Nomos raises €20M to put power plans inside home hardware

Why it matters

Nomos is using regulation as product infrastructure: hardware brands get an electricity business through an API, while Nomos owns the operational and market risk behind it.

Stefan Gerbes and Nils Bitzer said in a September 15th blog post that Nomos raised €20 million to connect household energy equipment to wholesale power markets. Index Ventures led the round, joined by Bolt founder Markus Villig, UiPath co-founder Daniel Dines and Nord Security co-founder Tomas Okmanas.

Nomos did not label the round or publish a valuation. The Berlin startup, registered in January 2024 according to OpenRegister, previously raised about €1.9 million in a pre-seed round led by Speedinvest. The new financing takes its reported funding to at least €21.9 million.

Gerbes, Nomos's CEO, researched European electricity markets at the University of Cambridge in 2022 and 2023. Years earlier, he joined a startup run by Mike Mahlkow as an intern and was promoted to chief of staff within weeks, according to Index Ventures. Bitzer, Nomos's CTO, studied at Stanford and has led the construction of the technical infrastructure behind the product.

Index says Gerbes and Bitzer built Nomos's integrated electricity operation in a little over 24 months with eight people. That small-team claim is central to the pitch: Nomos says software agents can absorb operational work that usually requires larger forecasting, trading, metering, billing and support organizations.

The regulatory license is part of the product

Nomos is selling considerably more than a dashboard for household batteries. Nomos is a regulated German electricity supplier and balancing responsible party. Nomos serves as the contracting supplier for plans sold under its partners' brands, taking responsibility for procurement, balancing, market communication, metering and customer billing.

That regulated position gives Gerbes and Bitzer a distribution model built around manufacturers and installers. A solar, battery, heat-pump or EV company can add an electricity plan to its hardware offer while Nomos runs the supply operation in the background. Index identifies Thermondo, Energiekonzepte Deutschland and IKEA Germany's solar offer with Svea Solar among Nomos's partners.

The Nomos platform supports dynamic electricity plans tied to EPEX day-ahead prices, solar export plans and battery flexibility trading. Nomos says households can reduce costs by shifting consumption into cheaper periods, though its claim of savings of up to 30% has not been independently established.

The public documentation shows the machinery behind the white-label pitch. Partners can use hosted signup and customer-portal components or build directly against Nomos's APIs and webhooks. The interfaces cover quotes, subscriptions, supplier switching, smart-meter orders, load forecasts, billing and electricity price data. Nomos can therefore sit inside a hardware maker's app without requiring that partner to become an electricity supplier itself.

That approach avoids the expensive consumer-acquisition contest that has shaped much of Europe's retail energy market. Gerbes and Bitzer are betting that the household's existing relationship with an installer or hardware brand can become the sales channel for energy. The hardware becomes easier to finance when it can buy, store and sell electricity, while Nomos gains customers without having to build a household brand market by market.

The AI claim still needs operating evidence

Nomos describes Nomos OS as an "agentic AI" operating system. The founders say it forecasts household behavior, manages exposure to price spikes, trades electricity, tracks liquidity and automates regulated communications and customer operations.

The available product materials establish that Nomos has built a substantial operating and API layer. They do not establish how much of that work is performed by AI agents, the agents' error rates or whether they outperform conventional automation.

Bitzer offered more detail in a technical hiring post, describing a real-time accounting ledger, an API versioning and webhook system, and agents used in communication flows with more than 5,000 energy-market participants. Those are Nomos's own descriptions, and Nomos has not published trading results or production benchmarks.

The distinction matters because mistakes in this market arrive as incorrect bills, missed meter data, liquidity pressure or imbalance costs. Nomos's technical advantage will depend on reliability across those linked systems, rather than the number of workflows carrying an AI label.

The round funds the harder half of the plan

Nomos says electricity supply and solar export products are already live. Battery and EV flexibility trading are next. The 20 million euros will finance an on-site Berlin hiring push and the work required to operate those products at a larger scale.

Battery and EV trading would move Nomos deeper into the economics that attracted Index. A connected battery can charge when electricity is cheap, discharge when prices rise and provide capacity when the grid needs flexibility. Pooling many devices could create a distributed energy resource that earns revenue for households and hardware partners.

Nomos has yet to report the number of households, connected devices or megawatts on its platform. The investment case therefore rests on the regulatory infrastructure, named distribution partners and the founders' ability to extend a working electricity-supply stack into active flexibility trading.

The angel group adds another layer to Index's bet. Villig, Dines and Okmanas each built European technology companies across regulated or operationally complicated markets. Their participation gives Gerbes and Bitzer a founder network with experience scaling software, payments, mobility and security across national borders, even if electricity regulation will make Nomos's expansion unusually country-specific.

Gerbes and Bitzer have chosen a demanding route. Electricity supply carries price risk, liquidity requirements, regulatory obligations and customer-service exposure alongside the software opportunity. Nomos cannot rely on software margins alone while acting as the supplier behind each plan.

That full-stack responsibility is also the point. A thinner software layer would be easier for established suppliers or hardware companies to replace. Nomos is using the round to make its regulated operation, trading systems and partner APIs function as one product. If Gerbes and Bitzer can preserve reliability as connected homes multiply, the electricity plan may become a standard feature bundled with the battery, solar array or EV charger rather than a separate household purchase.