Sense Closes $14 Million Series A

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Sep 1, 2016) -

• Shell Technology Ventures and Energy Impact Partners invest in home awareness platform Sense.
• The capital will be used to fuel growth and to accelerate the hiring of a world-class team.
• Investors cite Sense's innovative disaggregation technology, its consumer-centric approach, and its experienced founding team as key factors.

Sense, the home energy and awareness platform that interprets the power usage and activity of every device in the home, announced the close of a $14 million Series A financing led by Shell Technology Ventures (STV) and Energy Impact Partners (EIP), with participation from previous seed investors Capricorn Investment Group, Prelude Ventures, CRV, and hardware accelerator Bolt. In addition, Sense today announced the launch of solar compatibility and the Sense Android app (previously iOS only).

Founded by pioneers in speech recognition, Sense's patented machine learning technology measures power one million times per second, providing homeowners with real-time data and insights on individual device behavior (whether or not those devices are 'smart'). Sense's mission is to keep homeowners informed about what's happening in their homes; helping them make their homes safer, more efficient and more reliable. Customers rely on Sense for a wide range of uses including checking what time their kids get home, monitoring their home appliances, determining whether they left appliances running or doors open, and identifying how to reduce their energy costs.

"We've been excited by the level of consumer engagement and the wide variety of ways in which our customers are using Sense. Since our pre-order program launched late last year, our two most common requests were solar connectivity and Android -- today we're pleased to announce that both are now available," said Michael Phillips, CEO and co-founder of Sense. "The Series A funding marks an important time in our company's growth as we will use it to build out our team, expand our feature set, and enhance our device detection capabilities."

The home energy management market is growing rapidly and expected to exceed $22 billion in revenue by 2023. "Data and machine intelligence are becoming an increasingly important part of unlocking value in automation and control of a connected energy platform," said Geert van de Wouw, Managing Director of STV. "Sense has developed a leading technology with state of the art disaggregation capabilities leveraging their expertise as pioneers in signal processing. Shell is exploring opportunities to bring Sense's capabilities to our business and customers."