Mylight150 (in reference to the 150 million kilometers that separate the Earth from the sun) is a Lyon-based company which markets intelligent solar energy management systems to citizen producers (equipped with photovoltaic panels). Created in 2014 by Ondine Suavet and her brother Virgile Suavet, it is one of the French start-ups created ten years ago, which have in the meantime managed to scale up and become scale-ups.
While it had raised 2 million euros in 2016 and 6.5 million in 2020, the company is this time announcing a 9-figure funding round. 100 million euros, solely in equity, were raised from Eiffel Investment Group, Andera Partners and Azora Capital (a private equity group based in Spain). Historical shareholder Elevation Capital Partners also participated. The company intends to use this financing to accelerate the deployment of its solutions in Europe and open up to new segments with the ultimate goal of quintupling its turnover by 2030.
Advertisement
Equipment and software
Mylight150 markets both equipment and software that optimize energy consumption. It sells “state-of-the-art” solar panels produced in factories in China which she does not own. “They respect our specifications and it is our engineers who define their composition“, specifies Ondine Suavet, who hastens to justify”95% of the solar panel value chain is in China, it’s unfortunate, but that’s how it is“.
The company mainly markets a box connected to software, which measures the production of the panels, the consumption of the house, and controls the water heaters to optimize it.
It includes artificial intelligence algorithms that make it possible to predict production, to know how much this house will produce half hour by half hour and even five minutes by five minutes based on weather data and the conditions of each dwelling. “We build an algorithm for each house according to its sunlight conditions: how is it oriented? How much shade? Are the signs facing south or east?, etc.“, explains Ondine Suavet.
Advertisement
“My smart battery” to take advantage of all the energy produced
Its latest product, launched in 2021 and called “My smart battery”, allows you to save on your bill by storing the excess energy produced. “The challenge of solar is intermittency. In winter we don’t produce enough and in summer too much“, explained the CEO. Concrete illustration: a house with 15m2 of solar panels would accumulate 300 kilowatt hours of surplus in one month during the summer, the equivalent of five Tesla car batteries. It also produces without consuming when its owner ‘absent for a few days for example.
A sort of virtual battery, “My smart battery” counts this energy produced but not used and “Mylight150 undertakes, as a supplier, to allow him to benefit from it free of charge when he produces less or more (in the evening and in winter in particular)“, explains the co-founder. “We use the complementarity of our customer base to balance consumption and surpluses“, she continues. The product is due to be launched very soon in Spain.
Customers would be profitable after 7 years
Result: customers, who currently number 8,000 on this product, and 30,000 in total, would halve their electricity bill, and make their Mylight150 installations profitable in less than 7 years, compared to between 8 to 20 years on average for classic solar panels without intelligent systems.
The scale up has already attacked the Swiss, Romanian and Spanish markets but this new financing should help accelerate the deployment of its products in Europe with a strong focus on Spain, hence the presence of Azora Capital, which will be a strategic partner in the market.
Investing in the promising heat pump market
It also wishes to use this capital to open up to new segments and in particular accelerate the development of management and optimization systems for heat pumps. “They are already being tested on a little more than 40 houses but we need to scale up“, specifies the co-founder.
This is a promising market since there are currently 2 million heat pumps in France and the government objective is for 800,000 to be installed every year so that 60% of French people are heated with electricity via a pump. to heat by 2035.
And electric charging stations
Mylight 150 also wants to enter the market for electric vehicle charging stations. “We are going to offer our customers the opportunity to anticipate their expenses. Concretely, they will arrive in the evening, connect their car and be able to define whether they want to recharge in 5 hours for a full tank for 5 euros or in 2 hours for a full tank for 25 euros. They will be able to optimize their consumption according to their constraints and the money they want to spend“, specifies Ondine Suavet.
“If we add to the intelligent management of water heaters (our historical activity), the same thing for heat pumps and electric vehicle charging stations, we will be able to control 80% of the bill for the house of tomorrow“, she projects.
While it already has 160 employees (80% of which in France), the company wishes to recruit 100 people by the end of 2024 in the tech, marketing and sales areas. It assures that it will reach 100 million euros in turnover this year and the objective is to multiply it by 5 by 2030.
Selected for you
