Novele raises $17 million Series A for AI energy software in commercial buildings

Novele has raised an oversubscribed $17 million Series A led by Boisei Labs, with Locke Health, Arup Ventures, and Barton Malow, the national construction contractor, joining alongside several large commercial real estate owners and operators whose names the announcement omits—a cap table that points as much to a route into occupied buildings as to a software bet. The capital is earmarked for engineering, deployment, and commercial hiring, for faster installation across the company's active pipeline, and for further development of BoardOS, its AI energy intelligence software.

BoardOS runs beside EnergyBoard, Novele's distributed energy storage hardware, as a management system built for commercial buildings that are already standing and occupied, reading consumption, forecasting demand, and reshaping power use in real time to lower energy costs, improve resilience, and tighten control over emissions and energy performance. The pitch arrives as data centers, AI infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing add substantial new loads to a U.S. grid where transmission and new generation can take years to develop, and, as PWD has argued, the interconnection queue has become an underwriting variable. Buildings sit on the other side of that arithmetic, already connected and already metered, and in the company's telling largely beyond their owners' control.

Commercial buildings rank among the country's largest energy consumers while having "remarkably little ability to understand, predict, or control how they use power," chief executive and co-founder Charles Conwell said in the announcement, adding that the flexibility the grid needs is "hiding inside the buildings we already have." Novele reports live deployments with Fortune 50 customers and a pipeline of more than 2,000 buildings spanning 2.6 billion square feet, and it has completed large-scale UL 9540A fire testing in support of its UL 9540 listing as it prepares for broader deployment. Because the $17 million funds engineering hires and pipeline conversions rather than generation or transmission, the next test is how quickly the pipeline becomes an installed base and whether the UL 9540 listing clears in time for the wider deployment this capital is meant to fund.