6DC III has invested in Enersee, an AI-native platform automating energy management for enterprise clients.
Energy – a major cost
Energy is a major cost for companies with 10’s, 100’s, or 1000’s of buildings. This cost has also become increasingly volatile, driven by geopolitical instability, the transition to renewable energy, and demand growth outpacing supply growth. This imbalance is unlikely to reverse, with unprecedented electricity consumption from AI data centres coming online just as many European governments have scaled back nuclear generation capacity.
To control rising energy costs, large enterprises have adopted energy management systems (EMS) over the past decade. These systems aggregate data from multiple sources, such as smart meters, and visualise it in dashboards. Energy managers are then tasked with analysing the data to identify energy optimisation opportunities.
One company, for instance, spends €1.5 billion annually on energy across its 10,000+ stores. It has a dedicated team of 70 energy managers who work with an EMS system to identify issues and cost savings.
Software-as-a-colleague
For decades, software has served as a powerful tool to enhance human efficiency. Energy managers have benefited greatly from having an EMS that automatically collects and visualises data.
However, the efficiency gains have been capped by the inherent limitations of the people working with the software. The emergence of artificial intelligence now removes this cap. AI can analyse unlimited data in seconds, delivering results that exceed human constraints, while generative AI can then translate these findings into clear, human language, making complex insights easy to understand.
Enersee
Enersee built a next-generation, AI-first, energy management platform. Self-learning artificial intelligence analyses all available data – building, metering, utility, weather, metadata, etc – and finds efficiency opportunities that humans using traditional software miss.
With one of their clients, Enersee has detected 3.6 anomalies per store versus 0.27 for their traditional human-EMS approach. Moreover, Enersee achieved an 85% true positive rate (the energy and maintenance team confirmed that the identified issue was real rather than a false alarm), whereas the true positive rate of the human-EMS approach was 20%. This customer calculated that Enersee delivers €3.5m in annual savings for every 1,000 stores, implying potential savings of €40m per year at full rollout.
Examples of anomalies include refrigerators running at inefficient settings, heating system faults causing unnecessary kWh waste, and lights or equipment operating outside scheduled hours. While these may seem trivial, the impact is significant. At Delhaize, adjusting fridge settings based on Enersee’s recommendations cut energy costs by 40% in a single store, saving €100k per year.
Human limitations to processing data only partly explains the performance gap with AI. Another major factor is that the work often simply isn’t done. Site managers may work in a siloed set-up without access to the right EMS tool, or they may deprioritise energy management amid competing demands. In Delhaize’s franchise example, franchisee store managers are hardworking but often prioritise in-store jobs over analysing energy data.
Enersee helps companies to reduce energy costs, energy waste, and CO₂ emissions by allowing them to take more effective action, faster. It operates 24/7, delivers actionable insights, and transforms energy management from reactive to proactive. The system not only flags issues, but also offers solutions and automatically calculates the cost of the solution and the return-on-investment.
Enersee is a powerful tool for many different teams, from energy managers and maintenance teams to store managers and the C-suite. It automatically prioritises issues, coordinates action plans, and helps deliver substantially higher savings with less effort.
Return on Investment for clients
Enersee requires no additional hardware or on-site installations. It plugs into existing infrastructure, finds data and self-learns. Customers typically enjoy a double-digit return on investment (ROI), meaning they save 10-30x the cost of Enersee.
Commercial traction
While we invest at an early stage, we value that Enersee already serves multiple industry verticals – retail, hospitality, real estate, logistics, and healthcare. The platform is used by clients of different sizes, from the Port of Antwerp, Ahold Delhaize to CenterParcs and Korian Care Homes. And it is already used across multiple countries – Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the UK, and Scandinavia. All this ensures a large addressable market opportunity.
Team
The company was founded by Joachim Vleminckx (CEO) and Maarten Van de Vijver (CTO).
Joachim previously built digital automation solutions for large enterprises such as Johnson & Johnson, GSK, and BASF. In this role, he last scaled a business unit from 2 to 150 people.
Maarten has a background as a technical energy consultant focused on data-analytics and modelling. He graduated magna cum laude in Bioscience, Engineering, and Environmental Technology at Ghent University.
Enersee raised a €1.2m pre-seed round from Peak Capital in 2023 to complete its AI platform build, and began the commercial roll-out in H2 2024.
6 Degrees Capital has now led their Seed round to accelerate growth.