FirstFuel Scores $2.4M to Put Toward Software for Remote Energy Audits

FirstFuel Software, a developer of energy auditing analytics technology for commercial buildings, announced today that it has nabbed $2.4 million in first round funding, led by Battery Ventures and Nth Power. The money will go to scaling and fueling customer adoption of FirstFuel’s software, which can profile the energy performance of buildings using data on electric consumption and building characteristics, without the need for an on-site audit.

Boston-based FirstFuel, formerly named iblogix, is led by serial entrepreneur Swapnil Shah, a founder of three IT companies that either went public or were acquired. The FirstFuel software offers recommendations to building managers to adjust their energy consumption practices for immediate savings, and suggests building retrofits to be performed by utilities. The company fits into Boston’s cluster of IT startups developing software geared at lowering energy consumption.

Recently, the Cambridge, MA-based Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (which I profiled last week) conducted an independent study of the accuracy of FirstFuel’s auditing technology, and found that it “has the potential to be a valuable engine for the large scale benchmarking of buildings and to identify energy-saving opportunities without on-site audits,” according to FirstFuel’s announcement today.

Author: Erin Kutz

Erin Kutz has a background in covering business, politics and general news. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University. Erin previously worked in the Boston bureau of Reuters, where she wrote articles on the investment management and mutual fund industries. While in college, she researched for USA Today reporter Jayne O’Donnell’s book, Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. She also spent a semester in Washington, DC, reporting Capitol Hill stories as a correspondent for two Connecticut newspapers and interning in the Money section of USA Today, where she assisted with coverage on the retail and small business beats. Erin got her first taste of reporting at Boston University’s independent student newspaper, as a city section reporter and fact checker and editor of the paper’s weekly business section.