Nomos takes EUR 20M to turn heat pump installers into licensed power retailers

Buying power on the wholesale market, carrying the imbalance between what you bought and what your customers actually drew, and billing them later is a working capital business. Nomos holds the regulated supply licence and the balancing responsibility, and it runs procurement, metering, balancing and billing for its partners ^[4][5]. Cloover, which assembles the same solar, battery and heat pump hardware into virtual power plants, has a $100M credit facility against an expected $350M of revenue ^[13]. The facility is worth about 29 percent of the revenue it supports ^[2].

Nomos's named individual backers are consumer tech and software founders ^[7]. Ostrom's most recent EUR 20M came from Eneco, taking its total past EUR 40M ^[12]. "The round came together quite quickly and was oversubscribed," Gerbes said of his own ^[16]. I would expect the collateral a balancing responsible party has to post against its wholesale position to make an energy counterparty on the cap table worth more than the cash it arrives with.

Asked about competitors, Gerbes did not mention Ostrom, Cloover or Tibber ^[19]. "Our greatest competitor is the state of inertia together with the high energy costs which we are now experiencing," he said, and pointed to large established companies that "have not necessarily provided customers with innovative products" ^[10][11]. Tibber has raised about $180M for a direct-to-consumer model ^[14]. Take the dollar and the euro at par and that is roughly eight times everything Nomos has raised ^[3]. The new round alone is more than ten times the Speedinvest pre-seed of October 2024 ^[1].

Nomos hands over the brand and the customer relationship, and in exchange the customer arrives at the moment the hardware goes on the wall, while the installer is still in the house ^[3]. The company did not disclose how the margin is split with partners. That dependence cuts both ways. A partner big enough to sell tariffs under its own name is also big enough to apply for its own licence, and the partner decides each year whose supply sits behind its brand.

Price is what the pitch rests on. The International Energy Agency puts electricity prices for industry in the EU at more than double those in the United States, and German households already pay some of the highest rates in Europe ^[9]. "We are paying twice as much as people in the US and China for electricity," Gerbes said ^[8]. What would prove this reading wrong is a credit line or an energy counterparty turning up before the volume does, or installer partners converting households cheaply enough that about EUR 22M of equity carries a growing supply book without one ^[15].

Bastian Hasslinger, the Index partner on the deal, said Nomos is "technically uncompromising" and "ambitious enough to aim at the whole market" ^[17]. Gerbes said the company could become "one of the largest energy companies in history" ^[18].