NeedEnergy

Market position

NeedEnergy operates in the renewable energy software and distributed energy resource management segment, targeting African markets where electricity rationing, ageing coal plants and drought-affected hydropower have driven commercial adoption of solar PV, battery storage and diesel back-up generation. It has been named among the top 15 most innovative startups by the World Energy Council and the German Energy Agency through the SET programme, and is listed as a SET100 finalist and classified at mid funding stage in that database. Companies cited as similar include PowerBox, WattShift, Moduly and Yes Energy.

The company positions itself against one-off consultant engagements by offering continuous data analytics from design through operations and maintenance of renewable energy assets, and aims to build a network effect in which insights from one asset improve prediction accuracy across others. It cites use of IBM GRAF weather supercomputing for model training and NVIDIA cloud GPUs for complex scenario modelling, and a team combining software and product development experience with visiting engineers and researchers from Stanford, MIT and NVIDIA.

Technology

The platform is an AI-driven energy data analytics engine trained on load and consumption data, weather models and energy trading market intelligence, producing real-time day-ahead price predictions and demand and generation forecasts of up to 36 hours. Machine learning models are trained using the IBM GRAF weather supercomputing system and NVIDIA cloud GPUs. Additional components include long-term generation and asset sizing tools, an energy benchmark tool for Africa, the Memeza consumption monitoring and asset optimisation platform, smart metering for solar PV assets and clean cooking, predictive maintenance, battery management, and virtual power plant and virtual grid capabilities supporting trading.

Go-to-market

The company works through pilots and partnerships with energy-as-a-service providers, renewable developers and local EPC firms, and has used accelerator and award programmes — Startupbootcamp Australia and the Start Up Energy Transition initiative of the World Energy Council and the German Energy Agency — for visibility. Early reference deployments with commercial and industrial clients serve as the basis for scaling to neighbouring sites and aggregating them into virtual power plants.

Energy developers and engineers designing solar PV and battery storage systems, energy providers and traders, energy investors, distribution system operators managing grids based on distributed resources, and commercial and industrial energy consumers, including operators of microgrid fleets in remote areas.

Geography

Operations centre on Zimbabwe, with a location listed in Bulawayo and its first commercial deployment in the Borrowdale area of Harare; the company is also described as active across the wider Southern African region. One company-research profile lists a headquarters in Mobile, Alabama, US.

History

Founded in 2019, the company presented its first white paper on day-ahead price prediction for the Southern African Power Pool at NeurIPS 2019 and was invited to present at Future Energy Week (formerly Davos Energy Week). It subsequently deployed short-term demand and generation forecasting models and a long-term generation and sizing tool, developed an energy benchmark tool for Africa, and supported Puma Future Energy on a Zimbabwean rooftop solar PV design. After roughly two years of trials with firms in Zimbabwe, it launched its first commercial project in January 2023 with EPC partner Inno-Tech. It is an alumnus of Startupbootcamp Australia and a finalist in the Start Up Energy Transition (SET100) programme.