Australian energy-tech startup BidEnergy has announced its first US acquisition, buying RealWinWin (RWW), a company which secures rebates from utilities on behalf of customers via energy efficiency programmers.
The deal by the ASX-listed BidEnergy (ASX:BID) comes on the back of the company opening up a new office in the US and employing Phil Adams, a World Energy Efficiency board and former CEO of World Energy, as CEO of its US operation.
Bid, an energy spend management platform, counts Flight Centre, Cotton On, General Electric, Fletcher Building and BroadSpectrum (formerly Transfield Services) among its Australian client list.
BidEnergy CEO Stuart Allinson says the US is a vast market to tackle and the company’s strategy is based in part on securing channel deals through which it can sell its platform solution.
{loadposition peter}“Australian businesses trying to break the US market can spend a couple of years with little to show for their efforts. RWW has worked with over of 100+ multisites with upwards of 100,000 sites between them - all in our sweetspot.”
Bid will now have access to more than 100,000 sites in its target market, through more than 50 tier-1 customers, which the company says will accelerate its growth in the US market.
Allinson says the acquisition also provides BidEnergy with a proven sales and service team that can sell subscription services to existing customers and support the company’s deployment more broadly.
US utilities companies offer rebates to customers to encourage investment in energy efficiencies and typically the customer hires an engineering contractor to design and install energy efficiency measures, which is where RWW comes in.
RWW provides the administrative service to confirm that the installation will qualify for rebate and then follows up to make sure the customer receives the rebate cash from the utility.
Bid describes RWW as essentially a data business specialising in national accounts, dealing with utilities across multiple states.
Bid says it expects it will be able to leverage the Customer–Site–Utility hierarchy that underpins its billing engine and automate many of RWW’s functions.
Allinson says the RWW service can be digitised and incorporated into Bid’s platform offering, creating a compelling bundle of integrated sourcing, energy accounting, analytics reporting and rebate capture services.