Honda leads funding round in smart grid provider Moixa

Honda has led an £8.6m funding round in Moixa. The Japanese carmaker struck a deal with the London-based smart grid firm earlier this year as it joins the dots between the batteries in its cars and the energy sources that supply them.

Other investors in the funding round included Japanese trading giant Itochu, Lithuania-based Contrarian Ventures, and First Imagine! Ventures. Moixa’s GridShare platform facilitates the smart charging of batteries and EVs, using artificial intelligence to monitor energy use and develop charging plans that are tailored to the needs of customers. Moixa manages more than 70 MWh of residential storage capacity in 7,000 homes in the U.K and Japan, most of which are in Japan.

London-based Moixa entered the Japanese market last year in partnership with Itochu. The English company has integrated its GridShare software into the Japanese company’s Smart Star batteries. Moixa now manages 60 MWh of battery capacity across 6,000 homes throughout Japan.  The two companies are now looking at setting up a virtual power plant (VPP) with the capacity they have aggregated to provide grid balancing.

Back in their green hills of England last month, Moixa revealed their plans to develop such a virtual power plant (VPP) in West Sussex that will combine solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. The VPP could include hundreds of households, schools and other facilities in southern England and Moixa aims to eventually scale the network up to 17 MW. 

Rokas Peciulaitis, managing partner at Contrarian Ventures, one of Honda’s co-investors in the English company, said that “Energy storage is one of the most essential elements in the sustainable energy transition. By managing thousands of batteries as a ‘virtual power plant’, Moixa’s innovative GridShare software is tackling some of the biggest challenges caused by the rapid uptake of renewables.”

Moixa will use the newly acquired funds to finance the global expansion of its business. CEO Simon Daniel says his company will use the financing to work out how to best apply its platform “to improve the economics of electric vehicle ownership,” said Daniel, “which helps the overall economics of car ownership, charging infrastructure and enables deferral of grid investment”.

pv-magazine.com, greentechmedia.com, theenergyst.com