Furo, a Munich software company that optimises industrial battery storage, has raised €3.44M ($4M) from a mostly American investor group, a round its founders cast as a bet on building in Europe rather than returning to Silicon Valley.
TQ Ventures led, with Neo and Sheryl Sandberg’s Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners participating, alongside Munich’s Center for Digital Technology and Management, where the founders met.
Co-founders Lena Sophia Voss, Leonie Wagner and Simon Wittner studied at Stanford and UC Berkeley through the CDTM programme, then worked at Apple, Google X and AI startups. They moved back to Germany deliberately, Voss said, because the problem they wanted to solve was sharper there.
Furo’s platform forecasts power prices and weather up to 48 hours ahead and decides in real time when a commercial storage system should charge, discharge or sell capacity into energy markets. The company says customers cut electricity costs by up to 40%, and it sells through installers and project developers rather than directly.
The startup, founded in 2025 under the name Lumera Energy, has already signed enterprise clients including German rail operator Deutsche Bahn. It will use the funding to develop its software, hire and expand into more European markets.
Its path runs against the old venture orthodoxy that non-US startups must relocate to win American capital. Furo is incorporated in Delaware and raised from US funds while staying in Munich.
