A $3.7 million dollar funding round has been secured by the Santa
Monica–based startup Enervee. The funding round was led by Obvious
Ventures, a venture capital firm that was created by Twitter co-founder
Evan Williams, and has a focus on making a positive difference in the world. (Enervee raised $1.7 million in seed funding in 2014.)
Enervee is an online marketplace
with loads of information about energy-efficient products, including
ratings, and was designed to help consumers make good decisions. For
example, if you visit the site and search for refrigerators, you will
see hundreds of results. Each result has a full webpage with information
about a product like specifications, an energy score, potential
lifetime savings, and so forth. There are also online reviews for
products and a store locator, so you can do your research and then find
products located in stores near you.
Enervee’s energy product data is important for shoppers who want to
be sensitive to the environment, and save money. When we as individuals
buy energy-efficient products, we might have good motivations and
appreciate the savings, though they seem small at the time of purchase.
However, we clearly live in a social world, and the total amount of
savings from individual purchases is huge. “Overall,
energy efficiency is saving the American government, its citizens and
businesses more than $500 billion a year in avoided energy costs.” Our
individual consumer choices are where we can “be the change,” rather
than having to devise some sort of involved, global philosophy or
outlook.
“When buying a product that uses energy today, especially large
appliances and electronics, which use a large amount of energy, there is
currently no easy and transparent way to understand what the operating
costs of that purchase [sic] are going to be over time in a financial sense, and in environmental impact,” explained co-founder and CEO Matthias Kurwig.
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/28/3-7-million-funding-raised-online-energy-marketplace-enervee/