erin By
On July 2, 2012

North Carolina-based PlotWatt has raised a $3 million Series A round of funding, according to an SEC filing.

Founded in 2008, the company provides smart meter data analysis to help people lower their energy bills. It’s sort of like a Mint.com for energy use. Last year Felicis Ventures invested in a $1 million seed round alongside the company’s $100,000 grant from GE’s Ecomagination Challenge. Acorn Innovestments, a North Carolina-based angel investment and real estate firm, participated in the latest round.

The program provides a dashboard which tracks energy use in real time and identifies the differences in energy traces from various appliances. Using pattern recognition, it finds which ones are driving up costs the most. The one thing holding back PlotWatt from adoption now is that it requires a smartmeter to do any assessments.

The company’s goal is to educate consumers on the energy they use and its costs and then go beyond generic energy-saving tips to specific, personalized and useful ones. Its technology is consumer-facing but perhaps more economically attractive to large businesses. Multi-location establishments like chain restaurants can pay to use PlotWatt’s analysis and recommendations to lower their energy costs.

Intel is working on a hardware to solve the same problem. So are a few startups: Brooklyn-based EnergyHub, the consumer-facing energy use management site of Smart Grid, has raised $14.5 million in VC funding, and EcoFactor, another residential energy use platform, has raised $5.9 million.

Plotwatt was founded by Luke Fishback, a former Aerospace Systems Engineer at Lockheed Martin, and John Cunningham, an Engineering Fellow and former M&A banker.

erin
Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.