Nigerian Startup PowerLabs Gets Funding to Scale Intelligent Energy Orchestration Across Africa
PowerLabs, a Nigerian startup focused on energy and climate technology, has announced the successful completion of its pre-seed funding round, led by Breega. Participants in the round include Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures. This strategic investment aims to accelerate the deployment of Pai Enterprise, PowerLabs’ flagship AI-driven energy orchestration platform, across Nigeria’s commercial and industrial sectors, and sets the stage for expansion into other West African markets.
PowerLabs plans to utilize the new funding to broaden its platform’s reach into Nigeria’s most energy-intensive industries, such as hospitals and manufacturing hubs. These sectors require intelligent, automated control systems to ensure uninterrupted power supply and operational resilience. Unlike traditional energy management systems, PowerLabs’ platform offers real-time sensing, communication, and automation across multiple distributed energy sources, transforming how organizations manage their power infrastructure.
For decades, Nigerian energy management has primarily involved basic monitoring of energy consumption. However, for the millions of businesses relying on a combination of unreliable power grids, generators, rooftop solar, inverters, and batteries, mere visibility provides little value unless it translates into resilience and continuity. In 2024, the manufacturing sector alone spent ₦1.11 trillion on alternative energy sources—a 42% increase from the previous year. Small factories adjust work hours based on generator fuel availability, hospitals coordinate backup systems to maintain critical care, and building management teams make dozens of reactive energy decisions daily. Existing monitoring tools focus on identifying issues but fall short of providing actionable solutions or preventive measures.
Pai Enterprise changes that equation. Unlike conventional dashboards, Pai Enterprise does not simply observe; it senses, communicates, and actuates across multiple distributed energy sources in real time. By continuously modelling supply, demand, and operational constraints, the platform enables organizations to run their own intelligent microgrid. As a result, the platform transforms energy from a reactive problem into a proactive, strategic resource.
This vision of a self-optimizing energy ecosystem was recently highlighted in a feature that explored how PowerLabs wants to make Nigeria’s grid think by shifting the paradigm from passive consumption to active, intelligent orchestration.
The measurable impact spans Nigeria’s most critical sectors:
● Hospitals: With intelligent monitoring across critical circuits, teams are instantly notified when there are fluctuations in supply, voltage drops, or automatic transitions to backup systems. This real-time visibility ensures that departments like intensive care, laboratories, and operating theatres remain protected, enabling faster response, reduced risk of disruption, and continued patient care.
● Data Centres: By providing continuous insight into the performance of energy assets such as solar systems and generators, operators can track efficiency, optimize usage, and reduce emissions without compromising uptime. The result is a more sustainable infrastructure that still meets the uncompromising reliability standards required for digital operations.
● Factories: Factories require more than just stable power, they need actionable intelligence to drive performance and profitability. Through detailed energy analytics, operators can identify inefficiencies, understand consumption patterns across production lines, and make informed decisions that reduce costs while maintaining output. This transforms energy from a fixed expense into a controllable lever for operational efficiency.
● Retail outlets: By analyzing consumption trends and usage behavior, retail outlets can right-size their energy assets, avoiding overinvestment while ensuring sufficient supply during peak periods. This leads to lower operating costs and improved energy efficiency across single or multi-site retail operations.
● Critical facilities: For critical facilities such as telecom towers, banks, schools etc, uninterrupted operations depend on anticipating issues before they occur. Continuous real-time monitoring enables early detection of anomalies and supports predictive maintenance strategies, reducing downtime and extending asset lifespan.
“Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that don’t speak the same language. At PowerLabs, we believe decentralization doesn’t have to mean disorder. We’re building the intelligence layer that will prove that distributed energy resources can operate as a unified source while leveraging its disaggregation to offer flexibility, cost efficiency, carbon neutrality and redundancy … more than a centralised energy system ever could. “— Tobe, CEO & Co-Founder, PowerLabs
PowerLabs will strategically deploy the raised capital to accelerate the rollout of its flagship Pai Enterprise platform, improve its cutting-edge predictive load-management algorithms, and broaden seamless integration with distributed energy assets ranging from rooftop solar and battery storage systems to traditional grid infrastructure.
This funding round brings together a mix of global and Africa-focused investment partners with deep commitment to climate-tech and a proven track record of scaling innovation in emerging markets, all aligned on PowerLabs’ mission to solve energy resilience. Breega is an international fund investing in digital, climatech, and deeptech companies across Europe and Africa. Mercy Corps Ventures backs market-systems solutions in fragile and frontier markets; Catalyst Fund, a leading climate-tech investor backing solutions for climate adaptation and resilience in Africa.
Kaleo Ventures specializes in early-stage technology companies across high-growth African markets. With their support, PowerLabs is now positioned to scale its intelligent energy solutions, expand Pai Enterprise across sectors and geographies, and demonstrate that the era of traditional energy management is over. Personalized, decentralized, resilient, and intelligent systems are the future, and for millions of people and organizations, that future is already here.
We backed PowerLabs at the pre-seed stage because we believe intelligent orchestration will be essential to solving Africa’s energy reliability challenge. The team is building the software and hardware layer that enables businesses to coordinate multiple distributed energy sources in real time. We’re excited to support them as they prove the impact of this model across critical sectors over the next 12–18 months.— Tosin Faniro-Dada, Partner, Breega
“Globally, more and more businesses and critical services like data centers operate in complex energy environments where a mix of energy sources must work together. The energy users typically have to toggle between cost, quality of supply and carbon footprint. PowerLabs is starting in Africa to build the intelligence to orchestrate these systems seamlessly without sacrificing any of these critical factors.”— Olúwátóyìn Emmanuel-Olúbákè, Chief Investment Officer, Catalyst Fund
Energy management alone is not enough, and for millions of users who have long struggled with outages, unreliable grids, and fragmented infrastructure, the promise of intelligent energy is not merely convenience; it is the key to unlocking their full potential and powering a new era of human progress.
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