Boulder’s Simple Energy reaches Colorado with Marketplace launch

BOULDER – Simple Energy, a software company serving the utility industry for the past four years, on Tuesday launched its new Marketplace platform that will enable utilities to sell energy-saving products like programmable thermostats from their own websites while offering instant rebates and incentives.

The new product brings with it Boulder-based Simple Energy’s first foothold in the Colorado market. The company, which has had customers mostly in Southern California, the Northeast and Canada, will launch Marketplace with two utilities, San Diego Gas & Electric and a “large utility” in Colorado that will be named in coming weeks.

The value of such a product for utilities is that it streamlines the rebate process, Simple Energy co-founder and chief executive Yoav Lurie said. Utilities spend millions convincing customers to buy new products that will improve their homes’ energy efficiency, which in turn helps utilities meet certain goals mandated by public utilities commissions. The problem is often that the rebates that often make such upgrades attractive either go unknown to customers or the process is some cumbersome version of: buy the product, get the rebate form from the utility, mail in the rebate form and wait six to eight weeks and cross your fingers that your rebate check shows up.

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The Marketplace platform, geared only toward residential customers, is white-labeled by each participating utility on their websites, with the utilities paying a licensing fee to Simple Energy. The new product is designed to work seamlessly with Simple Energy’s original offering.

After graduating from the Techstars Boulder startup accelerator in 2011, Simple Energy began offering a software-as-a-service platform that helped utilities improve engagement with customers by making a game out of offering energy saving tips through emails and text messages. Customers could win incentives like Home Depot gift cards for reducing their energy usage at home.

Marketplace takes that interaction a step further so that now, when a utility recommends to a customer a certain energy-saving feature, the customer can click on a link to purchase such a product on Marketplace, with any applicable rebates the utility offers automatically factored in. Lurie said most of the major brands for things like thermostats, including Nest, Honeywell and GE, are offered on the site.

These two products work seamlessly together,” Lurie said. “It’s really woven together very tightly.”

Privately held Simple Energy doesn’t disclose revenue. The company has worked with eight utilities so far on its original software platform, but the company has been growing rapidly at its downtown Boulder digs.

Lurie founded Simple Energy along with Justin Segall, the company’s president. The company has raised about $8.2 million in venture capital in two different rounds of funding, and has 60 employees, a count that has doubled over the past year.

Lurie said the idea for Marketplace is that it will expand in scope over time so that utilities can use it to offer things like home warranty programs to protect against power surges or electricity-related damages, as well as things like solar panels or backup generators.

“There are a lot of utilities trying a lot of different things and trying to figure out ways to get those to market,” Lurie said.