Nigerian startup PowerLabs plans to use fresh capital to expand its AI-enabled orchestration platform for commercial and industrial users, with a view to wider West African growth.
PowerLabs Raises Pre-Seed Funding
Nigerian energy and climate-tech startup PowerLabs has secured an undisclosed pre-seed funding round to accelerate the rollout of its flagship AI-enabled energy orchestration platform across commercial and industrial enterprises. The round was led by Breega, with participation from Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures.
According to PowerLabs, its goal is to create “a planet with limitless human productivity through intelligent energy,” positioning its work around the need for better energy intelligence amid aging grid infrastructure, rising intermittency, and higher energy costs.
Focus on Intelligent Energy Management
At the centre of the raise is Pai Enterprise, the company’s flagship platform. According to the company, the new funding will be used to accelerate is Pai Enterprise’s rollout across commercial and industrial enterprises in Nigeria while laying the foundation for expansion into key West African markets.
PowerLabs describes its broader work as building, designing, and deploying intelligent and personalised energy consumer applications, devices, and services that help users access electricity at the lowest levelised cost while guaranteeing uptime and measurable emissions reduction across hybrid energy systems.
How the Platform Works
The Pai Enterprise platform is designed to sense, communicate, and actuate across multiple distributed energy sources in real time. By continuously modelling supply, demand, and operational constraints, it enables organisations to run their own intelligent microgrid and transform energy from a reactive problem into a proactive, strategic resource.
The operating model aligns with the company’s stated emphasis on making power more personal, giving individuals, businesses, and communities more direct visibility and control over how electricity is accessed and managed.
Backers See a Reliability Opportunity
Speaking of the approach, Tobe Arize, CEO and co-founder of PowerLabs said, “Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that don’t speak the same language. At PowerLabs, we believe decentralisation doesn’t have to mean disorder. We’re building the intelligence layer that will prove that distributed energy resources can operate as a unified source while leveraging its disaggregation to offer flexibility, cost efficiency, carbon neutrality and redundancy … more than a centralised energy system ever could.”
Tosin Faniro-Dada, partner at Breega, said the firm backed the startup because it believes “intelligent orchestration will be essential to solving Africa’s energy reliability challenge.” She added that the team is building “the software and hardware layer” that enables businesses to coordinate multiple distributed energy sources in real time.
Regional Implications
For those tracking energy infrastructure and productive capacity, the raise points to growing investor interest in technologies that help enterprises manage reliability, cost efficiency, and operational continuity more effectively. In that sense, PowerLabs is positioning itself not only as an energy technology provider, but as a company addressing a core constraint on business performance.
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