European battery storage optimisers Entrix and GridBeyond, have between them raised €55 million (US$63.22 million) in financing from investors.
Last week (25 March), Germany-headquartered Entrix announced a €43 million capital raise from a consortium of investors, including the Solar Impulse Venture Fund launched by French financial services group BNP Paribas and insurance group Allianz, among others.
Earlier in the month (17 March), Ireland-headquartered GridBeyond said it had raised €12 million from existing and new investors, notably including Samsung Ventures, which invested in the company for the first time and with which it has formed a strategic collaboration.
Both companies are responsible for facilitating the route-to-market (RTM) optimisation of battery energy storage system (BESS) assets, in other words, using AI and trading algorithms to figure out which applications and opportunities offer the best revenue outcomes for customers’ assets and managing their batteries’ charging and discharging across wholesale and ancillary electricity markets.
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However, Entrix and GridBeyond operate under different business models and in varying territories.
Entrix, for instance, is more European-focused, and since its launch in 2021 has grown its portfolio to manage standalone BESS and hybrid solar-plus-storage projects in Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland.
Entrix claimed in its announcement that it now has 3GW/8.5GWh of BESS capacity under contract, including 2GW due to go live during 2026, in addition to 70 systems already managed. It plays customer assets into electricity markets, including balancing services, day-ahead and intraday trading, while also offering long-term fixed-revenue model contracts.
“The scale of projects entrusted to us reflects a structural shift in the energy system: flexibility has become critical infrastructure,” Entrix founder and CEO Steffen Schülzchen said.
“Our role is to translate technical performance into stable, risk-adjusted revenues for investors while strengthening grid resilience and enabling renewable integration at scale.”
GridBeyond, meanwhile, was founded in 2007 as Endeco Technologies before a 2010 rebrand, and its background was in demand response aggregation before later diversifying into the energy storage market.
Unlike Entrix, GridBeyond focuses solely on merchant trading opportunities and does not offer tolling or other fixed-revenue contract structures. It is also more geographically diversified than Entrix, with operations in the UK, Ireland, the US, Japan, and Australia.
In an ESN Premium interview in 2024, following the 52 million close of a Series C funding round from investors including ABB and Yokogawa Electric, GridBeyond CEO Michael Phelan said the company’s philosophy is to “forecast everything, then optimise everything.”
“We optimise storage assets, mainly batteries and flexible assets, mainly industrial and commercial assets with storage, and we put them basically into all available markets. So we would look at, in any [given] market: have we access to the wholesale markets? The day-ahead, the intraday, the imbalance markets, the reserve markets, and the frequency markets. If there are local distribution system operator (DSO) markets, we would look at those as well and then we would place assets as appropriate into all of those markets, and trade them in time, to maximise the value that we can get from those assets,” Phelan said.
“That’s assuming we’re only working for optimisation of batteries. If it’s [also] energy transition, if we’re working with somebody who’s doing corporate PPAs, and is as much interested in 24/7 power matching as maximising completely the value of batteries, we will also look at it from that perspective. We would look at, say, capturing excess solar, or wind, whatever it be, putting that in the battery and making that available at the appropriate time, when it makes sense from an economic point of view,” the CEO said in the exclusive interview.
A Samsung Ventures spokesperson said GridBeyond had “demonstrated exceptional technical expertise and global traction in a rapidly evolving energy landscape.”
“Their ability to deliver real-time demand response, optimise renewable and battery assets, and enable intelligent energy trading across markets such as the United States, Australia, and Japan positions them as a key enabler of smarter energy systems and greater grid resilience.”
GridBeyond and Samsung will collaborate to explore trading, asset optimisation and energy services opportunities.
GridBeyond’s director of origination, Scott Berrie and director of modelling and forecasting, Paul Conlon, will participate in a sponsored webinar with Energy-Storage.news tomorrow (31 March), on how to extract more value from BESS assets in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM).
