PowerLabs Raises Pre-Seed Funding to Scale Intelligent Energy Orchestration Across Africa

PowerLabs, a Nigerian energy and climate-tech startup, has announced the successful close of its pre-seed funding round led by Breega, with participation from Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures.

The strategic investment will accelerate the rollout of Pai Enterprise, the company’s flagship AI-enabled energy orchestration platform across commercial and industrial enterprises in Nigeria and lay the foundation for expansion into key West African markets For decades, Nigerian energy management has centered on basic monitoring and tracking of energy consumption. Yet for the millions of businesses dealing with unreliable power grids, diesel generators, rooftop solar, inverters, and battery banks working together to keep operations running, visibility alone delivers no real value unless it leads to resilience and continuity. The manufacturing sector alone spent ₦1.11 trillion on alternative energy sources in 2024, which is a 42 per cent increase from the year before. A small factory changes its work hours based on when it can get generator fuel. To keep critical care going, a hospital coordinates backup systems. Every day, the facility team of a commercial building has to make dozens of decisions about reactive energy. Monitoring tools already in use tell you what went wrong, but they do not provide solutions or preventive measures to address the issues identified.

Pai Enterprise changes that equation. Unlike conventional dashboards, Pai Enterprise does not simply observe; it senses, communicates, and actuates across multiple distributed energy sources in real time. By continuously modelling supply, demand, and operational constraints, the platform enables organizations to run their own intelligent microgrid. As a result, the platform transforms energy from a reactive problem into a proactive, strategic resource.

The measurable impact spans Nigeria’s most critical sectors:
Hospitals: With intelligent monitoring across critical circuits, teams are instantly notified when there are fluctuations in supply, voltage drops, or automatic transitions to backup systems.
Data Centres: By providing continuous insight into the performance of energy assets such as solar systems and generators, operators can track efficiency, optimize usage, and reduce emissions without compromising uptime.

Factories: Factories require more than just stable power, they need actionable intelligence to drive performance and profitability.

Retail outlets: By analyzing consumption trends and usage behavior, retail outlets can right-size their energy assets, avoiding overinvestment while ensuring sufficient supply during peak periods.
Critical facilities: For critical facilities such as telecom towers, banks, schools etc, uninterrupted operations depend on anticipating issues before they occur.

CEO & Co-Founder, PowerLabs, Tobe …., said: “Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that don’t speak the same language. At PowerLabs, we believe decentralization doesn’t have to mean disorder. We’re building the intelligence layer that will prove that distributed energy resources can operate as a unified source while leveraging its disaggregation to offer flexibility, cost efficiency, carbon neutrality and redundancy … more than a centralised energy system ever could. “

With their support, PowerLabs is now positioned to scale its intelligent energy solutions, expand Pai Enterprise across sectors and geographies, and demonstrate that the era of traditional energy management is over. Personalized, decentralized, resilient, and intelligent systems are the future, and for millions of people and organizations, that future is already here.

Tosin Faniro-Dada, Partner, Breega, said: “We backed PowerLabs at the pre-seed stage because we believe intelligent orchestration will be essential to solving Africa’s energy reliability challenge. The team is building the software and hardware layer that enables businesses to coordinate multiple distributed energy sources in real time. We’re excited to support them as they prove the impact of this model across critical sectors over the next 12–18 months.”

Olúwátóyìn Emmanuel-Olúbákè, Chief Investment Officer, Catalyst Fund, said: “Globally, more and more businesses and critical services like data centers operate in complex energy environments where a mix of energy sources must work together. The energy users typically have to toggle between cost, quality of supply and carbon footprint. PowerLabs is starting in Africa to build the intelligence to orchestrate these systems seamlessly without sacrificing any of these critical factors.”

Energy management alone is not enough, and for millions of users who have long struggled with outages, unreliable grids, and fragmented infrastructure, the promise of intelligent energy is not merely convenience; it is the key to unlocking their full potential and powering a new era of human progress.