Kailas Nair, Plentify’s Chief Growth Officer and co-founder, together with Jon Kornik, CEO and co-founder.
South African electrotech firm Plentify has raised almost $15 million following a recent oversubscribed Series A funding round. The capital will bolster adoption of its solutions within SA’s property, solar and utility sectors, as well as in new overseas markets.
The company did not disclose the total value of the Series A round, but confirmed it was led by Secha Capital, Buffet Investments and a South African family office. Existing investors E3 Capital and Fireball Capital participated, alongside new backers Endeavor South Africa’s Harvest Fund and Satgana.
Plentify uses AI-fuelled hardware and software to connect home appliances to what it describes as cheaper, cleaner energy.
Jon Kornik, CEO and co-founder of Plentify, said the company has a full-stack technology team that designs and develops its hardware, firmware, data science models and back-end and front-end software.
Kornik added the company manufactures all its devices in SA and, within its data science function, develops three types of models:
- Analytical models to detect when appliances are not operating according to specification.
- Optimisation models to determine the optimal moments to turn appliances on and off.
- Predictive models to forecast future energy supply and demand.
“It’s largely in these predictive areas that we apply AI – towards things like forecasting how much solar your system is going to produce or how much demand for electricity is going to exist on a microgrid over the course of a day. These are important inputs into both our analytical and optimisation models,” he said.
Plentify says its growth has been shaped by what it describes as one of the world’s fastest energy transitions.
The company claims its AI-powered home-energy management system is being deployed by partners including Balwin Properties, SA metering company Conlog, and solar tech firm Wetility.
Together, these deployments form what Kornik called “a massive virtual power plant, with close to 100MWh of water heaters and batteries under management”.
According to Kailas Nair, chief growth officer and co-founder of Plentify, SA is the ideal testing ground for scalable, subsidy-free innovation. “Chronic load-shedding and rising electricity tariffs created a rooftop-solar boom among middle-income households, at penetration levels similar to advanced markets, but without subsidies or feed-in tariffs. That forced us to make load management work from day one. Now, as other markets reduce or remove solar subsidies, we have the technology and know-how to help them do the same.”
Kornik added that investor confidence stems from three key factors: traction, team and strategy.
“We’ve come off phenomenal growth and built an incredible team, including professionals who have led at Google, J.P. Morgan, Tesla Energy, IBM Research, Discovery Vitality and NASA, and proven they can deliver real impact together.”
Nair said the company is focused on expanding into large, fast-growing residential solar markets that have a high penetration of controllable household appliances – such as electric water heaters, batteries and pool pumps – and where solar subsidies or feed-in tariffs are low, non-existent or being phased out.
“In these markets, solar homeowners need to ensure their solar system generates the maximum energy possible to meet their household energy demand,” he said.
He added that the company is preparing pilot projects in the UK, Australia and Brazil. “Our technology has already been installed in two out of the three markets, and we expect these pilots to run for two to three months.”
