Metering.com 7 DECEMBER 2016
European smart meter software provider Greenbird has received a $5m investment from venture capital firm Statkraft Ventures, with participation from ETF Partners.
Greenbird is a growing software vendor and IT integration specialist based in Norway. The company serves 80% of the utilities in the Norwegian market, and continues to build its international customer base. Its Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings Metercloud.io and Ghostwriter are designed to help utilities quickly implement flexible IT architectures for modern smart meter operations.
According to a company release, smart meter software architectures are complex, and they need to be integrated quickly and remain flexible and ever-evolving.
Metercloud.io is a ‘integration as a service’ offering, which handles metering data and provides connectors to all of the common smart meter software applications. New applications are therefore on-boarded within days rather than months. The system evolves with changes in the industry, regulation or security requirements, and thereby future-proofs a utility’s systems without repeated integration efforts or dependency on a single software supplier.
Software integration
Says Matthias Dill, managing director of Statkraft Ventures: “At Statkraft Ventures we are well aware of the software integration challenge utilities are facing as the grid is becoming increasingly intelligent. In order to capitalise on the smart grid opportunity, the IT systems need to adapt quickly. Greenbird provides exactly that flexibility and delivers it conveniently as a cloud service. Having proven its case in Norway, we see a big opportunity for Greenbird to further expand globally.”
“What convinced us about Greenbird was the vision and energy of its team,” added Arne Morteani, partner at ETF Partners. “They identified a real need in the market and leading utilities have already adopted their Metercloud.io service. We are delighted to provide additional capital to enable Greenbird’s further growth.”
Thorsten Heller, CEO at Greenbird, concluded: “Traditional system integration is not suitable for smart meter operations.
“What is needed is a brand new approach. Metercloud.io is a cloud-native integration platform that cuts integration times from 6-12 months to less than 1 month. More importantly, it creates a flexible, multi-vendor architecture that readily evolves as utilities seek to capture the more advanced benefits of smart meters. We are not competing with other software or big data vendors, but we are lowering the barriers for everyone in the ecosystem – we are truly making data fly!”
Image credit: www.statkraft.com