Invertix: Munich Energy A.I. Start-Up Earns Its Y Combinator Knighthood

Seven months after launching, Invertix has landed in Y Combinator’s fall batch. The Munich start-up, founded in February by chief executive Joseph Perrotta and chief technology officer Kaan Durmaz, is building A.I. for energy infrastructure. That puts it in a tiny European club inside what many founders still treat as the gold standard of startup programs.

YC’s draw is not just the check, though the standard deal is a big one: $500,000 in total, split between $125,000 for 7 percent and another $375,000 through an uncapped SAFE. The real prize is access. Three months in San Francisco, a crowd of alumni, and Demo Day can open doors with U.S. investors in a way few European programs can match.

Invertix is chasing a very specific problem. Solar, wind and storage are growing faster than operators can hire and train experts, and a lot of the work is still manual: alarms, performance checks, maintenance planning, compliance. Before founding the company, Perrotta and Durmaz say they contacted more than 5,000 people and spoke with over 500 industry experts to make sure the pain point was real.

The company is not trying to outbuild the big A.I. labs. It layers its own system on top of existing models and trains it on energy operations, using work orders, human interventions and other operational data. It says the setup is based on physics-informed neural networks and differentiable simulators, with a separate security layer so operator and grid data stays under customer control.

So far, the numbers are moving. Invertix says it has four live pilots with European energy companies and counts TotalEnergies On as a customer. It also says more than 50 gigawatts of renewable capacity are under contract, while its sales pipeline is above 100 gigawatts, up from about 10 gigawatts in May. The company claims technical proposals are being produced 50 to 100 percent faster and procurement is down from about 60 hours to roughly one.

The team has some unusual founder stories behind it. Perrotta was once a professional volleyball player, sold more than $17 million in real estate at 18, and later helped Cubbit raise more than $25 million. Durmaz has worked in computer vision, differential privacy and A.I. for chemistry. The pair met at Brightdale and built Invertix out of Munich’s TUM.ai community. In May, they raised a 1.7 million euro pre-seed led by Vireo Ventures.