How much does one startup need to sell software to manage utilities’ energy data? For Thomas Siebel’s C3, it turns out, a good deal.
According to an SEC filing C3 has raised another $ 15 million of a planned $ 30 million round, adding millions to the roughly $ 60 million we estimate the company has raised. Siebel has said that C3 is building a $ 100-million-to-$ 150-million software platform for big data that it has been selling to utilities to help them manage their energy data.
The company’s board of directors is also now even more of a who’s who of retired energy executives, including Mayo A. Shattuck III, the former CEO of Constellation; Stephen Ward, the retired CEO of Lenovo; S. Shankar Sastry, the Dean of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley; former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; President of Yale, Richard Levin; and former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. Newer executives hired include Tendril’s former COO Ivo Steklac, and former Under Secretary and Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy, Cathy Zoi.
Earlier this year, Siebel talked about some of the recent milestones that the four-year-old C3 has met, including a data grid analytics project for PG&E, and a joint development deal with GE to create a big data energy platform.
The PG&E project crunched data about commercial and industrial buildings in the utility’s footprint, and helped PG&E work with these customers to reduce their energy usage. The GE software, which is built on the C3 platform stack, can pull in disparate data from a variety of sources such as grid sensors, utility databases and even social media sources. Utilities can use the software to peer into their grids and combat blackouts in real time.
C3 said that, as of earlier this year, it had three of these types of projects live with customers, and planned to launch another five projects in 2013 and another five in 2014. Other C3 customers include Entergy, Northeast Utilities, Constellation Energy, NYSEG, Integrys Energy Group, Southern California Edison, ComEd, Rochester Gas & Electric, DTE Energy, and McKinsey.
Over the years C3 has pivoted from its original business plan, which was focused more on managing carbon emissions and working with corporations on those sustainability goals. Now C3 is squarely focused on energy data and utilities.
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