by Shane Henson — September 28, 2011—FirstFuel Software, a commercial building energy analytics company, recently announced that it secured a $2.4 million initial round of financing led by Battery Ventures and Nth Power, with participation from individual investors. The company, formerly called iblogix, Inc., will use the financing to quickly scale and accelerate adoption of its Rapid Building Assessment (RBA) platform, which provides zero-touch analysis of the energy performance of commercial buildings.
Using patent-pending analytics that disaggregate whole building consumption into end-uses, the FirstFuel RBA platform remotely profiles the energy performance of buildings without requiring on-site audits or devices. This technology could prove to be a tremendously helpful tool for facilities managers working in all industries and for both large and small companies.
FirstFuel enables utilities to engage commercial customers by efficiently benchmarking the consumption of an entire portfolio of buildings at an end-use level, recommending custom operational and retrofit energy savings measures at a fraction of the cost and time of current alternatives. The operational recommendations lead directly to savings in the buildings, while the retrofit recommendations generate qualified leads for existing utility programs. Ongoing monitoring of consumption data against a baseline ensures verification of savings.
“FirstFuel Software has a profound opportunity to help the utility industry maximize their energy efficiency goals across commercial building portfolios,” said Jason Matlof, partner, Battery Ventures. “We look forward to supporting the company’s growth and are excited by FirstFuel’s vision of establishing the de facto information platform for large-scale energy efficiency in commercial buildings.”
