Fenecon develops open-source battery storage systems and gives batteries a longer life. Interview with Founder and CEO Franz-Josef Feilmeier on how FENECON is cutting CO2 emissions and facilitating the renewable energy revolution.
Start: 2011
BONVENTURE partner since 2018
Fund: BONVENTURE 3
What does FENECON do and what is your vision?
We design and make electricity storage and management systems for residential, commercial, industrial and grid applications. When we launched the company in 2011, we were already thinking big – 100% renewable energy. This is still our company’s vision in whatever we do.
What’s the story of your partnership with BONVENTURE?
When we were looking for strategic partners, we had offers from various investors and not just BONVENTURE. But the others simply wanted to take us in a specific direction or just make more money. BONVENTURE was the ideal strategic partner because they did an impact analysis and asked us, for example, if what we were claiming about our CO2 emission reductions or workplace commitments was actually true.
BONVENTURE invested in a successful company at the right time. From 2018 to 2021, our turnover averaged 165% and by some 50% to €140 m in 2023 alone. We grew on average by 141% a year from 2018 t0 2022 and our profits rose by an average of 149% from 2019 to 2022. Now, BONVENTURE has profitably reduced its investment, while we continue to pursue our vision of making climate-neutral, low-cost energy available to everyone.
“Everything started with the BONVENTURE impact analysis, which revealed that more electric vehicle batteries were being produced than required.”
What role did BONVENTURE’s impact analysis play in your new CarBatteryReFactory?
Everything started with the BONVENTURE impact analysis which revealed that more electric vehicle batteries were being produced than required due to reduced sales of electric cars. So we decided to give these electric vehicle batteries a second life, which not only saves resources but also emissions. In all, 1.4 million tons of CO2 will be saved within the next ten years through our factory’s products.
BONVENTURE went with us was because of the measured CO2 savings impact. And based on this impact analysis, we applied to the EU in 2021 and received financial backing from the EU Innovation Fund and the State of Bavaria.
What was your experience of working with BONVENTURE?
Other VCs use growth scenarios and financial figures to determine a company’s value. But if you only take a value-oriented perspective, you have to grow big, no matter how unhealthy that may be. BONVENTURE, in contrast, asked us if we were sure that fast growth was healthy and sustainable, and advised us to look after our employees and ourselves and to broaden our management for greater resilience. For us, staying broadly based and not being over-dependent on one sector or country has been very valuable – and in this we received a lot of support from BONVENTURE.
What are your plans for the near future?
100% energy transition is not just our big vision, but that of the entire energy sector as well. So we are now focusing on what we can do to enhance this big vision through a threefold environmental impact: giving electric vehicles batteries a second life; making the energy transition process more efficient through large-scale electricity storage systems; and enabling openEMS-based energy management for all electricity generators. And we are pleased to report that our achievements have been recognised by a Handelsblatt Energy Award, an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award and a Technology Fast 50 Award, for example.
Context:
FENECON has grown from producing electricity storage devices in a garage in Lower Bavaria to providing a wide range of sophisticated energy storage and management solutions for residential, com-mercial, industrial and grid storage systems. FENECON’s decentralised storage systems will play a key role in stabilising the grid in the energy transition process, while FEMS, its openEMS- based energy management system, is enabling homeproducers and commercial electricity generators to con-trol their own systems.