German BESS flexibility platform and operator Terralayr raises €192 million

LAYR has 50MW-plus of BESS live and 100MW more to come in the ‘very near future’, Man said. Tolls can be 5-7 years as with Vattenfall/RWE, while the platform also has short-term battery auctions offering 1- to 7-day contracts.

“Today, LAYR is used across a mix of terralayr-owned assets and third-party systems, with a clear trajectory toward an increasing share of third-party capacity over time,” Man said. The first asset from a partnership with Stadtwerke Duisburg Energy Trading, which involves projects owned by both Stadtwerke and its customers, is live.

Terralayr’s VP strategy and commercial Mikko Preuss will be speaking on the ‘How Are Energy Traders Reshaping the Revenue Stack in Europe?’ panel discussion at the Energy Storage Summit 2026 in London next month.

‘Core infrastructure of platform is in place to scale third-party usage’

CEO Man did a Q&A with Energy-Storage.news as the fundraising round was about to be announced, the rest of which is published in full below.

Energy-Storage.news: Does the LAYR platform still need time to be proven out, and how long for, before it is mainly third-party assets?

Philipp Mann: LAYR has already been proven in live operations on Terralayr’s own assets and third-party assets. Established players such as Vattenfall, Stadtwerke Duisburg Energy Trading and our Designated Optimisers are dispatching via LAYR already. 

The core infrastructure of LAYR is in place for scaling third-party usage. We are, of course, continuously adding more features and use cases to equip our customers and partners with the tools that make operating and trading flexibility more comfortable and profitable. 

As trust, track record and integrations deepen, we expect third-party assets to become an increasingly important share of the platform. Further established players will go live throughout this year.  

Is LAYR the only way you are commercialising/optimising your projects, or are some via conventional, direct deals?

Yes, all assets are run via LAYR, as it is uniquely positioned as a BESS commercialisation platform, enabling multiple revenue streams for us:

• Merchant Optimisation via our ETF-Model
• Tolling (contracted revenues) with our partners Vattenfall/RWE dispatching via LAYR and
• Virtual Battery Auctions as a proprietary channel enabling additional levers of portfolio management.

Additionally, the capacity allocation can be changed throughout an asset’s lifetime without being limited by the physical setup of the assets.

What are the key software and integration challenges you’ve had to overcome when building LAYR?

Moving away from the model of “one battery, one optimiser” to allow capacity abstraction with virtual batteries, which is a foundational capability of our platform. This allowed capacity to be dynamically reallocated without physical hardware changes.

Among other benefits, this allows for netting-off effects, where optimisers’ dispatch schedules offset each other, thus saving physical cycles and hence costs for asset owners. 

The telemetry scalability challenges of a rapidly growing fleet: BESS sites generate enormous amounts of data – building an infrastructure that remains responsive under this pileup without dashboards freezing and metrics lagging was an engineering challenge. Ensuring that this system operates at the highest levels of resiliency, security, and uptime is a key priority for us. 

Market and regulatory integrations: we’re building turnkey systems and automated workflows that consider different battery manufacturers, sometimes with incompatible communication protocols. We established a tech-agnostic middleware layer, allowing users to interact with a standard API regardless of the underlying hardware.  

What is the next frontier of LAYR in terms of its capabilities?

BESS asset owners need professional risk and performance management tools. We enable them already to manage their commercialisation like a portfolio manager in the financial market via our multi-optimiser model, but will expand these capabilities further. That, for example, includes flexible allocation to short-, mid- and long-term de-risking options at the click of a button instead of months-long and costly analogue transactions.

LAYR continues to scale in its capabilities to handle different asset technologies, onboarding wider ranges of dispatch technologies, maintaining strict compliance in an evolving security landscape.

Additionally, we are further strengthening the handling of flexible connection agreements (FCAs), including ramp rates, and seeing large potential in smart load distribution across an entire portfolio of assets to reduce degradation and maximise profitable utilisation.

What would be the impact of LAYR if it was to become widely used in the German market?

LAYR becomes the go-to platform for flexibility on demand. Offtakers as well as project owners can individually manage their offtake strategy according to their risk and return profile. LAYR thus makes BESS a bankable infrastructure asset class and facilitates the integration of these flex assets into the market.

At the same time, LAYR facilitates the grid integration of storage and flexibility, by steering a distributed network of assets according to both market- and grid signals and constraints. This is how terralayr not only helps BESS to fulfill its potential but also contributes to the stability of the grid and the system integration of more and more renewable energy. 

Specific benefits of further adoption of LAYR would be, for instance: 

1. Shorten time-to-market: utilities, municipalities and other asset owners could launch optimisation services in months rather than years, as demonstrated by Stadtwerke Duisburg. 

2. Reduce renewable curtailment: by providing immediate, API-based access to flexibility, LAYR helps the grid absorb surplus renewable energy that would otherwise be curtailed. 

3. Support DSO stability: the platform’s ability to handle complex regulatory market communication (MaKo) and DSO confirmations simplifies the integration of batteries into local distribution grids. 

4. Lower costs: through “netting-off effects,” the platform aggregates opposing dispatch schedules from different traders. This reduces physical battery cycling, saving up to €4,000/MW per year in wear and tear, which ultimately improves the business case for low-cost energy storage. 

5. Virtual Battery Auctions (VBAs):  a widespread marketplace for “slices” of capacity would allow smaller players (energy-intensive businesses, small traders) to access flexibility without owning hardware, increasing overall market liquidity. 

6. Emergency fallbacks: With features like physical tolling fallbacks, a widespread LAYR network ensures that assets remain dispatchable even during long-term platform unavailability, protecting grid security.