Sascha Koberstaedt has a pitch German factory managers apparently can't refuse: Cut your electricity bill by half, maybe more, and don't pay a cent upfront.
His Munich-based startup, encosa, just closed €25 million in combined seed equity and debt financing—announced June 1—to scale what amounts to turnkey battery storage for the country's sprawling but often overlooked mid-market industrial sector. The premise is simple, if not exactly cheap to execute: Install lithium-ion storage behind the meter, optimize when companies draw power, and arbitrage Germany's notoriously volatile electricity prices. The country's industrial users pay around €0.20 per kilowatt-hour, among the steepest rates in the developed world. And yet most lack the capital, or frankly the patience, to deploy storage themselves.
Which is where encosa comes in.
Money In, Batteries Out
Realyze Ventures led the equity tranche, with Verve Ventures, Bayern Kapital, Blum Ventures, and Kopa Ventures joining. Pre-seed backers First Momentum Ventures and Redstone stayed in, alongside Heliad, UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators, and WEPA Ventures—a family venture vehicle that brought along a consortium of co-investors, including better ventures. A handful of recognizable German tech veterans chipped in as angels: Andreas Kupke, who co-founded Finanzcheck.de; Marc Stilke, formerly at the helm of Immobilienscout24; and Sebastian Bärhold, who helped start IDnow.
The exact equity-versus-debt breakdown wasn't disclosed. The debt facility, though, is explicitly ring-fenced for asset financing—encosa's leasing model lets customers rent or lease battery systems rather than shoulder the upfront capital burden themselves. That's a critical detail in a business where installations can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of euros per site.
Founded less than two years ago in June 2024, encosa is the brainchild of Koberstaedt—who previously co-founded EVUM Motors, an electric utility vehicle maker—and Sebastian Becker. The company bills itself as hardware-agnostic, which in practice means it'll spec whatever batteries make sense (mostly lithium-ion from major suppliers) and layer its own software stack on top.
That software is the real product. Encosa's platform analyzes a customer's historical load data, models optimal system sizing, handles the bureaucratic maze of grid interconnection permits, oversees installation and commissioning, and then runs the system day to day. The goal: squeeze savings from peak shaving, maximize self-consumption of on-site renewables if present, and—crucially—trade spare capacity into Germany's wholesale spot and ancillary services markets.
The company claims payback windows typically land between 18 months and five years, depending on a given site's energy profile and how aggressively it participates in grid services. Some customers, encosa says, have seen energy cost reductions of up to 80 percent. Take those numbers with the usual grain of salt—they're vendor claims, not third-party audits. Still, with German power prices swinging wildly (and often spiking during winter evenings), the arbitrage opportunity is real, if volatile.
Regulatory Winds, Finally Favorable
By the time the seed round closed, encosa had already racked up what First Momentum described as "eight-figure project volumes" across logistics, chemicals, food processing, and real estate. The target customer base is mid-sized: companies consuming at least 100,000 kilowatt-hours annually. That's a segment that's historically been stuck in no-man's-land—too small for the utility-scale developers, too complex for the residential installers who've flooded the rooftop solar market.
Timing may be everything. Germany's renewable energy policy has lurched forward in fits and starts, but recent moves have clarified the rules of the game for storage operators. The Solarspitzengesetz, which took effect in early 2025, opened up incentives. More importantly, the Bundesnetzagentur—Germany's grid regulator—spent much of 2025 and early 2026 finalizing its MiSpeL framework, which governs how multi-use battery systems (those that blend grid-sourced power with renewables) are treated for tariff and grid fee purposes. That's dense regulatory jargon, but it matters a great deal when you're asking a logistics company in Bavaria to sign a five-year lease.
"Battery storage is conquering Germany's mid-market," Koberstaedt said in the funding announcement. "The question is just how fast."
Perhaps faster than even he expected—or maybe not fast enough, depending on who's counting.
What's Next
The equity capital will fund team expansion and speed up project delivery. The debt side bankrolls the hardware deployments themselves, which are asset-heavy by design. Encosa's public LinkedIn profile suggested a team of fewer than ten employees as of early June, though hiring has likely accelerated since. The company's immediate focus remains Germany, where it has home-field regulatory advantage and a deep pipeline of energy-intensive SMEs. Whether it expands geographically—Austria and the Netherlands seem like logical adjacencies—will depend on how smoothly it can scale operations in its home market first.
There's also the open question of competition. Encosa isn't the only player eyeing this opportunity. Enpal, Zolar, and a handful of others have dipped toes into commercial storage, albeit with different models. Utilities themselves are waking up to the potential, and some are launching their own behind-the-meter offerings for large customers. The window may be wide open now. It probably won't stay that way for long.
For the moment, though, encosa has capital, momentum, and—crucially—a regulatory environment that's finally playing along. Whether that translates into durable market position is a story that'll unfold over the next 18 to 24 months, one industrial battery installation at a time.
