This European Startup Just Secured Millions To Rethink Your Home's Power

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-24

There's a new energy play coming from Europe, and it's not building a massive power plant. It's aiming to turn millions of our homes into one. London-based startup Boldr just landed $5 million in a pre-Series A funding round. That's about €4.2 million. The goal? To expand its smart climate technology across North America, beef up its contractor software, and tackle a wider range of heating and cooling systems. This wasn't a small bet by a single firm. The round was led by Unconventional Ventures, with a whole crowd joining in: Ada Ventures, Tetrad Ventures, Davidovs Venture Collective, Roxbury Asset Management, the Inclimo Climate Tech Fund, Prosegur, Techstars, the S20 Fund, and PropelX. This cash infusion comes hot on the heels of an oversubscribed $3.2 million (€2.7 million) Seed round they wrapped up just last year, in 2025. So, what's the big idea that's getting investors so excited? ### The Vision: Your Home as a Power Plant Boldr's CEO and co-founder, Madi Ablyazov, put it in a pretty compelling way. He said, "The next power plant won't be one building. It will be millions of homes working together. But you don't get there through a consumer app alone. You get there through the contractors who already install, service and replace the equipment that controls energy inside the home. Our job is to give them the technology to make that future possible." That's the key difference. Instead of trying to sell fancy tech directly to homeowners, Boldr is going through the experts who are already in our basements and attics: HVAC contractors. They see these existing networks as the fastest route to scale. ### Riding a Wave of European Energy Tech Investment Boldr's raise isn't happening in a vacuum. It's part of a much bigger trend in 2026, with serious money flowing into European tech focused on managing building energy, heating, cooling, and making the power grid more flexible. Just look at some of the other recent deals: - Axle Energy, another London company, raised $22 million to connect heat pumps, batteries, and EV chargers to electricity markets. - Berlin's GALVANY, a heat-pump platform, secured $10.5 million. - Companion.energy, based in Ghent, got $8.2 million for enterprise energy management. - Metiundo, a smart-metering provider for buildings, landed a whopping $42 million. - Helsinki's Capalo AI, a virtual-power-plant operator, raised $11.6 million. Throw in a few more rounds from companies like Hybrid Greentech, Entrix, and Barocal, and you're looking at over $165 million invested in this space just this year. Boldr has a particularly interesting peer in Axle Energy, showing London is becoming a real hub for this kind of thinking. ### Why Investors Are Betting on Boldr Alexis Horowitz-Burdick, a Partner at lead investor Unconventional Ventures, explained the conviction. "Boldr is attacking one of the most important infrastructure challenges of the next decade: how to add flexible capacity to the grid quickly, affordably and at massive scale," she said. "The team has identified HVAC contractors as a critical partner... By building technology that helps contractors serve customers better while creating a path to distributed grid capacity, Boldr is positioned to become a defining company in residential energy management." ### How Boldr Actually Works Founded in 2022 by Madi Ablyazov, Toma Paro, and Matheus Marotzke, Boldr is building an energy management platform. It starts by connecting equipment inside homes and buildings, with an initial focus on HVAC systems. But the long-game is bigger. They want to bring everything—heating and cooling systems, batteries, EV chargers, solar panels—into a single, connected network. This network could then adjust electricity demand automatically when the grid needs help. Their strategy is all about empowering the contractor. One of their flagship products is the Universal Thermostat. It's a hardware-agnostic system designed to make installations a breeze for HVAC pros. It uses a wireless setup where a control module talks to a subbase on the equipment side. The big win? No need to run new thermostat wiring, which can be a huge headache. According to Boldr, this wireless approach can save a contractor up to $500 in labor costs per installation. That's a serious incentive for adoption. Every installed unit also feeds real-time data back to Boldr's cloud platform. This gives contractors and property managers remote visibility and control they've never had before, turning a one-time install job into an ongoing service relationship. It's a clever model. They're not just selling a gadget; they're building the connective tissue for a smarter, more responsive energy grid, one contractor and one home at a time. For professionals watching the EU startup scene and the broader conversation around grid modernization, Boldr's path is one to watch closely.