THE CATALYST
Energy is changing all around us.
Production, management, trade, and of course, consumption.
Henrik Langeland, Thorvald Thorsnes, and Nikolai Heum co-founded Enode to build a sustainable energy system and enable the next frontier of energy apps and services.
Enode’s mission is to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy system by connecting and optimizing the world’s energy devices. The company is betting big on the electrification of energy-intensive sectors like transportation and a general transition from fossil to renewable electricity production. The idea is that a coordinated, smart and flexible energy system will reduce the cost and accelerate the pace of this inevitable energy transition.
To accomplish this mission, Enode has built a powerful platform on top of API building blocks.
These APIs provide the infrastructure to connect the entire energy network that Enode supports. Consumers can manage their energy consumption by optimizing it based on price/supply and enterprises ranging from electricity suppliers to climate startups are able to move faster with their customers.
Enode’s team, headquartered in Oslo, Norway with team members spread remotely around the world, supports a wide array of customers, including global energy leaders E.ON, Fjordkraft, and OVO Energy, who collectively reach more than 60M customers.
Founded in 2020, Enode has raised $17.2m from leading investors, including Lowercarbon Capital, Box Group, MCJ Capital, and Skyfall Ventures.
PASSION BECOMES PROFESSION
Langeland has always had a personal interest in energy.
He attended NTNU to study energy engineering, then dabbled in a few startups and climbed the proverbial ladder of the consulting world. But energy was always his passion.
Norway also had a particularly significant impact on the Enode story.
The three co-founders are from Oslo, Norway and attended university together. When the three friends began to consider starting a company in early 2020, the Norway EV adoption rate hovered at around 50% and was ramping up drastically to a meaningful inflection point.
“We started reflecting on how Norwegian society was electrifying rapidly and five years ahead of any other country in the world basically. We observed how the consumer mindset was shifting, even our own friends and family. These consumers were interested in electricity consumption and energy usage, specifically the price of a kilowatt hour and an improved understanding of what the kilowatt hour really is.”
By monitoring the pulse of Norwegian citizens and their general migration towards more sustainable energy usage, ideas began to surface for how to support this growing market.
Initially, the shift to EV was in large part due to cost. In Norway, there are high levels of taxes on ICE vehicles, but not on EVs.
However, it’s not just about cost.
The global electrification movement is already underway.
The vast deployment of new devices across the world will undoubtedly drive up the amount of electricity and all of the supply has to come from renewable energy, particularly solar and wind, which unfortunately is unreliable.
So you have increasing demand, but a supply side that's going to be much more unreliable.
The logical solution to that is that we have to start managing demand more intelligently. The energy consumption model needs to follow the supply in a much more elegant way than it is today.
This requires interoperability to control the data accessed from all these EVs, solar panels, heat pumps, etc. that are being installed and we need to be able to manage or control them in real-time. We can only do that through software.
This is where Enode the story begins.
Q&A
I spoke to Langeland (CEO and co-founder) about his lifelong passion for energy, the company inception, growth ambitions, and API strategy. Why build your company around an API platform?
There are enterprises today that want to build user experiences on top of energy data. For example, an energy provider that wants to build a home charging experience using your EV charger to balance the grid in essence.
We're building the infrastructure for that.
All through our API.
In every country, there are different variations in terms of how energy is traded and how the energy market is structured. There are local adaptations that need to be made if you are going to build a consumer experience, but that limits the scope in a geographical sense.
So for us, it basically came down to the fact that we think that we can accelerate the energy transition more by doing this horizontally and going further down the stack, enabling all these companies to build with our single API entry point.
We think this makes it easier for our customers and accelerates their development across a lot of different geographies, which eventually is crucial to the energy transition.
If we're going to be able to have that increasing demand and run on intermittent supply, this needs to happen extremely fast.
That’s the reason why we chose to build a platform that’s underpinned by APIs.
Talk about your strategy for growth.
Our growth story is really about the shift towards electrification.
Every country in Europe, the US, and basically all over the world will follow the curve of electrification.
Every car out there will be replaced by an EV. Every gas boiler will be replaced by a heat pump. Every house will have a solar panel.
Everything will be electrified.
Over the next 10 years, there will be more than a billion of these devices that will be deployed.
And all of those devices need to be connected.
They all need to play a role in this energy transition and they all need to be managed through one of our customer’s end user experience.
Over the next 10/20 year trajectory, we need to continue leading that market expansion by enabling all of those devices to be connected and making them interoperable. Basically, making it easy to access and connect those devices.
What’s most important during the Enode customer integration?
First, API documentation.
One of the first interactions that we have with our customers is when they look at our documentation.
We want our documentation to be accurate, but also have a nice touch and feel to it. We also care about what it looks like because it’s a product in itself. We put a lot of effort into that.
We were lucky to bring on an incredible designer early on that was crucial in building what you see today.
We also invest a lot of time and resources in solutions engineers and customer success functions. These critical roles serve our customers all the way from before implementation to exploring new ways to use our platform. The integration phase and the Go-Live milestone are very important to us.
How long does it take to go live with Enode?
Of course, this depends on many things. But we have customers who were able to get credentials and have a working product two weeks later.
Describe your ideal customer.
It varies by country, but using the US as an example, the prototypical customer for us is an energy provider.
Specifically, an energy retailer would be an enterprise that sells energy wholesale to the consumer. This enterprise might desire to build an energy management solution. For example, a home energy management solution with a digital user experience around consuming energy in a better way that’s basically helping out balancing supply and demand in the grid.
We support customers of all sizes, from startups with small teams of maybe five people to large enterprises with tens of thousands of employees.
If you could build any API in the world to solve a particular problem or just for fun, what would it be and why?
I’ve only ever wanted to do this.
It’s personal for me.
It comes down to the mission and why we're doing this. I really believe that we're not going to be able to go through this next energy transition unless we have a digital infrastructure in place. I just don't think it's going to be possible. I think it's absolutely crucial that somebody needs to build this infrastructure to make it work.
That’s why we do this.
POSTscript
Special thanks to Henrik for allowing me to peak under the hood of Enode and sharing his inspiring story!
If you're interested in learning more about Enode, you can find them at enode.com.
If you have an API related topic or API company that you think we should explore, feel free to comment below or reach out directly to us at theapipost.substack.com