New York City based EnergyHub just received it's first round of venture financing, from Physic Ventures and .406 Ventures. News on the financing from NYC journalists: conspicuously absent. Wake up, folks! It was on VentureBeat last night!
That's exciting to me for a number of reasons. First of all, what they do is very cool. The company makes information systems that help you monitor your energy usage. This way, instead of a bill with just the bottom line of how many Kilowatt hours you used last month, you can get an in-depth view of how you're using energy. This is key to reducing peak consumption and lowering your costs. It would certainly be nice to know how much money and power my computer is costing me each day.
What's very cool is that I got the opportunity to work with the founders, Seth and Tom, at ITAC's FastTrac class, where I am the Entrepreneur-in-Residence. (In this case, EIR is a fancy way of saying that I'm the class instructor and good utility guy to have close by to help startups working with ITAC). If you're interested in future FastTrac programs given by ITAC, you should contact Veronica Price at vprice@itac.org. There are a lot of programs, consultants and advisors for startups in NYC--
They come out of Honeybee Robotics, a New York-based company that builds hardware for NASA’s Mars missions and the Department of Defense. Who said everything in NYC was about finance, advertising and media? They're really awesome guys and I'm glad to see them get their funding. I can't wait to be able to buy an EnergyHub system for my apartment.
What's also great is that they got money from .406 Ventures--making this .406's 2nd investment in Brooklyn (they're also in Kaltura). I had the opportunity to talk to Larry Begley in the fall and he was super smart and extremely approachable. Hopefully, there will be more NYC-area based investing from .406 in the future.
BTW... Good thing Ted Williams choose to play that final day of the season. .39955 Ventures just doesn't have the same ring to it.