Our Series D Will Make the Next Phase of Our Vision a Reality.
Today, LevelTen Energy is celebrating the close of a $65 million Series D funding round. The financing, which includes both new growth capital and the conversion of notes, was led by B Capital, a global multi-stage investment firm, with participation from Constellation New Energy, Equinor Ventures, Google, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, NGP, Prelude Ventures, and ZOMA Capital, among others. On behalf of the entire LevelTen team, I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to our Series D investors, and all the investors who preceded them, for their support.
LevelTen’s mission — to accelerate the energy transition by facilitating frictionless clean energy transactions — was borne of frustration; frustration that clean energy capacity wasn’t being built fast enough to prevent the most devastating impacts of climate change; frustration that despite growing corporate clean energy demand, signing power purchase agreements (PPAs) took a year or longer to execute. LevelTen was founded to address these frustrations, and as we set out to make the PPA experience better, we gained valuable insights into what it will take to advance our mission even further.
Four Key Learnings From Building the World’s Largest PPA Marketplace
In its first few years, LevelTen focused on making PPAs easier to sign, because they were (and still are) key to unlocking billions of dollars of corporate investment in renewables. At the time, PPAs were slow, often arduous processes which were only accessible to the most sophisticated (and well-resourced) companies. Simply put, PPAs couldn’t scale at the rate needed to combat climate change.
We launched the LevelTen Energy Marketplace in 2018, and since then, we’ve facilitated over 8 gigawatts of clean energy procurements. Today, LevelTen’s network includes more than 1,000 project developers across North America and Europe, 50 energy advisors, and a variety of retail electricity providers who use our Energy Marketplace to source clean energy supply on behalf of their clients and customers. Many of the world’s largest corporate and utility clean energy buyers consider the LevelTen Platform vital to their operation, making LevelTen the global hub for clean energy transactions.
The path here wasn’t always clear, and certainly wasn’t always easy. Through this journey, four key learnings emerged:
- Scaling renewables takes a network beyond just buyers and sellers. Building a highly functional and accessible marketplace does not inherently mean it will become widely used. Early on, when demonstrating our platform to corporate sustainability managers, they would often simply not know what they were looking at. They needed an advisor — which is why we launched our partner program, the first (and only) of its kind. We now partner with more than 50 energy advisors and retail electricity providers, who use the LevelTen Platform to source PPAs on behalf of their clients. Our partner program has been central to enabling LevelTen to become the world’s largest centralized marketplace for PPAs.
- Industries can’t remain analog in a digital world. It’s amazing to think about how many experienced professionals were conducting business via spreadsheets and long email chains before they saw the power of our platform. LevelTen’s centralized online marketplace, RFP software, and other technological innovations like LEAP™ (LevelTen Energy’s Accelerated Process) have proven to get more deals done, faster. LEAP, which we developed in collaboration with Google, has reduced PPA timelines by 80%: an accomplishment our team is immensely proud of, and a game-changing development in clean energy procurement.
- Deals don’t progress quickly without data. Even with a centralized marketplace and software to make processes more efficient, we saw that deals were still slowed by lengthy internal discussions and stakeholder-alignment challenges. We realized that, for all parties to move faster, they needed fresh, reliable data that accurately reflects the state of the market. LevelTen’s MarketPulse and PPA Price Index meets these needs by delivering real-world market data generated from the actual PPA offers of our expansive developer community. These data products bring unprecedented levels of transparency to a space that has traditionally been immensely opaque, allowing industry players to make important decisions and secure stakeholder buy-in with confidence and efficiency.
- Scaling markets requires standardization. One of the main reasons PPAs were (and still can be) such time-consuming endeavors was that historically, every deal was bespoke. Counterparties would begin contracts essentially from scratch, and hone in on contractual terms and a distribution of risks over many, many months. Obviously, achieving a fast rate of deal flow using this contracting approach simply wasn’t possible; to move faster, PPA sellers and buyers needed reasonable contractual starting points as a foundation. LevelTen’s new procurement approaches, like LEAP™ and other PPA templates, bring contracting innovations to the PPA space which help move the industry towards much-needed standardization. By providing counterparties with balanced terms that reflect current market realities and require minimal (if any) alterations, these approaches get counterparties to executed terms far more quickly than legacy processes ever could.
Helping Climate Moonshots Scale With Our Series D Funding
For years, PPA complexity led people to believe a simple and rapid contracting process was unattainable. But by leveraging insights from the clean energy developer and buyer communities, we made the 'impossible' possible: PPAs are now much faster to sign, and we’re dedicated to making them even more accessible to a greater pool of buyers. Our journey has reinforced that a powerful network, efficient software, actionable data, and contract standardization compose the four pillars of “transaction infrastructure.” Invigorated by these learnings, we’ve continued to build transaction infrastructure that supports much more than just PPAs, with a steadfast focus on unlocking capital and reducing friction in even more transactions that are essential to a clean energy future.
In 2021, we launched the LevelTen Asset Marketplace to support the exchange of clean energy projects themselves. Since then, over 5.8 gigawatts of capacity have been exchanged, with participation from more than 460 developers. This year, we expanded our platform once again with the launch of the LevelTen Tax Credit Marketplace, which supports the sale of federal renewable energy tax credits. Placing these four pillars at the center of our development process has allowed us to launch these new marketplaces quickly and successfully.
But we can’t stop there: To avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, it is urgent that we make carbon-free energy available at all hours of the day, and in every corner of the economy. Our Series D capital will allow us to provide transaction infrastructure for an even greater number of applications, each critical to global decarbonization:
- Unlocking the full potential of round-the-clock carbon-free energy supply. In December 2023, LevelTen announced the Granular Certificate Trading Alliance, a collaboration with AES, Constellation, Google, and Microsoft. The Alliance’s mission is to build a first-of-its-kind trading and management platform for “granular certificates” (GCs) — energy attribute certificates that verify the time and location of carbon-free energy (CFE) generation with far greater resolution. This platform, under development in partnership with the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), will support the next wave of sustainability targets — including 24/7 carbon-free energy goals and emissions-first objectives.
- Supporting more types of buyers and sellers, in more places. LevelTen currently operates in 32 countries across North America and Europe. With additional funding, we will expand our existing platform into new markets, providing a more global solution to a truly global problem. What’s more, we’ll be able to serve a greater variety of customers, including utilities, who must move quickly to secure the clean energy supply needed to meet skyrocketing demand for electricity.
- Helping decarbonize heavy industry. LevelTen Energy is already supporting the critical need to address heavy industry’s substantial emissions. As a founding member of H2DI — a coalition selected by the US Department of Energy to support the demand-side of clean hydrogen — LevelTen is contributing its transaction infrastructure expertise and clean energy market data to support the design and implementation of this $1B program aimed at jumpstarting industrial decarbonization.
There are countless climate “moonshots” at the moment, and so many ways to contribute to the fight against climate change. But for these emerging technologies to reach mass adoption, they need marketplaces that bring buyers and sellers together, and software tools and data to help deals get done. At LevelTen, we’re committed to building the transaction infrastructure that will allow these moonshot initiatives to scale and maximize their impact.
It Takes a Village: Join Us as We Build What’s Needed Next
None of this would have been possible without the partnership of our valued investors, and the hundreds of clean energy developers, buyers, and advisors who continue to leverage the LevelTen Energy Platform and share their wisdom with us. And of course, the countless hours of tireless work our devoted LevelTen employees have contributed over the years has been absolutely essential. To everyone who has played a part in building this remarkable company, I extend my sincere thanks and gratitude.
The existential threats posed by the climate crisis cannot be understated, and the past eight years have affirmed the role a robust network of dedicated industry participants has to play in facilitating a faster energy transition. If you’re part of the developer, buyer, or advisor communities, or a professional looking to drive impact in the climate space, I encourage you to contact us so we can explore ways to work together. Through our collective efforts, we can continue providing solutions to our planet’s most pressing problems and help ensure a bright tomorrow.
