The lowly breaker panel has been around for a century without getting much love, and along comes Span. The company is making a compelling bid for better, smarter electrical panels, and just got a $90 million top-up to continue its evolution. The company is solving the challenges of electrification and micro-grid balancing, ensuring that the smart homes of the future have better visibility in the how, what and why of power consumption.
Span raised $10 million a couple of years ago, integrated with Alexa and launched a smarter EV charger earlier this year to go with the smart panels.
“I was very fortunate to join Tesla in the very early days of defining what Tesla Energy subsequently became. So I was one of the early leaders in the Energy Group. People are probably most familiar with the Powerwall battery, but I was the leader of the product team there that designed, developed and deployed residential products, commercial industry products, as well as utility-scale products both on the hardware and software side. During my time, they were also responsible for products like the solar roof and deployment of solar, the glass roof part, if you will,” Arch Rao, CEO and founder of SPAN told me in an interview earlier this year. “One of the things that I got to see firsthand while deploying home batteries and solar systems and electric vehicle charging systems around the world, is that there is a fundamental problem tied to infrastructure. It is going to be a deterrent to the adoption of distributed clean energy, especially if you believe that electrification is a meaningful part of the Fossil Free journey that we want to be on. If we want to supplant [fossil-fuel focused appliances] with superior electric appliances, it’s going to require a massive upgrade to the infrastructure starting with the home electrical panel.”
“We started with reinventing the electrical panel, as it is the core component to any scalable path to electrification of homes, but the consumer experience demands more,” says Rao. “We’re excited to deploy this new capital to expand our product offerings that simplify the decarbonization of homes, and to continue developing the unparalleled approach to home energy management that Span is uniquely positioned to deliver.”
Span’s Series B funding round was led by Fifth Wall Climate Tech and Wellington Management. Other investors include Angeleno Group, FootPrint Coalition, Obsidian Investment Partners and A/O PropTech. The company explains it will use the new funding to continue developing the Span Home suite of energy products and solutions to drive commercial growth and accelerate the electrification of homes.