Building A New Energy Model For Europe: Our Investment In Nomos

AI has fundamentally transformed how tech firms are built, but the essential ingredient of the best companies has remained the same: the talent of the founders and those they recruit. It’s why we continue to invest in people, just as we did in 1996.

This belief in people is the main reason we’re backing Nomos. I first met co-founder Stefan almost a decade ago, when he was interning at a company I worked at, and it was clear then that he was special. He not only has the raw IQ found in the most exceptional founders, but total determination backed by first-principles thinking – he’s laser-focused on taking the best, not the easiest, path.

In a little more than 24 months, Stefan and his co-founder Nils have built a fully integrated, AI-native power company with a team of eight. They could have launched sooner by using third-party systems or by increasing headcount. But they decided to go slow to go fast – building the core systems from scratch with the best possible team. Never settling for average, the duo’s obsessive approach has created a talent density at the company that is hard to match.

This, combined with their resourcefulness, ambition and intensity, is what makes this team so special – and what has enabled them to build an energy firm we believe has the potential to become a generational company.

Why now

With Europe’s power grid and energy markets at a point of fundamental change, the opportunity is enormous. Gone are the days when a single nuclear or coal power plant provides the energy for an entire region. Today, an extensive network of renewable energy sources generates a growing share of power, alongside millions of homes equipped with solar panels, batteries, EVs and other energy assets.

While this is positive for Europe’s energy security, it also leads to feast-and-famine periods in the grid and greater price volatility. Left uncoordinated, household energy assets add to that instability. Harnessed properly, they become the very flexibility the grid needs to stabilize markets.

As households shift from passive consumers to active market participants – generating, storing, buying and selling power – connecting those assets efficiently can help lower energy costs and increase available capacity at a time when high prices and a constrained grid are eroding the continent’s industrial competitiveness. This is becoming increasingly important as the construction of much-needed AI data centers is currently limited by grid capacity. Nomos is built to unlock this opportunity by managing complexity at scale through its AI-native operating system.

Learning from the next-gen energy companies that came before them, rather than acquiring households one by one, Nomos has taken a different approach: it embeds energy tariffs as a feature of home energy hardware, handling electricity procurement, communication with grid operators, metering, balancing, billing and payments, allowing manufacturers and installers to offer energy under their own brand. The company has already partnered with some of Europe's leading energy installers, including Thermondo, Energiekonzepte Deutschland and IKEA's solar offering with Svea Solar.

Europe’s energy advantage

The exciting thing is that the expertise and technology Nomos is creating for energy management could eventually be applied globally, yet Europe, with its open electricity retail market and high adoption of home energy hardware, is uniquely set up to develop such a solution. Arguably no other continent has a larger deregulated electricity retail market: every European household is free to choose its supplier, and Germany alone consumes roughly as much electricity as the entire Texas grid. The category leader in home energy will be built here.

In the future, political power will be hugely influenced by the nations that can produce and manage electrical power most efficiently. With energy prices in Europe currently two to three times higher than in the US and China, Europe is falling behind. With an exceptional team set to orchestrate millions of home energy assets, Nomos will help stabilize the grid, accelerate the rollout of solar and bring down retail electricity prices, laying the foundation for Europe's energy competitiveness.