1KOMMA5° raises €70m at $1.35bn valuation for Heartbeat AI

1KOMMA5° has raised €70m from new and existing investors at a $1.35bn valuation, with Japanese cleantech fund Marunouchi Innovation Partners the only named backer, to scale Heartbeat AI, its energy management platform – the Hamburg company confirmed the round on Monday 12 October 2026.

We are getting very good at building energy unicorns in Europe – and still hesitant about listing them. 1KOMMA5° has just chosen more private capital over a ticker symbol, again. Having followed this company’s raises since 2021, I read the €70m less as a war chest and more as a waiting room – a comfortable one, with a new Japanese guest.

€70m, a Tokyo signature, no lead

The round is €70m of fresh equity from new and existing investors, and it lifts the company’s valuation to $1.35bn, up from its previous mark, by 1KOMMA5°’s own account. The company designated no lead, and the returning investors stay unnamed. The one name attached is new: Marunouchi Innovation Partners, a Tokyo-based cleantech fund that 1KOMMA5° expects to bring experience in US energy investing to the table.

The money has a single destination. 1KOMMA5° plans to put more than €100m into Heartbeat AI over the next year – the software that steers household solar, storage, heat pumps and EV chargers against live electricity prices. CEO and co-founder Philipp Schröder also confirmed the company is weighing a US market entry: “We are considering entering the US market.”

No stage label was given; the raise follows the €150m pre-IPO round the company closed in December 2024 and extended in July 2025 with Sabanci Climate Ventures. By its own count, 1KOMMA5° has now raised roughly €470m in equity since 2021, debt-free at the last published check (company, July 2025).

Three thousand people, 300,000 machines

So why does a group built on rooftops and heat pumps need another €70m for software? Because the hardware was always the Trojan horse. Founded in Hamburg in 2021, 1KOMMA5° rolled up local solar and heating installers across Europe, and today counts more than 3,000 employees across 80-plus locations in seven countries, 120,000-plus customer households and over 300,000 installed controllable energy systems (company figures, October 2026).

Every one of those machines is a node Heartbeat AI can steer. The software side reached roughly €30m in annualised revenue, nearly double a year earlier, against expected group revenue of around €700m for 2026 (figures the company released in September). Germany’s phase-out of the fixed feed-in tariff is doing the selling: order intake in its home market rose almost 50% in September alone, by the company’s own count.

The listing remains the elephant in the Speicherstadt. 1KOMMA5° called off a planned Nasdaq IPO last year, citing US energy and trade policy, and a new attempt rides on next year’s numbers.

The 22% compounding behind the cheque

The market this round bets on is virtual power plants – aggregated fleets of small energy assets traded as one. Globally that market was worth $6.28bn in 2025 and is projected to reach $45.67bn by 2035, a 22.61% CAGR; Europe accounted for $2.61bn of it, a 41.5% share (Precedence Research, April 2026). Heartbeat AI already controls more than 1 gigawatt of flexible capacity and targets 20 gigawatts by 2030 (company figures, September 2026).

For scale, our fundraising records logged a €1.45m round for Elvy in residential energy-as-a-service just last week, while the biggest European deep tech cheque of the same stretch was Universal Quantum’s $100m Series A. A €70m top-up for a single scale-up says this segment has left seed-stage romance behind: in a market compounding at 22% a year, the fight is now for installed gigawatts, and it is a capital fight.

Patient Japanese money and the European IPO queue

What we are seeing is a pattern, not a one-off. Europe’s late-stage cleantech companies are topping up privately while the listing window stays stubbornly half-open, and the capital filling the gap is increasingly strategic and Asian – a Tokyo fund buying into a Hamburg rooftop fleet because that is where the energy-transition software economics live. The irony is hard to miss: a German unicorn postpones a US listing over US policy, then raises money partly to enter the US market anyway.

The good news is what this round values. Heartbeat’s €30m of software revenue sits inside €700m of group revenue, and the $1.35bn valuation only makes sense if the market now prices 1KOMMA5° as an energy software company that happens to install hardware – not the other way round. What to watch next: whether the Nasdaq attempt returns in 2027, how fast 1 gigawatt of steered capacity becomes 5, and which other European installers re-rate on the same logic.

Europe does not need another listing to prove this sector works. It needs the next 19 gigawatts connected. Watch Hamburg!