Australian home battery automation specialist Amber Electric has raised a €49m Series E led by Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s 1GT, with E.ON joining, to fund its move into Europe.
Amber Electric, the Melbourne company behind a leading home battery automation platform, closed a €49m Series E round on 21 September. Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s 1GT climate private equity strategy led the round. E.ON, one of the UK’s largest energy suppliers, also took part in the funding round.
In Australian dollars, the round is worth about A$78.5m. ETF Partners and Innovation Victoria also joined. The money will fund Amber’s expansion into Europe, where demand for household energy flexibility is rising.
What Amber does
Chris Thompson and Dan Adams founded Amber in 2017. It operates as an energy retailer in Australia and gives households access to wholesale electricity prices. Customers pay what the market pays, which can be cheap at midday and expensive in the evening. That model suits households with batteries and solar, because they can avoid buying power in the priciest hours.
Amber’s software makes that exposure work in customers’ favour. Its SmartShift system uses AI to forecast wholesale prices, solar output and household demand in real time. It then decides when to charge or discharge a home battery, run an electric vehicle charger or export rooftop solar.
The company says it is Australia’s largest battery automation provider, with more than half of the market for automated home batteries. That position rests on Australia’s high rates of rooftop solar and fast growth in home batteries. Federal battery subsidies have added to that growth. As more batteries arrive, the case for home battery automation grows too, because each device earns more when software runs it well.
Why investors are backing flexibility
As grids take on more wind and solar, prices swing more sharply through the day. Home batteries and electric vehicles can soak up cheap power and release it when supply is tight.
So platforms that coordinate millions of small devices are becoming a form of grid infrastructure. Grouped together, they can act like a power station, often called a virtual power plant. They can also delay costly network upgrades.
Vikram Raju, head of climate private equity investing at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, said Amber was well placed for that shift. “We believe Amber will play a consequential role in enabling the energy transition in Australia, Europe and beyond,” he said.
Thompson, Amber’s co-founder, said the round would help the company build overseas. “We’ve built a leading energy automation platform in Australia, and this investment gives us the backing to build on that leadership globally,” he said.
A European push with E.ON
Europe gives Amber a much larger market, although conditions vary by country. Many European households still pay fixed tariffs, yet dynamic and time-of-use tariffs are spreading fast. Meanwhile, home battery sales have grown strongly in Germany, Italy and the UK. In Britain, for instance, some tariffs already change price every half hour.
E.ON’s involvement is important for that plan. As a major supplier with millions of customers, it could give Amber a route to households through utility partnerships. Thompson said 1GT would help the company accelerate its expansion across Europe and bring energy flexibility to more households and utility partners.
A crowded field
Amber won’t be alone. Competition for households’ devices is already strong. Some utilities are also building their own control tools in-house.
Octopus Energy’s Kraken platform, Tibber and others already sell smart tariffs and device control in Europe. In the United States, battery companies are also chasing flexibility revenue, as Branch Energy’s recent raise viste.
Still, few rivals have Amber’s depth of data on how home batteries behave in a volatile wholesale market. The test in Europe will be whether home battery automation built for Australian conditions can adapt to different tariffs, rules and grid operators.
