Furo Raises $4 Million to Make Industrial Battery Storage Pay Off

Munich startup Furo has closed a $4 million seed round to push its software for commercial and industrial battery storage. The money is meant for product work, expansion into more European markets and hiring. TQ Ventures led the round, with backing from Neo, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners and CDTM Venture Capital.

The company was founded last year and only recently changed its name from Lumera Energy to Furo. Its three founders — Lena Sophia Voß, Leonie Wagner and Simon Wittner — met at CDTM in Munich, then collected experience at places like Apple, Google X, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Boston Consulting Group. They also did something a lot of startup advice would probably call irrational: they turned down full-time, visa-sponsored jobs in the US and went back to Munich anyway.

Their case is that Europe, and Germany in particular, gives them better timing. Engineering salaries are lower, industrial customers and technical universities are nearby, and the CDTM network helps open doors. Furo is legally a Delaware C Corp, but the team works from Munich and makes three or four trips a year to keep US investors close. In 2025, it was the only European startup accepted into Neo, which later became an investor.

The product itself is aimed at a very old problem with a very modern bill attached. German industrial firms pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world, while data center power use is expected to nearly triple by 2035 and wholesale prices could rise by as much as 50 percent over the next five years. Furo says the global cost of inflexible energy demand for industrial companies is about $580 billion a year. That is the kind of number that makes battery storage look less like infrastructure and more like an emergency response.

Furo’s software forecasts electricity prices and weather up to 48 hours ahead, then decides in real time when a battery should charge, discharge or sell power. Unused capacity is pushed onto energy markets. The company says customers can cut electricity costs by up to 40 percent. It sells through installers, project developers, storage manufacturers and utilities, and says more than 800 companies use the platform across more than 6,000 sites in Germany and Europe, including Deutsche Bahn. Enpal is one of its channel partners, and says the platform gives customers better visibility into what their battery is doing and why.