Boldr, an energy management startup, has raised £3.6 million in a Pre-Series A round led by Unconventional Ventures, with participation from Ada Ventures, Tetrad Ventures, Davidovs Venture Collective, Roxbury Asset Management, Inclimo Climate Tech Fund, Prosegur, Techstars, S20 Fund and strategic investors from the North American HVAC industry. The platform turns equipment inside homes, from heating and cooling systems to batteries, EV chargers and solar, into flexible energy assets that grid operators can draw on.
Electrification, extreme weather, electric vehicles and AI-driven data centres are pushing US electricity demand higher, while building new power plants, transmission lines and other centralised infrastructure can take decades. Boldr's answer starts with HVAC contractors, who are already inside millions of homes installing, maintaining and replacing the equipment that controls energy use there. Its smart thermostats and connected controls are designed to be quick to install, flexible and compatible with a wide range of heating and cooling systems. The software platform gives contractors visibility across the equipment they have installed, helping them reduce service costs, identify problems earlier, grow maintenance revenue and stay connected to customers over the lifetime of the home. Homeowners get better service and lower energy costs, and every connected system becomes another potential source of flexible capacity.
Heating and cooling is one of the largest sources of energy demand in the home and one of the biggest residential energy markets in the United States, which is why HVAC is the starting point. Nationwide distribution partnerships with major HVAC brands and supply houses, including Bosch and Daikin, give Boldr access to contractor networks across the country through the channels those contractors already use.
The new funding will support expansion from ductless HVAC controls into residential and light commercial central HVAC, accelerate product development, grow contractor partnerships and distribution, and scale the contractor platform across North America. Over the longer term, the ambition is to go beyond thermostats and become the operating layer connecting energy assets inside millions of homes, so that instead of relying only on new centralised infrastructure to meet every spike in demand, grid operators could call on thousands or millions of connected homes to reduce, shift or manage demand together.
The next power plant won't be one building. It will be millions of homes working together. But you don't get there through a consumer app alone. You get there through the contractors who already install, service and replace the equipment that controls energy inside the home. Our job is to give them the technology to make that future possible.
Boldr is attacking one of the most important infrastructure challenges of the next decade: how to add flexible capacity to the grid quickly, affordably and at massive scale. The team has identified HVAC contractors as a critical partner in the electrification of the home. By building technology that helps contractors serve customers better while creating a path to distributed grid capacity, Boldr is positioned to become a defining company in residential energy management.
