Sunrun-backed Lunar Energy debuts battery system in first step to electrify homes
Led by former Tesla Energy executive, Kunal Girotra, Lunar Energy was founded in August 2020 with the mission to electrify the home and provide energy independence. On the premise and its technology, it has raised $300 million in funding over two rounds by Sunrun, the nation’s leading residential solar and battery storage provider, and South Korea’s SK Group.
“As an entrepreneur, I’m always looking for those rare opportunities where you can invest in exceptional people with a big vision,” said Lynn Jurich, Chair of Lunar Energy and co-founder, co-executive chair of Sunrun. “Kunal, and the engineering team at Lunar Energy, are building at scale home electrification products that will dramatically accelerate the switch from fossil fuels to renewables.”
Making its official debut last week, the company’s first product is a home battery system. With that as the building block, more home and grid interactive concepts are set to follow.
“Lunar Energy was founded to build affordable hardware and software products for the residential sector to help homeowners generate, store and consume 100% clean energy and remove the usage of fossil fuels from every home,” said Kunal Girotra, Founder and CEO of Lunar Energy.
Lunar also acquired Moixa, a software company for distributed energy resources (DER) management, to take advantage of its GridShare software to manage thousands of batteries across Europe and Japan.
“From our early patents in smart homes to managing the world’s largest single fleet of home batteries, our Gridshare software has led the industry for more than 10 years and significantly advanced smart home charging,” said Simon Daniel, CEO and co-founder of Moixa. “In joining Lunar Energy, we have the exciting opportunity to pursue even greater scale for Gridshare by aggregating larger fleets of batteries across the world to better manage clean energy intelligently for homeowners and businesses.”
Now dubbed Lunar Gridshare, it is deployed at scale across 35,000 homes (330MWh of batteries) via ITOCHU in Japan, supports advanced smart charging services for Honda electric vehicles, and facilitated UPS’s transition to electric vehicle fleets in the UK. ITOCHU and Honda, previous investors in Moixa, now also join Lunar’s team of investors.
The capital raised has been used to hire great talent, acquire Moixa, and invest in product development and manufacturing activities in order to bring Lunar’s first product to market later this year.
Lunar has built a team of nearly 250 employees globally, most of whom are a mix of hardware, firmware and software engineers designing and building energy products in its Mountain View, CA and London, UK offices.
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