NOX Energy raises €3 million seed for home-device grid flexibility

NOX Energy has raised €3 million, about $3.4 million, in a seed round for software that links household heat pumps, solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles to energy markets. Rise Proptech and Volve Capital co-led, with Seeder Fund, Uneti Ventures, Fair Impact Fund and 100in participating, ESG Today reported.

The Belgium-based company, founded in 2024 by chief executive Axelle Moortgat and chief operating officer Louis Clermont, says it connected more than 10,000 energy devices over the past year and has signed customers including Eneco and Frank Energie. Its platform decides when those devices run, reading electricity prices, weather forecasts and grid conditions.

The company says the capital carries two mandates: expand outside Belgium and the Netherlands into new European markets, and embed its optimization directly into manufacturers' own apps so that flexibility becomes a built-in feature. That second use of the money is a distribution decision, and the company states the alternative it is trying to avoid — asking households to adopt a new energy-management app or install new hardware. Moortgat's pitch is that the hardware is already there. "Millions of homes already have a heat pump, battery or solar panels connected to their manufacturer's app," she said, adding that energy suppliers and grid operators need the flexibility those devices can offer while every manufacturer and market works differently, with NOX sitting in between "as the infrastructure of flex."

Ten thousand devices is the base; the company's own framing counts the opportunity in millions of homes. The firms that control the interfaces in that opportunity are manufacturers, and the announcement names none of them. Eneco and Frank Energie are evidence that suppliers will sign for the output the platform aggregates, which suggests the buyer side is at least reachable, though the coverage describes no terms, volumes or compensation for the flexibility.

No new markets are specified either, which leaves the geography as loose as the manufacturer list. The measurable test of the app strategy is which manufacturer software NOX turns up inside, and what share of the 10,000-device base came through those apps rather than through direct signings.