Furo raises $4M to put software in charge of industrial batteries

Munich-based Furo, the energy software startup formerly known as Lumera Energy, has raised a $4 million round led by New York’s TQ Ventures, joined by Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, Neo and CDTM Venture Capital, to make commercial and industrial battery storage actually pay for itself.

Europe keeps installing batteries faster than it learns to run them – and the margin between a storage asset that prints money and one that sits there depreciating is decided entirely in software. That is precisely the layer a one-year-old Munich team just convinced three American investors to back. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, the market it rides, and why the geography of this cap table is the most interesting thing about it.

The round: $4M led by TQ Ventures

Furo announced on 11 September 2026 a $4 million round – €3.44 million as reported by EU-Startups – led by TQ Ventures, the New York firm of Schuster Tanger and Andrew Marks. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, the investment vehicle of Sheryl Sandberg and Tom Bernthal, joined the round alongside Silicon Valley accelerator-fund Neo and Munich’s own CDTM Venture Capital.

The money goes to further development of the platform, expansion into additional European markets, and hiring, per the company’s announcement. “Our customers did not buy a battery to own technology, but to lower their electricity bill. That is decided by software, not hardware,” said co-founder Lena Sophia Voß in the announcement.

“Combined with a global market for storage flexibility that is likely to multiply in the coming years, we see one of the biggest opportunities in Europe and beyond,” added TQ Ventures co-founding partner Schuster Tanger.

From Google X and Apple back to Bavaria

Furo was founded in Munich in 2025 by Lena Sophia Voß, Leonie Wagner and Simon Wittner – three founders who came home from San Francisco, Google’s Moonshot Factory and Apple in Seattle respectively, out of Munich’s CDTM programme, per Tech Funding News, September 2026. The wry footnote: the talent pipeline we usually mourn flowing west can flow back east when the problem is European enough.

The problem is this: commercial and industrial batteries only earn their keep if someone decides, every quarter hour, whether to charge, discharge, shave a peak or sell flexibility into the market. Furo’s platform forecasts electricity prices and weather up to 48 hours ahead, steers the storage system in real time, and markets unused capacity in energy trading – cutting electricity costs by up to 40%, the company claims. It is hardware-agnostic, working across manufacturers and installers including Fenecon, BayWa r.e. and Enpal.

Traction, one year in: more than 800 businesses run the software across over 6,000 industrial sites, with Deutsche Bahn and Sonnen among the names cited – per the company’s announcement, September 2026. The rebrand from Lumera Energy to Furo lands with the round.

A $24bn European market compounding at 17%

The battery fleet Furo optimises is not a niche. The European battery energy storage system market is projected at $24.22 billion in 2026, growing to $52.72 billion by 2031 – a 16.84% CAGR, per Mordor Intelligence, 2026. Every megawatt of that build-out ships with the same question attached: who runs it intelligently?

Inside our own fundraising data, the energy stack has been busy this month: HVR Energy closed a €20 million Series A led by Sandton in September 2026, and Veridue raised $4 million for energy deal due diligence the week before. Furo’s cheque sits at the same early scale – but in the software layer, where a small team can touch thousands of sites without pouring a single foundation.

American cheques for German flexibility

So what does this round actually signal? Look at the cap table: a New York lead, Sheryl Sandberg’s vehicle, a Silicon Valley accelerator fund – backing a one-year-old company whose moat is fluency in Germany’s power market, the most complex in Europe. Tanger called that complexity, combined with the founders’ technical depth, exactly the point.

We have spent years watching the pattern run the other way – European energy founders chasing American capital by moving to America. Here the capital crossed the Atlantic to Munich, because the asset it wants exposure to, German grid complexity turned into software, cannot be replicated from a WeWork in SoMa. The good news is that our hardest market is becoming our export product: master pricing chaos at home and every simpler European market downstream looks like a rollout, not a bet.

What to watch now is the land grab. Battery optimisation software is filling up with contenders across Europe, and the winner will be whoever standardises the most sites fastest while the fleet doubles. Furo starts with 6,000 of them and the most demanding grid on the continent as its training ground. Watch this space – the batteries are coming either way!