Boldr Success Story

Off the back of the acceleration programme, we went out to raise our pre-seed round and raised around $1.1 million. We've sold over 10,000 products in the first 15 months of operation. We actually made some key partnerships with energy companies and virtual power plants in the US and in Europe, which has allowed us to unlock the next stages of our growth.

At Climate-KIC, we are really interested in impactful startups because they're the answer to decarbonising corporates, urban areas, and making regions more climate resilient. Of our portfolio of more than a hundred companies, Boldr is really one of our success stories. I'm Toma, I'm one of the three co-founders of Boldr, and the COO. Boldr is a platform that empowers households to reduce their energy consumption while at the same time allowing them to be part of a green energy grid.

Toma and I came together to start Boldr in 2022. Both of us have always been passionate about sustainability. We were looking for an accelerator that can help us grow really quickly in Europe and gather early traction. We eventually got in and we spent three months working with the accelerator team and then later on graduated into the SAFE programme.

The Climate-KIC SAFE programme is something that we have established as a natural progression of the Climate-KIC accelerator. We take a small equity share in the company in return for an extensive service package. Fundraising is very stressful. It's a very stressful, very long process that takes time away from operating.

So having a body and partners and people like Climate-KIC is really helpful in accelerating that process. Being part of Climate-KIC and having the support of the portfolio managers has been really helpful, also in gaining a lot more visibility for the company. That has really led us to be able to grow our business and drive up new partnerships. Unlike most investors in the space, we are much more interested in the impact potential of the startup compared to the financial return.

And with impact, we mean, for example, the carbon impact potential. Advantages of the Climate-KIC SAFE programme is that you get to do the full climate impact assessment of your product. They'll measure the mitigated carbon emissions, from extraction of raw material to production to use and after use. The climate impact assessment was really important for us as it really gave us credibility with investors and really allowed us to benchmark the measurements of our impact.

In the case of Boldr, we were able to show that at the use phase of their product, they were able to save around 30% of energy compared to existing control systems in the market. In the long run, we would like to be the home operating system that can support over 10 million homes and provide energy flexibility in the grid in order to actually decarbonise the overall energy grid. We are not like any investor that holds equity shares for seven to ten years and then exit as fast as possible. We are really in for the impact and committed to the growth of the company.

Having someone like that on our cap table really gives reassurance to other investors that we're worth backing. If you have the opportunity to have Climate-KIC as a strategic partner, I think a startup should 100% do it. It really helped us grow much, much faster and was a great support in reaching our fundraising goals.