A Lagos-based energy and climate-tech start-up, PowerLabs, has raised a pre-seed funding round to tackle Nigeria’s fragmented and unreliable power systems.
The round was led by Breega, with participation from Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures and Kaleo Ventures.
The company said in a statement by CEO & Co-Founder, Tobechukwu Arinze on Tuesday that proceeds would be used to scale its artificial intelligence-enabled platform, Pai Enterprise, across commercial and industrial sectors in Nigeria and to support expansion into other West African markets.
The investment comes as companies across Nigeria grapple with persistent grid instability, forcing them to rely on a patchwork of diesel generators, rooftop solar systems, inverters and battery storage to maintain continuity. Managing these disparate systems has become both costly and operationally complex.
Nigeria’s manufacturing sector alone spent N1.11tn on alternative energy sources in 2024, a 42 per cent increase from the previous year, highlighting the growing burden of self-generation on businesses.
For years, energy management has largely focused on monitoring consumption. But in an environment where outages are frequent and supply unpredictable, visibility without control has offered limited value. Facility managers are often left making reactive decisions, from adjusting production schedules based on fuel availability to coordinating multiple backup systems to keep critical services running.
Arinze said, “Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that don’t speak the same language. At PowerLabs, we believe decentralisation doesn’t have to mean disorder. We’re building the intelligence layer that will prove that distributed energy resources can operate as a unified source while leveraging its disaggregation to offer flexibility, cost efficiency, carbon neutrality and redundancy … more than a centralised energy system ever could.”
PowerLabs is positioning its platform as a shift away from this reactive model. Rather than simply tracking energy usage, Pai Enterprise is designed to sense, communicate and act across multiple energy sources in real time, continuously modelling supply, demand and operational constraints.
The result, the company says, is the ability for organisations to operate their own intelligent microgrids, transforming energy from a reactive problem into a strategic resource.
The approach reflects a broader trend towards decentralised energy systems in emerging markets, where unreliable national grids have pushed businesses to assemble their own hybrid infrastructure. Coordinating these systems efficiently is increasingly seen as a critical challenge.
PowerLabs says the benefits of its platform are most visible in sectors where downtime carries significant risk. In hospitals, real-time monitoring of critical circuits can help ensure uninterrupted power for intensive care units and operating theatres. Data centres can optimise the performance of generators and solar assets without compromising uptime, while manufacturers can analyse energy use across production lines to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Retailers, meanwhile, can better match energy supply to demand, avoiding overinvestment while maintaining reliability.
The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate deployment of its platform, enhance its predictive load-management algorithms and deepen integration across a range of energy assets, from solar and battery storage to conventional grid supply.
Investors say the opportunity lies in orchestrating existing infrastructure rather than building new generation capacity.
Partner at Breega, Tosin Faniro-Dada, said, “We backed PowerLabs at the pre-seed stage because we believe intelligent orchestration will be essential to solving Africa’s energy reliability challenge. The team is building the software and hardware layer that enables businesses to coordinate multiple distributed energy sources in real time. We’re excited to support them as they prove the impact of this model across critical sectors over the next 12–18 months.”
The backing underscores growing investor interest in climate and energy technologies tailored to frontier markets, where infrastructure gaps create demand for decentralised solutions.
Chief Investment Officer at Catalyst Fund, Olúwatóyìn Emmanuel-Olúbákè, said businesses increasingly operate in complex energy environments that require balancing cost, reliability and carbon impact. Platforms that can manage these trade-offs in real time, she said, are becoming essential.
For PowerLabs, the funding marks an early step in scaling what it describes as an operating system for distributed energy. As companies continue to navigate unreliable grids and rising energy costs, the ability to move from passive monitoring to active control may determine not just efficiency, but resilience.
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