Backing the ENGYcell team to build software and solutions for commercial and industrial battery energy storage
Back in 2016, Egija Gailuma pitched me a poker game tracking startup, having graduated with her bachelor's degree a couple of years earlier. Not being a poker player, the idea did not excite me too much, but it was immediately clear that she had masses of energy, confidence, and smarts — someone to keep track of.
A year later she co-founded a Baltic-focused Tesla car-sharing startup with Kristians Karlsons and Kristaps Vasiljevs, Ox Drive. When Ox Drive exited via a merger with CarGuru in 2024, I tracked down Egija to see what she had in mind to do next and was not surprised that she and her co-founders already had a new startup in the works.
Being scrappy entrepreneurs, the Ox Drive team had experimented with repurposing Tesla batteries to store cheap electricity at night so that daytime car charging was cheaper — in the end saving Ox Drive significant costs with this approach. Upon selling Ox Drive, they sought to commercialise this idea for all manner of companies that could both optimize their own electricity purchases to save costs and also participate in energy trading with the grid. ENGYcell was born.
Our expectation is that all commercial and industrial operations will, over time, add a battery energy storage system for this purpose during the coming decades. This is a massive potential market, even just in the Baltics, CEE, and other European countries. While the hardware is somewhat of a commodity and is a capital-intensive business, the software and setup are the challenging part for companies that wish to deploy such a solution. The three Ox Drive founders working on ENGYcell were joined by Jevgenijs Zaremba, with whom they had collaborated on energy management software before.
We are excited to back this business and look forward to their rapid growth through the Baltics and beyond.
