FirstFuel Takes In $10M for Building Energy Analytics

Lexington, MA-based FirstFuel Software announced today that it snapped up $10 million in Series A financing, led by Rockport Capital and joined by existing investors Nth Power and Battery Ventures. That comes atop a $2.4 million seed round the company raised last September.

“The addition of RockPort Capital builds on the strength of our existing investors, bringing together three of the top investment firms in the cleantech market,” FirstFuel co-founder and CEO Swapnil Shah said in the announcement.

FirstFuel’s technology, called the Rapid Building Assessment platform, is designed to monitor the energy usage of commercial buildings, without requiring a costly on-site audit. The software interface displays where energy is going in a building and helps target which aspects of a building are most in need of energy efficiency upgrades.

According to today’s announcement, FirstFuel’s new Series A financing will go toward product development, as well as expansion in the utility and government agencies markets—customers that FirstFuel has been targeting, Shah told me last fall. Last month, FirstFuel announced it had been selected as part of a Department of Defense effort to curb energy usage across its facilities and help advance new energy efficiency technologies

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.