Please welcome Texture, the first data and communication platform for the distributed energy economy
Meet Texture, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: New York
Founders: Sanjiv Sanghavi, Nicholas Brown, and Victor Quinn
The problem: Over the past decade, we have done a great job of deploying distributed energy resources (DERs), such as solar, wind, electric vehicles, chargers, batteries, heat pumps and more onto the grid. But this rapid deployment has resulted in a distributed energy ecosystem that is a patchwork series of closed systems that don’t speak to each other or operate efficiently, which has prevented collaboration across companies and energy resources. Climate change has deepened our reliance on DERs, but their available capacity will need to triple by 2030 if we want to meet the concurrent increase in demand for electricity, according to the Department of Energy. Moreover, the ineffective use of electricity from traditional power plants, combined with grid overloads and inadequate grid management, will lead to power disruptions or shortages for 300 million people in North America this year. We need fewer stopgap measures and a more permanent fix that maximizes efficiencies from our existing DER ecosystem, especially as more and more resources come online.
Texture solution: Texture is the first operating system for energy networks. The company collects data from various sources, including devices that use and store energy, the energy markets, and data on greenhouse gas emissions, weather, and more. By gathering all this data and, most importantly, making it available on a centralized hub to everyone involved — such as virtual power plants, installers, and energy retailers — Texture helps customers access all of their data and understand energy usage patterns, market trends, and environmental impacts. The platform allows customers to deliver their products and services faster, pass on those savings to consumers, and significantly reduce their data engineering costs so they can focus on their core mission. Through its centralized platform, Texture is working to accelerate the energy transition, improve resiliency as demand increases, and ensure energy abundance.
Origin story: Prior to launching Texture, Sanjiv spent more than a decade leading product, growth, design, and engineering at startups across various sectors, including fitness, healthcare, real estate, adtech, and energy. Most recently, he was Chief Product Officer for Arcadia, a JP Morgan-backed community solar platform and the largest supply-side energy data company in the world. Before that, he founded ClassPass, a leading fitness and wellness membership company that was acquired in 2021 by Mindbody. We met the Texture team through our friends at Equal Ventures, who invested in Texture’s pre-seed round.
Why we’re betting on it: Last year, electricity bills experienced the largest increase since 1984. These skyrocketing costs are driven by multiple factors, including intermittent renewable energy supply, increasing demand, and extreme weather, and rapidly rising temperatures. As a result, electrification is surging as industries and consumers alike shift toward cleaner energy sources and technology. But due to the challenges of interoperability, and a lack of resource visibility, we have not yet unlocked the full potential of distributed energy resources. Our inability to collectively stall critical climate progress because of these limitations is unacceptable, but it can be fixed. That’s where Texture comes in. The company’s vision is to enable the energy ecosystem to operate as a real-time network and provide the necessary infrastructure to enable seamless communication and coordination among diverse technologies and platforms. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Sanjiv, Nicholas, and Victor to power our global energy transition.
Our take: Today’s energy landscape is riddled with makeshift solutions — DIY integrations, isolated ecosystems of universal APIs with unreliable connections, and companies building their own networks. The industry’s attempts at navigating the complexities of climate change through stopgap measures, while offering temporary fixes, fail to tackle the core issues: inefficiency, lack of scalability, and the glaring absence of unified standards. At Lerer Hippeau, we have focused much of our time and resources on evaluating opportunities that aim to solve issues of energy access and interoperability. We believe that in order to combat climate change, rising electricity prices, and energy waste, we need a way to coordinate resources. Our investments in Haven Energy and Palmetto are direct results of this effort, and we’re proud to now be working with Texture, the data and communication platform for the green transition and open energy ecosystem.
Further reading: “Texture makes a bid to become the world’s go-to platform of the energy transition” via TechCrunch
