Belgium startup e-peas raises further €8 million in VC for long term growth

Award-winning Belgium start-up e-peas has raised an additional €8 million worth of investment led by Partech and Airbus Ventures, with KBC Focus Fund, W.IN.G, Noshaq Ventures, LeanSquare,  Nivelinvest and Vives also contributing.

By leveraging the raised funds, e-peas will be able to accelerate the introduction of new products and intensify the market penetration of its existing products, as well as strengthening its commercial presence worldwide by opening more offices as it continues to underline its reputation as the go-to supplier of advanced energy harvesting solutions.

In the future, society will need to shift towards energy sources that have less ecological impact. Tens of billions of connected IoT and edge computing devices are now starting to be deployed and activity will keep on ramping up in the decades ahead. Reliance on disposable batteries in this context is simply impractical, with heavy network maintenance costs being incurred (as depleted batteries will need replacing periodically), along with huge damage to the environment. 

e-peas is uniquely positioned within this sector, serving as a one stop shop for customers’ energy harvesting requirements and enabling their hardware to be powered indefinitely. The company is successfully addressing opportunities in industrial, home/building automation, agriculture, health monitoring, smart metering and other sectors. Over the last 3 years, it has been continually broadening the scope of its Ambient Energy Manager (AEM) product line. This now covers solar, thermal, vibration and RF methods for extracting energy from IoT devices’ surroundings – thereby making them completely energy autonomous. The imminent introduction of ultra-low power processing and sensing solutions will bolster the e-peas portfolio still further.

Romain Lavault, General Partner at Partech: “Since our initial investment in 2017, we have been incredibly impressed by how Geoffroy and Julien have transformed a small R&D company into a recognized leader in low power IoT and edge computing with prestigious clients around the world. Geoffroy and Julien have also put the company in scale-up mode with the arrival of very experienced talents like Jean-Paul Bardyn and Christian Ferrier, have quadrupled the size of the team, and have developed an active commercial pipeline worth 500M$ over 3 continents. We are proud to be supporting e-peas again on their journey to make the world run battery-free.”

Matthieu Repellin, Investment Manager at Airbus Ventures: “With its exceptional low-power ICs, e-peas is a key attractive partner for all those considering the design and deployment of energy-efficient autonomous devices at scale. e-peas has been a model in terms of execution and reliability. We are thrilled to continue supporting this outstanding European team through its fast-accelerating journey.”

Nuno Carvalho, Investment Director at KBC Focus Fund: “At KBC, we invest in companies in the DeepTech ecosystem of Belgium and its neighbouring countries that have the potential to become global players. e-peas is one such golden nugget. e-peas makes edge device batteries live forever by solving the critical aspects of energy harvesting and energy efficiency. Their unique combination of state-of-the-art power management and ultra-low-power microcontroller chips will thus pave the road towards mass adoption of IoT edge devices. We are excited to support further market development of this transformational technology via the network and expertise of the KBC Group.”

Olivier Vanderijst, CEO at SRIW: “As early public investor in e-peas, W.IN.G is happy to support the growth of the company. This new financing will enable e-peas to leverage the R&D to scale high volume applications in the coming years. We are also pleased to welcome on board Noshaq and Nivelinvest as public investors. This investment is exactly in line with our common strategy to develop Deep Tech scale up in Wallonia.”

Laurent Burton, chairman of LeanSquare: “We are delighted, with this fund raising, to contribute to the growth of e-peas, a disruptive techno company that will allow the faster and deeper diffusion of energy autonomous microsystems in the daily equipment of all IOT users. The technologies implemented by e-peas are perfectly aligned with our strategy of developing an Industry 4.0 ecosystem that will accelerate the networking of advanced skills in this field.”

Pierre Mottet, Director of Nivelinvest: “We are very excited with this new investment in e-peas which is in line with our strategy to play an active role to invest in the development of the digital and sustainable innovation ecosystem of the Brabant Walloon.  We are also convinced that e-peas will play a major role in the development of industrial and IoT wireless products thanks to its disruptive technology and strong team.”

e-peas.com