A Long Time Coming: Why Powerverse Feels Like a Calling

9 Jan

Before solar was really a thing

I sent a letter to Richard Branson’s office through a friend who worked for him, suggesting a Virgin Energy brand where local solar on rooftops could one day be a challenger model providing distributed community energy, instead of relying entirely on the big energy retailers. People could generate and share their own power, supported by smarter technology. It was the early 2000s and I worked at a Sky subsidiary but had ambitions to do something more and different.

My interest in sustainability goes back to university in the early ’90s. I studied geography at a time when the Rio Earth Summit was raising awareness of the environmental crises we were walking into. That led to me reading widely on the subject and scientists including James Lovelock who developed the Gaia theory of the earth as a single interconnected system, opened my eyes to the scale of the challenge and the need to act differently..

The idea didn’t get traction at Virgin, but, wherever my career took me, I kept on reading, watching, and thinking about how technology, business, and human systems could respond better.

Foundational lessons

But the technology was still about ten years too early, and I knew too little then about what it takes to bring an idea to market at the right time, fund it, and build it into a business. But what happened next gave me the tools that I needed. I was made redundant by Sky, and that was the catalyst to co-found CloudSense, an enterprise software company serving telecoms and media. Then, over more than a decade, I learned what it takes to successfully scale product development, enterprise sales, customer trust, through to global expansion and an eventual company exit. Those years were formative for me. I didn’t forget about sustainability or energy, but neither did I realise I was equipping myself with the tools I would one day need to play a role in it.

A calling

After selling and leaving CloudSense, I had the headspace to consider what might come next. It was then that I received a call on behalf of Nick Boyle, the entrepreneur behind Lightsource, at the time the world’s largest commercial solar company.

Nick and his team had built solar farms across the world. Alongside that, they’d created a lab to develop software for managing that power as it flowed into domestic homes. The more they experimented, the clearer it became: the greatest potential wasn’t in utility-scale solar farms, but in those homes.

He wanted to find a partner to carve out the lab and turn it into a new business. For me, it felt like a moment of alignment. Here was the very space I had imagined twenty years earlier; local solar, local storage, but now with intelligent software, and the AI to connect it all together. The opportunity had circled back and now I had the experience to meet it.

That’s how Powerverse was born. We are working to create a better system for the energy sector. By empowering consumers and giving them visibility, control, and better deals; we can modernise a sector that has been too slow to change.

To do this, we’re building software that helps rooftop solar, batteries, EV chargers, and other home energy devices work together simply. We are proving that smarter software can turn complexity into simplicity, and that energy can work better for people.

It feels like a calling, not just a business. The idea I once wrote in a letter has finally found its time.