Furo raises $4M from US investors and stays headquartered in Munich

Furo, a Munich startup whose software runs commercial and industrial battery storage, has closed a $4 million seed round led by New York based TQ Ventures. Its three founders are all 28. They raised the money from mostly US backers after turning down full time US job offers and moving home to Germany.

The US accelerator Neo joined the round too, which matters because Furo was the only European startup it accepted in 2025. Also in were Sheryl Sandberg’s fund Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners and CDTM Venture Capital, Trending Topics reported. Furo is incorporated as a Delaware C Corp while the team works out of Munich. The cash is going into product development, expansion into further European markets and hiring.

What it sells is a forecasting and trading layer that sits on top of battery hardware. The software predicts electricity prices and weather up to 48 hours ahead, then decides in real time when a battery charges, when it discharges and when selling power is the better option. Spare capacity gets monetised on energy markets, so an idle battery still earns. Furo’s own site splits that into three modules, PLAN, OPERATE and FLEX.

The company says customers cut electricity costs by up to 40 percent, and it puts the global cost of inflexible industrial energy demand at roughly $580 billion a year. Both figures are Furo’s own, which means nobody outside the company has checked them. What’s easier to check is the install base, because there are comparable figures from May and from this week.

Reported figures	19 May 2026	11 September 2026
Sites	Over 3,500 planned or optimised	Over 6,000 in Germany and Europe
Companies on the platform	Around 100 paying customers and over 600 more	More than 800
Named partners and customers	Enpal, Sonnen, Fenecon, BayWa, Segen, IBC Solar, badenova	Deutsche Bahn, Enpal

That May announcement introduced the company as Furo, formerly Lumera Energy. It also set the floor for the product, and that floor is unusually low. Co-founder Simon Wittner said Furo enables marketing from 150 kW and behind the meter optimisation from 100 kW, while established aggregators focus on portfolios starting at 10 MW.

Why the founders went back

Lena Sophia Voß, Leonie Wagner and Simon Wittner met on a master’s programme at Munich’s Center for Digital Technology and Management, a joint institution of LMU Munich and the Technical University of Munich. The programme took them to Stanford and UC Berkeley. Between them they’ve worked at Apple, Google X and Boston Consulting Group, so the Bay Area track record is real. All three had full time offers with visa sponsorship from their former US employers, Voß told TechCrunch, and went back anyway.

We’re currently moving faster in Europe than if we’d have stayed in the U.S.

Lena Sophia Voß, Furo co-founder, via TechCrunch

Her reasoning was commercial rather than political, though immigration restrictions are affecting tech employees elsewhere. Proximity is what counts early on, she said, and German engineering salaries stretch a seed round further. Furo’s US investors had asked whether it could hire on the budget it set, which was already at the top end for Germany.

If you are an early-stage company, very often it’s mostly about your network, and also about being close to your customers.

Lena Sophia Voß, Furo co-founder, via TechCrunch

The thesis the investors are buying

That argument has a name now. In an August post, a16z’s Gabriel Vasquez and Angela Strange wrote that there is now an advantage to having one foot in your home country and one foot in Silicon Valley. They put 44% of a16z Apps investments over the past two years in companies with international founders, split evenly between US and overseas headquarters. The same firm recently raised $1.1B for AI hardware.

European rounds have grown to match, though Furo’s is nowhere near the top of that range. Mistral’s €3B raise at a €21B valuation is the scale the continent’s biggest names now command. Furo is at the other end, but the route to market differs too, so it sells through installers, storage manufacturers and utilities rather than direct.

The catch is that the two customer counts aren’t measured the same way. May’s figure separated around 100 paying customers from over 600 other companies using it. September’s “more than 800 companies” doesn’t carry that split, so the paying share isn’t public. Nor is revenue, a valuation or the round’s structure.

What’s worth watching is whether the Munich setup holds once the hiring starts, because that’s what this round pays for. The salary argument gets harder if rivals start recruiting from the same European pool, and Trending Topics calls the field crowded. Voß said the team is back in the US three or four times a year, mostly for admin and investors, so the Silicon Valley link still holds.