For businesses operating in Nigeria, energy is not a utility — it is a daily operational problem. Grid instability has pushed commercial operators to build their own patchwork power infrastructure: diesel generators, rooftop solar, inverters, battery banks. The result is a fragmented, expensive, and largely unmanaged mix that cost Nigeria’s manufacturing sector alone ₦1.11 trillion in 2024, up 42% year on year.
PowerLabs is betting that the answer is not more hardware, but smarter software. Its flagship platform, Pai Enterprise, connects all of a facility’s energy sources — grid power, solar, generators, batteries — into a single system and manages them automatically. Where most businesses currently rely on staff to manually switch between power sources during an outage or voltage drop, Pai Enterprise monitors supply and demand in real time and makes those decisions on its own, keeping operations running at the lowest possible cost without anyone having to intervene.
The startup has now raised a pre-seed round led by Breega, the European fund with €700m under management that has been quietly deepening its Africa presence. Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures also joined the round. The size was not disclosed.
CEO Tobechukwu Arize shared insights with Launch Base Africa on building the company, competing in a crowded energy market, and what the funding means for the road ahead.
1. How did you land your first backers, and what was the specific “hook” that convinced them to bet on PowerLabs?
We met our investors through various connections in our founding team’s network. What really excited them was seeing how complementary our founding team is — our skills, experiences, and perspectives fit together in a way that makes tackling the energy problem not just possible, but practical. They were drawn to our approach of solving a real, persistent energy challenge through intelligence and orchestration, rather than layering incremental fixes on a broken system. And they responded to the conviction we brought — not just to the idea, but to building the team and technology capable of delivering it at scale.
2. Beyond the mission statement, what does PowerLabs actually solve, and what sparked the idea?
PowerLabs is an energy and climate tech company on a mission to enable limitless human productivity through intelligent energy. Our flagship product is Pai Enterprise — an intelligent energy management and control platform that helps businesses running 24/7, or across multiple sites, maximise uptime at the lowest possible cost. It does this by bringing all their energy sources — grid, solar, diesel, batteries — into one place and optimising how they work together, automatically.
3. You’ve been on this journey since 2023. What are the tangible milestones that prove this isn’t just a pilot project?
Since 2023, we’ve moved from an idea to demonstrating, in the field, that our solution actually works. What started as a clear-eyed observation of a broken energy reality has become a growing network of installations across critical 24/7 and multi-site businesses — factories, data centres, hospitals, retail outlets. We now have real usage data, and a much tighter feedback loop between the product, how it performs in the field, and what our customers actually need.
4. How did you meet your co-founder?
I first met David through a trusted mutual friend who had worked closely with him and spoke very highly of his abilities. We got on a call, and it became clear quite quickly that we were aligned — not just on the problem we wanted to solve, but on the approach and values needed to tackle it. Our skills complemented each other naturally: he brought deep technical expertise while I brought operational and strategic experience. That combination, alongside a shared conviction about what we could achieve, made working together the obvious next step. After several months of prototyping and testing our thinking, the rest, as they say, is history.
5. The energy sector is crowded. How do you distinguish PowerLabs from the dozens of “smart meter” and monitoring startups?
The energy space is active, with many players offering monitoring and management solutions, and we respect the work happening across the industry. But the category we operate in isn’t energy monitoring — it’s energy intelligence. Most monitoring tools available today are retrospective: they tell you what happened after the fact. Pai Enterprise decides what to do next and acts on it automatically, in real time. While others focus on collecting and presenting data, we orchestrate it — turning a fragmented mix of energy sources into a unified, resilient system that helps businesses run their operations at the lowest attainable cost.
6. What are the “unspoken” challenges for energy startups in Nigeria, and how are you navigating them?
The challenges are real. Regulatory instability can shift the rules overnight, and infrastructure deficits make building reliable solutions genuinely harder here than in more stable markets. Our response has been to design operational systems and processes built for change rather than against it — investing in local partnerships and in technology that holds up even when the surrounding conditions don’t. The goal is to turn those constraints into an advantage: if you can build something dependable in this environment, it means something.
7. For other founders navigating the African ecosystem, what is the one lesson that actually matters?
The most important lesson we’ve taken from this journey is how much your team determines everything else. Hiring thoughtfully, empowering the people around you, and staying focused on doing excellent work — those are what separate a good product from one that genuinely changes a market. On that note, we’re launching a podcast series starting Friday, April 10th, hosted by David and me. We’ll be sitting down with our investing partners to talk honestly about the challenges, decisions, and lessons that come with backing African businesses — and sharing what we’ve found most valuable along the way.
