Another ClimateTech Podcast
Interviews by Ryan Grant Little, a climatetech founder and investor that explore the fight against climate change through with founders, investors, activists, academics, artists, and more.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
The Utility Industry's Secret Weapon with Chris Bernkopf of Podero
Chris Bernkopf is the founder of Podero, a tech company that helps utilities balance power loads by controlling distributed energy resources like heat pumps, batteries, and EVs. Fresh off a major fundraising round, he's building his remote-first team to expand across Europe while delivering 25% energy savings to customers.
In this episode we talked about:
🔌 How Podero's software enables utilities to aggregate and trade power from customer-owned devices on energy markets
🌏 How growing up watching the same YouTube videos creates a global tribe of like-minded founders
🎯 The value of focused mentorship through programs like Y Combinator in developing founder mindset
💰 Why closing a funding round is just the beginning - it's "registering for the marathon, not finishing it"
🏗️ Building a remote-first company culture with quarterly offsites, virtual coffee chats, and camera-on meetings
#climatetech #energytech #cleanenergy
For there is a software for utilities that basically allows end users to connect their devices, so that is DERS, distributed energy resources. It could be a heat pump, a battery or an electric vehicle, and then we control these devices so that end users so the customers utility save approximately 25% energy savings. What we do in the background is that we essentially aggregate the whole fleet and then trade the power on the energy markets.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Chris Bernkopf is founder of Podero, a tech company working with electrical utilities to balance power loads across its customers. He's fresh off a major fundraising round and building up the team to ramp up across Europe. We grabbed some Japanese food for lunch and then hit record afterwards here in Vienna. I'm Ryan Grant-Little Thanks for being here, chris. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you Great to be here. You are the founder of Podero, a climate tech company in the energy industry. What does Podero?
Speaker 1:do a climate tech company in the energy industry? What does Podero do? So, in very basic terms, podero is a software for utilities that basically allows end users to connect their devices so that it's DERs distributed energy resources it could be a heat pump, a battery or an electric vehicle and then we control these devices so that end users so the customers of the utility save approximately 25% in energy savings. And what we do in the background is that we essentially aggregate the whole fleet and then trade the power on the energy markets.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you're looking at kind of inefficiencies and spot market pricings and all these kinds of things and figuring out the best time to be pulling or pushing energy from one source to another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly it. So we basically look at the household's power production. We look, of course, at the battery, the spot market, day to day prices and, of course, grid imbalances.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so I'm trying to imagine what this looks like. So does the end user kind of have an app and they're controlling this and kind of expressing preferences that I need my EV to be powered up right now, or it can be like a power plant, or is it like a smart home app or something like that? What does it look?
Speaker 1:like, yeah, that's a good question. So it's either our white label app, so we have an app where you can, you know, add a device, then basically look at the device data, set preferences for steering, or, of course, the utilities can use our API to integrate us into their app. So, you know, most of the large ones we work with, be it an Eon, you know with, be it an Eon, total Energy, skillac a lot of them first use our white label app and then they move over to integrating our API Because, of course, the customer interface should be owned by one component or by one company.
Speaker 2:Got it Okay. So you're not dealing with the end customers yourself. You're dealing with Eons and different kinds of utilities and you're the Intel inside for them, basically, as they're pushing this out to their customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So you could say we do first level support for utilities and second level support for their end users.
Speaker 2:Okay, I wanted to ask more about your customers. So it is these utilities and what happens when you approach a multi-billion euro utility and say, hey, we're the startup, we're doing this really cool thing. What does that conversation usually look like and what do they like about you?
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. You have several factors where they essentially want to work with us, one, of course, being that electricity is sort of a commodity where it's the same product for all of them, but of course there are important differences in the product offering that it can offer on top of sort of just electricity. Of course, on the other hand, there's increasing volatility in the markets. There's new regulations, there's new competitors, be it on the installer front or actually new utilities, and so the incumbents, the utilities we work with, basically, you know, want to have products that can match those, of course, be better than those, and so it typically looks like the utilities, of course, first, either they already have an internal initiative going on that says, well, we want to use these DERs to steer trades, save customers money, or of course they're still sort of in the fact-finding phase, and so it can happen that we have to help in that fact-finding phase. Or they say, well, we have a plan to steer this and this device category by X, and then we of course show them how our software works.
Speaker 2:We usually run a pilot so they can see it works with their devices, works, it works the device of their boss. And then of course, once these, once we clear those stages, then we go into rollout. So it sounds like all the utilities want this kind of offering for their customers and the decision is largely about buy or build, and some of them are building in-house right now. How do you kind of make that argument? This is a classic kind of especially dealing with larger corporates. How do you make the argument of why it makes sense to work with you rather than build in-house?
Speaker 1:So we've seen some utilities build some things in-house. We've not seen, you know, one of the major ones, maybe except for sort of the very advanced ones like Octopus, or some of the startups like Tiber and Greenlee, build parts in-house and even then they sort of buy different components. We've not seen a sort of clean in-house build. But of course there's always the question where is the handover right? So how much of the work happens on pedero side, how much of the work happens on the utility side? Of course the utilities want to own the customer interface, so they want to own the customer relationship and of course, just as, like a bank, wants to own the sort of part that keeps track and sends out loans. And you know, does the accounting for the money the utility wants to, you know, keep the trading part but also of course the sort of accounting and billing and all these aspects to some extent in-house, because of course you know those two parts are the main businesses that a utility has it's a great name, by the way.
Speaker 2:My spanish sort of said something like I could in the future, or like I can this. Did you come up with a name?
Speaker 1:uh, well, it was my co-founder, moritz. Uh, and so there's sort of yeah, there's the poder, I can. There's poder, which I think means power in Portuguese, if I'm not mistaken, uh-huh, and also it's a six-letter word that um has a dot-com domain.
Speaker 2:Not anymore, of course, but wow that's amazing that you could that that dot-com still existed. Yeah, did you use a specific tool to like find out if there are six letter words with the dot com still available?
Speaker 1:uh, right, you won't no one believe this, but uh, we use google maps, so we'd go and basically look at greek town names. Um, you know, we'd sort of um look around the map and we didn't find anything good, but sort of, in that process we came up with with arrow wow, oh, that's a really cool idea.
Speaker 2:So we just you mentioned things like or maybe I mentioned it like load balancing and and basically it's. This is a like a, an arbitration play on like demand management or arbitrage. Can you talk a little bit about how electricity systems work and kind of how you got into the space, like bring it down to a real kind of one-on-one for people who don't really might not be thinking about, like how can my car be both a power plant and a power user and stuff like that, and you know these concepts like maybe net metering or something. Just talk a little bit about how this whole system works for the average person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, I mean I usually hear these terms like load balancing and an imbalance and grid instability and so sort of the way we think about it and the way sort of it's structured in the market is there there are sort of three tiers to how electricity is bought, traded, sold.
Speaker 1:So there's long-term power purchase agreements, so these can be, you know, up to years.
Speaker 1:So you sell, you know, the nuclear power of the nuclear power plant generates, you know, to a certain company and you can do it for a very long period. Then you have the wholesale markets. So this would be your day ahead and intraday markets, a day that is, you buy electricity for tomorrow and intraday would be in 15 minutes intervals or it could also be longer intervals like 30 or 60 minutes, you know, for the next day and then of course on that day and then you have the balancing energy markets and so that is basically the sort of markets where you get a signal from the grid operator to turn on and turn off power and this is basically the last you know stabilization mechanisms. Of course, long term you want to have enough PPAs in either direction buying and selling so that the grid is sort of roughly balanced. Then on a day ahead market, of course the price find itself where demand and supply meets. And then the balancing energy market is, you know, for short-term corrections when sort of that market is not balanced anymore.
Speaker 2:PPAs being power purchase agreements. In the past few years, we've seen the energy markets change a lot, driven by AI and its kind of insatiable demand for power. I read recently that one AI prompt uses the power equivalent to charging your smartphone for two days, which is kind of terrifying when you think about how, like you know, people are. What's the weather today on chat, gpt and stuff like that, and I wonder, you know, just thinking about this, in the few years that you kind of been in this space, how have you seen the power markets change and what keeps you up at night about?
Speaker 1:it? Yeah, for sure I'll touch on the AI part at the end of the answer. So I guess what we've started this is sort of long-term sort of deregulation or splitting of the actors in the electricity market. So it used to be that the national grid would be owned by the largest utility, like it's still the case in the US, and now in Europe it's split up into transmission systems operators, so those are basically the largest power lines you know transmitting between countries or between you know large facilities. Then you have the distribution grid and then you have the retail utility companies and of course anyone can get a license and become a utility and trade in the power markets. Of course it's not super easy but it's possible, and so essentially this allows you know non-state utilities, you know other companies, to basically participate in the power markets.
Speaker 1:And so the next big shift is of course the surge in renewables, so specifically wind and solar, that we've seen in the past 10 years, and of course also the growth in heat pumps, evs, batteries, inverters on the consumer side.
Speaker 1:Of course in Sweden that trend has been going on for many, many years, but in the rest of Europe it's been more recently and of course the sort of surge of ACs in Northern Europe where, for example in Austria, people are now getting ACs because the summers are getting a little bit too long, and so of course the key issue on the power market right now is that you know generation and utilization of power is not synced anymore. So it used to be that when you turn on you know your let's say, your electric heater that some gas turbine would spin faster. But of course now you know, if generation is from wind and solar, that you know that the power output is set by nature and now of course the demand side, so the utilization side, has to adapt. So this shift is something that causes imbalance in the markets, that causes these price peaks and valleys, and we are of course working actively against that and of course the trading on those markets then saves our customers money.
Speaker 1:You wanted to mention something about the AI side of things as well, there, well it seems that that's more of a personal opinion, that I can't prove, but it seems that most of the compute will be the evaluation and not training of the models, since now with DeepSeq, the reinforcement learning seems to be quite cheaper than training the base model, and so you can adapt models with less energy use. So most of it will be evaluation, and so I guess it won't be that much different to running web apps. I feel that for it to make a notable effect on the grid and on the total power consumptions we would have to build much more chips than we can currently. I don't see it being the sort of the biggest use of energy in the coming years, but of course.
Speaker 2:But if I look at companies like Microsoft and Google, they're saying that they're using 50% more power than expected or than they did a couple of years ago. Is that, I mean, is it just not material relative to other industries?
Speaker 1:basically, Well, if you look, for example, everybody heating their home with electricity or everybody cooling their home, everybody driving around with cars that use electricity, I would assume that that's sort of much more than you know, of course, charging a smart burner. But I think the sort of if you use AI a lot, it's like having a mini fridge, which, of course, the sort of heat pump, is also in a way a reverse fridge, but much larger, of course, than a mini fridge.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's not nearly as bad as I thought then. So yeah, if somebody just sitting there doing AI prompts all day and drinking beers out of a mini fridge next to them, then that's 2x Exactly Okay, interesting, interesting. You at Podero have just finished a fundraising round and you're wearing your Planet A. People can't see this right now, but you're wearing your Planet A sweatshirt right now. Investor Jessica Burley from Planet A was on the podcast as well. Can you talk a bit about how the round went, who was involved, how it came together? What did you expect, what didn't you expect? Was it easier or harder than you expected?
Speaker 1:That's a good question If it was easier or harder. So yeah, planet A as a lead investor, a systemic capital from London as a co-investor. Our two VCs that were in before, that is, pilblot, dot and Push Ventures, are also invested again. So that was very nice to see that we also have the continuous support from existing investors and I think now we have a sort of a good mix of two climate VCs and two sort of you know, more energy focused VCs, and I feel that we get the best of both worlds in terms of sort of the you know, the support system that somebody like Planet A could offer and, of course, sort of the electricity expertise that somebody like Systemic can offer.
Speaker 1:And it's been sort of it was the same in our pre-seed round and it's really nice to continue that trend and to basically, you know, that's sort of the thing that we looked out for us. I made it like a number two thing that was important to us, of course. Number one is more the people you work with, because you sort of it is good to have a great fund name, but you sort of you really care about the person behind the fund that you're working with, so that that's maybe the top thing and there I think we've been extraordinarily lucky. Fundraising process. I feel it always feels to you like it's difficult, but I guess it can always be more difficult and probably the next rounds will be more difficult still. So, yeah, it's good to be back to selling and building, the main two things that we should be doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you've got some great brand name investors there and it's a very clean cap table and great testament to your success that you have your existing investors in this round as well. You're not new to the founding game. You're a lifelong founder and when you were a teenager you started a t-shirt company, later on an ed tech company and now you're doing this. Can you just talk a little bit about how you became an entrepreneur, Kind of what spurred you on and bring us up to today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. I mean I guess the sort of you know. When I was a kid I saved my money and became a glider pilot, which is really cheap actually it's not like you know like it's under 2000 bucks. And so you sort of learn that to do something that's sort of risky or where you have a lot of responsibility can be very enriching and that sort of can be super interesting. And so in a way, it's good to not shy away from responsibility because of course you get something for it in return. It's not a zero something.
Speaker 1:And I read the four hour work week, believe it or not, when I was 18. And I was like, well, probably it's going to be more than four hours of work. But it seems really interesting to sort of you have this sort of icky guy between what's needed, what are you good at, what is valued by society and how you can earn money. And it seems sort of that equation would be solved quite well by founding. And yeah, so I started this t-shirt brand where we did merchandising for sport clubs. You know then had a couple of wins and failures in the past. Yeah, before Podera built Alpus procurement search engine, went for Y Combinator, but then ultimately decided to go into climate tech because it felt like the thing I could be doing for 20 or 30 years without ever regretting it. So, yeah, I'm very happy to sort of be contributing a little bit to that movement.
Speaker 2:You mentioned Y Combinator there. Y Combinator is probably the world's most elite startup accelerator, and you also spent time at the world's definitely most elite physics center. No-transcript. Talk about what it was like being in those two places and maybe how you got into them.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure CERN was. Actually. I shared this tiny office in Vienna with a colleague and then he spent a summer at CERN and met an interesting professor there and just out of the blue I was in my t-shirt selling sales mode. I was like, hey, can you give me a meeting? And so I was able to do my master thesis at CERN. I have to say I never got into the community as much as people who did their PhD there, when you spend three, four years there. So I'm not that close to CERN.
Speaker 1:But for me always the sort of startup world resonated more because it seemed like for science it would be very important for you to be the first name or the last name on the paper.
Speaker 1:Of course, first being the best place to be last name is the second place to be in the paper, as far as I still remember, whereas for companies you usually you sort of it's easier to win together and that sort of drove me back into the startup world and I sort of the thing Y Combinator was to me was sort of this apprenticeship, you know, where you basically learn a craft, you have a lot of time with mentors, you get a lot of feedback, you're able to ask all the stupid questions. You're able to ask all the stupid questions and most often the answer is you're like, how can I do X? And they say, well, just do X. And usually that's good advice and it's basically you just have to increase your agency. Of course, reading a lot of the articles out there by the people in the Y Combinator Network, but it was sort of a transformative step for me in terms of how I think and how I approach founding in general. I approach, you know, founding in general.
Speaker 2:So you've been around the world. You spent some time in Berlin and Copenhagen, I guess with these accelerators also then probably in the US and in Switzerland. You're back home now in Vienna, where you've got your kind of nose to the grindstone building this company for the past couple of years. What's it been like? You know you're below 30. Still You've traveled the world and lived around the world. What's it been like to live in these different places and what are some of your impressions of the startup communities in different?
Speaker 1:places. Yeah, you know it's strange because you'll go somewhere in the world and then you'll meet people that are exactly like you, because it's sort of you know, you've watched the same YouTube videos when you're 16, even though you live in India or you live in Austria. True, that's kind of strange, but of course, you get to experience, you know the cultures of the people you meet and I think that's kind of nice.
Speaker 2:So your cultural reference points are less about geography and much more about, kind of like, the particular sub genres that you've chosen.
Speaker 1:And then you end up meeting these same people in these different places, kind of de facto, because it's these are the, you know, the shared interests that brought you to those places in the first place yeah, exactly, and I might have, um, you know, much more in common with them than with my high school buddy, just because they're in a different bubble in the internet, which maybe is also concerning, but that's my experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's super concerning. It's less concerning when it's driving you to build climate tech companies. It's more concerning. You know probably some other podcasts where people are talking about other things that are more dangerous bubbles out there, Exactly. And what about the year ahead? So you're funded now. You, as you said, you're happy to be back kind of into operation mode. I remember that as well. You know as a founder that the financing, the fundraising period, is so stressful, right, Because it's like it's just always this moving target and kind of like this Tetris game, and then, once you're through it, you feel this great sense of relief and I think the better founders realize that that's just like basically registering for the marathon, whereas some other founders treat it as like that's having finished the marathon, Like OK, we've got all this money in the bank, but now is the time for action and to kind of build the thing. What does your year ahead look like?
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure Before I go into year ahead. I mean, it's sort of the interesting thing about fundraising is you have to sort of prove that. You have to prove that what you're doing is valuable and that your strategy is right, and you get to really ask the big questions, like you know, should revalue strategy. And then now, of course, we are lucky enough to have enough money in bank and time, of course, to implement a strategy. And so the year ahead, essentially, is rolling up with more customers, increasing our customer base, you know, improving the software and basically, of course, for me personally, the challenge is, of course, to go from IC to manager, as I, you know, of course I will always do some sales and I can't help myself, but I don't code in more than like over a year but to also, of course, you know, be sort of there for the team and to sort of build an environment where people can do great work without being bothered by externals or also internal factors, like me.
Speaker 2:It's awesome that you say that it's nice being questioned on your strategy like that. I do a lot of investment readiness and pitch training for startups and one of the things I tell them is like look, just accept that pitching to investors is super, super stressful because it's literally you're up there in front of people whose job it is to try to like basically poke holes in everything you do and you're literally up there telling the world your very best idea and the thing that you're going to commit like five maybe more you know years of the of your life too, and it can be, when you know, those moments when people ask you a question you don't really have the answer to or, like you know, you're quite literally and figuratively under the spotlight. So great that we felt comfortable in that role. It's paid off, for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. It's really funny when I say, well, you should focus on startups, you should focus on this, and then you sort of get to prove your thesis. I feel that's nice.
Speaker 2:That's the other thing, right? I mean it's the peanut gallery, because everybody's telling you how to do your job and everybody thinks that they've got the better approach to it. You know and including with you know existing and new investors they're going to have a view on how you should approach these things, but ultimately the implementation is up to you and you can take it as advice. But if you try to listen to everybody, treat everything as prescriptive from everyone, then it's impossible to move forward. Right, because a lot of it's going to be contradictory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. It's always the question, you know, what level of context somebody has to have before, sort of the strategic advice is valuable, and so it's sort of we've been quite fortunate to have very close advisors, but of course only very few, because it's really just sort of a certain cadence of information you have to receive before you know. I can also give somebody feedback and so I can give an opinion, but it shouldn't be taken as advice.
Speaker 2:Not everybody follows that principle, unfortunately. Oh yeah, that's definitely true, but you're absolutely right, and I mean, with the investors that you have, I think you've got a lot of that knowledge really built into the cap table For people who want to learn more about Podero or get involved with this mission. What are you looking for? Where is the best place for them to get in touch with you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. So I mean, you know we're currently hiring, so that is, software engineers, sales managers, sdrs. We just finished the marketing roles. Unfortunately, marketing world is going to be open again in maybe a few months. Are they remote or in Vienna? Yeah, so we're a remote company.
Speaker 1:We do have a hub in Vienna and we have almost a hub in Milan already, but we meet, you know, every three months for offsites and of course, we have different ways to to stay in touch. So that's, you know, coffee chats where you get matched one on one. Of course we have all hands. Uh, they're sort of ad hoc board game nights and these sort of things. So we tried, and of course, every meeting is, you know, everybody has the camera on. I'd always be super weird. Yeah, so that's the. How can people learn about us? Well, I, well, I guess doing projects like this is sort of the highest fidelity information. Of course we sort of write articles where we're out there on LinkedIn. You know we of course are happy to also do one-on-one conversations and then, at first, calls to share more.
Speaker 2:I'll put your LinkedIn in the show notes and I guess on your LinkedIn probably you've got links to those roles as well. Absolutely, chris. Thank you so much. Really interesting what you're doing and congrats on the major fundraise. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech Podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
