Positioned a Swiss Energy SaaS for North American capital
50 institutional engagements against a $3M raise. Fifteen qualified management meetings across European and North American capital — weighted toward energy software specialists, climate funds, and strategic utility venture.
Overview
SDP was engaged by SAMAWATT AG, a Geneva-based AI software company solving a $23 billion global problem: the grid imbalance penalties paid by wind and solar operators when their forecasted production diverges from what actually shows up on the wire.
The company had a working SaaS product, a roster of utility customers, documented per-MWh value creation in live trading, and the kind of technical bench — PhDs, twenty employees, awards from EDP and the Global Energy Tech council. What it didn’t have was reach into US/EU institutional capital. We rebuilt the positioning before sending a single email, then ran a targeted campaign across the European and North American mandates that the new thesis was built to convert.
Industry
Energy software · Renewable trading SaaS · AI / data science
Challenge
€3M Seed Raise
Strategy
Translate a Swiss B2B SaaS story for US institutional investors who don’t normally underwrite European energy software.
Impact
50 institutional engagements; 15 qualified meetings booked
The Challenge
SAMAWATT was the kind of company that should have been an easy yes for the right investor. A defensible AI moat. A live customer base of European utilities. The problem was where the round needed to land. The company’s natural investor base — European energy software specialists — had been worked. The growth audience was in the US: vertical AI investors, climate software funds, and strategic utility venture programs that look at energy-AI plays as platform bets rather than as regional services. None of them were going to find a Swiss SaaS company on their own. The materials, written for a European industry reader, didn’t do the translation work needed to land in front of an American investment committee.
Our approach
We rebuilt the investor narrative end to end before touching the list. Three workstreams ran in parallel: positioning the company as a vertical AI platform rather than a regional energy services vendor, narrative development that translated the European utility traction into a thesis a US committee could underwrite, and a curated outreach sequence personalized to where each investor sat on the energy-software spectrum.
We anchored SAMAWATT against a market truth that was easy to verify and hard to argue with: grid imbalance penalties are a recurring, measurable, growing cost line on every wind and solar operator’s P&L, totaling roughly $23 billion globally and €2 billion in Europe alone. Inside that frame, the company stops being “an energy trading software vendor” and starts being something cleaner — a vertical AI platform attacking a quantified, regulator-driven penalty pool with documented unit economics and a working customer base. That single move did most of the work. It gave climate-software investors a market they could size in one sentence, gave strategic utility venture a credible product to evaluate, and gave generalist VCs a reason to take the meeting.
Outreach ran against a curated list rather than a sprayed one. The thesis-fit work was deliberate: vertical AI and climate-software specialists, energy-transition VCs with appetite for European exposure, strategic utility venture and grid-mandated corporate capital, impact and Article 9 mandates with a return discipline, and a tight band of European family offices and operator-led funds. Every send was sequenced and personalized, and the opener referenced the part of the thesis that mapped to the investor’s book — a climate-software fund saw the platform thesis, a strategic CVC saw the utility traction, a European family office saw the recurring revenue model.
The Results
15
Qualified management meetings sourced across European and North American capital.
50
Institutional engagements against the targeted thesis bands, weighted toward energy software specialists, climate funds, and strategic utility venture.
€3M
Raise mandate — a tiered, US- and EU-sourced pipeline aligned to the round, with a teaser and deck the company has continued to deploy as standing materials.
More
Projects
Pivoted Finnish solar sites into a hyperscale co-development opportunity.
Pivoted a stalling Finnish solar raise into hyperscale co-development with four Tier 1 operator conversations.
A US capital channel for subsidiary of a publicly traded UK O&G co.
A US capital channel for subsidiary-level.
