines and develops software to integrate renewable resources into the grid.
Sonnen is looking to expand its residential and commercial market share in U.S. regions with high electric prices, like California, Hawaii and the Northeast. Through software that allows end users to trade energy and services between each other, then-CEO Boris von Bormann told Utility Dive the vision is to become the "AirBnB for energy."