This week marks a monumental step in WePower history. A step towards which we’ve been working for the last few months and news of which I’m very excited to share with you today.

On July 1st, we have secured a strategic equity investment in a seed round led by Marubeni Corporation.

Marubeni is an international Japanese company with over $70 billion in revenue, 40.000 group employees and activities spanning over 14 diversified business divisions.

The investment agreement was reached upon discovering deep synergies with Marubeni’s Power Business Division. After the initial introduction in January, we’ve spent the last few months meeting Marubeni and their group companies in London, Tokyo, Australia, Lithuania, and Estonia. During these meetings, we’ve discussed the future of the energy industry, how both companies contribute towards driving change to sustainable future and how WePower technology could help Marubeni offer new innovative energy services for their corporate clients.

New funds will be used to finance further development of the corporate energy procurement platform, expand the sales team and explore new markets.

It’s no secret that as a rule, energy markets in most countries are highly complex. This complexity comes as a result of the synthesis between decades-long investments into the energy grid, cyclical changes in political directions, the sophistication of the local IT talent pool, geographical situation, size and structure of the energy market participants in each country.

This complexity also creates opportunities for new companies to drive change across many different industry segments.

Although we’ve chosen to drive change in the most meaningful way — enabling corporate consumers to buy green energy directly from producers — having the support of such a significant energy market player with the presence in Asia, Middle East, Europe and Americas will allow us to move faster than ever before. We’ve been amazed by the ambition for innovation and speed at which Marubeni operates despite being an incumbent market player in a rather slow-moving energy industry.

“Marubeni has already become a leading independent buyer and supplier of power and renewable benefits in some of our markets. We did it by disrupting traditional energy supplier business model with a deep focus on big data and a radically different approach to energy sourcing, management, and trading. We believe that WePower is in a unique position to disrupt the traditional corporate energy procurement markets by allowing almost any company to buy energy directly from renewable producers.”- Yoshiaki Yokota, Chief Operating Officer, Power Business Division.

We’ve mentioned these numbers many times before, but it couldn’t be stressed enough — Commercial & Industrial clients consume 2/3 of the globally produced energy. Any meaningful change towards a fully sustainable future is not possible without full involvement by corporate consumers. So far, only the largest global corporations were able to leverage the economic benefits of green energy by directly purchasing electricity from renewable producers. The complexity of this process has prevented the majority of the remaining companies from buying more green energy and this way contributing to the growth of green energy development. WePower is changing the game by streamlining this process.

We are delighted to work together with Marubeni in offering these solutions to their clients, jointly working on introducing new commercial energy services, as well as scaling our solutions globally.

More news on the progress towards the first energy auctions and updates on pilots with selected Free Electrons energy accelerator utility companies are lined up so stay tuned!