siliconindia | | November 20158Bidgely Raises $16 Million for Energy DisaggregationRobin Systems Closes Funding Round Bringing Total Investment to $22 MillionBidgely, a startup that enables consumers to monitor and manage their household energy use, announced that it has raised $5 million in new funding from Khosla Ventures. The Sunnyvale, California-based company previously raised a three million dollar seed funding round in November 2011 from the venture capital firm, which is known for investing in environmental-friendly technologies. Constellation Technology Ventures, which is part of Exelon Corporation, led the round. European utility investors E.ON and RWE also joined in the round with existing investor Khosla Ventures. "The Series B round with European utility investment will allow us to aggressively expand our European presence and leverage our disaggregation technology and expertise in consumer behavior across an expanded product offering. We'll also use the funds to further expand the Bidgely team, which has already tripled in size since 2014," said Abhay Gupta, CEO, Bidgely. The company is best known for its dis-aggregation software offering customers appliance-level en-ergy consumption data, which it collects by analyzing the unique energy-use patterns of individual devices. The startup has built products that help customers to see what appliances are turned on, how much energy they are using, and how much it is costing to the overall electricity bill. Bidgely is available in the U.S. and Canada and is in the process of expanding into New Zea-land, Australia, France and Asia. Gupta says Bidgely is cur-rently targeting growth in California, where electricity usage data from about 10 million households is now accessible to third party developers thanks to the Green Button initiative. Robin Systems, a trailblazer in reinventing IT infrastructure for increasingly data-centric enterprises, announced its new funding round of $15 million, bringing the total investment to $22 million. In addition to the funding announcement, Robin also hired Altera executive Premal Buch as CEO; Cheng Tang as vice president of engineering; Sushil Kumar as chief marketing officer; and Amir Assar as vice president of sales. "I am delighted to join this accomplished team which has developed a disruptive, industry-changing technology," Buch said. "I am very impressed with the strong customer interest the team has generated and look forward to scaling the business." The latest round was led by a USAA subsidiary and DN Capital, with participation from Hasso Plattner Ventures and existing investors. The capital will fuel the development of its analytics orchestration software, which promises to optimize the resource utilization of data crunching clusters based on the physical characteristics of the underlying infrastructure. It's made up of over half a dozen patent-pending technologies that the startup developed internally over the past two years. The company says its service features "more than a dozen patent-pending innovations" that allow it to provide very high performance operating infrastructures for applications like Spark, Hadoop and modern NoSQL databases. Robin Systems claims that the combined efficiency improvements from its capabilities can enable organizations to analyze their data up to three times faster for a third of the cost, a value proposition that the new $22 million in funding will help expand. Abhay GuptaPremal Buch
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