European venture capital firm Breega is continuing its expansion into the African tech ecosystem, leading an undisclosed pre-seed round into Lagos-based energy tech startup PowerLabs.
The investment, announced today, highlights a growing VC appetite for software-driven solutions tackling Africa’s acute infrastructure challenges. Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures also participated in the round.
PowerLabs will use the fresh capital to scale its flagship platform, Pai Enterprise, a system designed to orchestrate the fragmented energy sources that African businesses rely on to survive the continent’s unreliable power grids.
The Problem: A Fragmented Energy Mix
For decades, commercial operations in Nigeria have been forced to operate as their own utility providers. Frequent grid collapses mean businesses rely on a complex, often inefficient mix of diesel generators, rooftop solar arrays, inverters, and battery banks.
This redundancy comes at a steep price. In 2024, the Nigerian manufacturing sector alone spent ₦1.11 trillion on alternative energy sources — a 42% year-on-year increase. While companies have adopted monitoring tools to track this consumption, these systems are largely reactive, identifying faults only after a voltage drop or outage has disrupted operations.
“Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that don’t speak the same language,” says Tobe, CEO and co-founder of PowerLabs.
The Solution: Automated Orchestration
PowerLabs is pitching a shift from passive monitoring to active, automated control. Its AI-enabled platform, Pai Enterprise, acts as an intelligence layer that continuously models a facility’s energy supply, demand, and operational constraints.
Instead of requiring facility managers to manually switch between grid power and backup systems, the software automatically toggles and balances energy loads in real-time. PowerLabs says this allows businesses to essentially run their own optimized microgrids.
The startup is targeting Nigeria’s most energy-heavy and critical sectors:
- Hospitals: Automating the transition to backup systems to protect intensive care units and operating theatres from voltage drops.
- Data Centres & Telecoms: Balancing the dual mandates of maximizing uptime and reducing carbon emissions by optimizing when to use solar versus diesel.
- Manufacturing: Providing granular analytics to map energy consumption against production lines, turning energy from a fixed overhead into an optimizable cost.
For Breega, a fund that manages €700m and operates across Europe and Africa, the investment signals a strategic focus on climate-tech that offers immediate operational ROI for businesses. The fund has more recently invested in Angola’s Anda.
“We backed PowerLabs at the pre-seed stage because we believe intelligent orchestration will be essential to solving Africa’s energy reliability challenge,” says Tosin Faniro-Dada, Partner at Breega. “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.”
The sentiment is echoed by co-investors who see the dual financial and environmental benefits of the platform. Olúwátóyìn Emmanuel-Olúbákè, Chief Investment Officer at Catalyst Fund, notes that businesses typically have to make hard trade-offs between the cost of power, the quality of supply, and their carbon footprint.
“PowerLabs is starting in Africa to build the intelligence to orchestrate these systems seamlessly without sacrificing any of these critical factors,” Emmanuel-Olúbákè says.
What’s Next
With the pre-seed funding secured, PowerLabs plans to aggressively ramp up the deployment of Pai Enterprise across commercial and industrial hubs in Nigeria. The startup will also expand its engineering team to refine its predictive load-management algorithms and broaden the platform’s integration capabilities with legacy grid infrastructure and modern battery storage.
If successful in its home market, the company plans to use the current architecture as a blueprint for expansion into other key West African markets facing similar energy constraints.