UK startup Domna, which helps homes become more energy efficient, has raised £70m in a round which it says is one of the largest first-time raises for a female founder team in Europe.
In the UK, 18m homes — over half of the UK’s housing stock —have poor energy efficiency, making them colder and more prone to damp and mould, according to a study by Rightmove.
Domna, formerly called Hestia, supports landlords in decarbonising private and socially-rented houses, helping them assess which houses to buy, advising on measures to retrofit them and managing the delivery.
It offers on-site services such as improving insulation, glass and glazing, draft proofing, as well as upgrading boilers and installing renewable energy systems such as heat pumps and solar panels. It also offers software that assesses what the homes need to become more energy efficient.
The company says its aim is to improve the valuation of homes by 20% after retrofitting and help homeowners cut bills by 40%.
The company is part of a wider trend of European startups acting like traditional PE buyout firms: buying up a series of small businesses in industries from health to energy and rolling them into one.
The difference with this new wave of startups is that they also deploy their software across the companies they acquire, an approach that helps companies scale up operations and acquire new customers quickly.
The funding — which was led by private equity investment firm Leon Capital — has helped Domna acquire two retrofit surveying and contracting businesses: the Warmfront Team and Osmosis ACD.
Domna told Sifted that it wants to use the fresh funding to acquire further businesses and build out its predictive machine-learning stock assessment tool.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/domna-raises-70m/
