geo acquires ONZO accelerating delivery of its home optimisation vision
UK based smart energy specialist geo, today announced the acquisition of market-leading energy disaggregation specialist, ONZO. The deal is a strategic cornerstone in the company’s vision to deploy its Whole Home Optimisation smart energy system across the UK and Europe. At the same time, geo revealed the successful conclusion of a strategic funding round, allowing the business to further accelerate delivery of its plan.
ONZO’s energy disaggregation technology details exactly how devices in homes consume energy and drive energy bills. By adding this extra intelligence to geo’s market-leading Whole Home Optimisation capability, which uses machine learning to enable homes to fully exploit their energy tariff, households will now be able to automatically obtain the biggest possible energy savings, whilst minimising waste and household carbon emissions.
geo’s technology is being provided to around 50% of UK homes under the Government’s smart meter rollout, as well as to tens of thousands of homes in the Netherlands and Nordics, in the form of in-home energy displays, and Onzo’s service is currently used in a quarter of a million homes, with more than 7,000 new users joining monthly. This significant footprint represents a crucial foundation from which to realise the full benefits of smart meter deployment.
Commenting on the acquisition Steve Cunningham, Chief Executive Officer at geo said, “It’s great to be joined by the innovative and creative team at ONZO. Combining our two businesses adds real strength to geo’s expertise and extends our leadership in the Energy IoT and data science environments. It also allows us to provide even greater savings to the millions of geo and ONZO customers across Europe.
“2021 is going to be an exciting time for geo and our partners: we commenced the delivery of our new EV charging and home heating optimisation capabilities earlier in the year. And as we complete the integration of ONZO’s capabilities, we will introduce the ability for the millions of households to automatically reduce their energy consumption further still through Whole Home Optimisation.”
“We’re looking forward to being able to bring even greater benefits from our combined offering to geo and ONZO’s existing customers and to helping our industry partners lead the way in the race to achieve Net Zero.”
Rob Merrington, Managing Director of ONZO commented, “Becoming part of the successful geo team is a perfect platform for ONZO’s evolution. It’s clear there is genuine synergy within the current product suite provided by both businesses, and a significant opportunity for future developments, that will benefit both geo and ONZO’s current and future customers.”
geo also announced the conclusion of a successful funding round today. The raise will see strategic investors the Low Carbon Investment Fund, Schneider Electric and West Coast Capital join the business and will allow geo to accelerate its mission to enable every home to achieve energy and carbon savings through Whole Home Optimisation.
Commenting, Steve Cunningham said, “We are pleased to welcome our new investors to our business as we set out on the next step of geo’s journey. Each brings a unique set of capabilities and perspectives with them, which will collectively allow us to accelerate the deployment of our Whole Home Optimisation system across the UK and Europe.
“geo’s positioning at the centre of the home energy management ecosystem makes it a very valuable proposition, significantly reducing energy consumption and therefore accounting for less CO2 emissions,” commented Axel de Megille on behalf of the Low Carbon Investment Fund.
The news has been welcomed by customers of both companies, with Richard Hughes, Director of Sales & Marketing for EDF’s Customers Business Unit, commenting, “We’re very pleased to see this step from geo and ONZO. Our work with both companies over the last few years has been very successful. The world of smart energy management is maturing rapidly, moving from theory to reality. We are excited to see how the combined capability of geo’s smart energy gateways and ONZO’s energy disaggregation and home energy optimisation can help EDF customers save money on their bills and help Britain achieve Net Zero.”
