Distributed Storage Startup Closes $18M Round, With Arnold Schwarzenegger as Investor

By Stephen Lacey:  DBL Investors leads an $18 mil­lion series A round for Advanced Micro­grid Solu­tions.  Before last Novem­ber, very few peo­ple had heard of Advanced Micro­grid Solu­tions. But after win­ning a 50-megawatt con­tract to deliv­er stor­age ser­vices to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Edi­son, the start­up is pulling in some well-known back­ers and tech­nol­o­gy partners.

Three months after rais­ing $8.8 mil­lion, Advanced Micro­grid Solu­tions (AMS) has now closed its series A round with a total raise of $18 mil­lion.

AMS is plan­ning to devel­op behind-the-meter stor­age sys­tems in com­mer­cial and indus­tri­al build­ings. But unlike most oth­er dis­trib­uted stor­age devel­op­ers that are focused on cus­tomer con­trol, AMS is offer­ing util­i­ties full con­trol of the sys­tems for grid services.

The first deploy­ment, expect­ed for 2016, will be a col­lec­tion of bat­ter­ies adding up to 10 megawatts of capac­i­ty. SCE will use the bat­ter­ies to help shift load dur­ing peak times or to pro­vide fre­quen­cy reg­u­la­tion ser­vices. The sys­tem hosts will get com­pen­sat­ed through reduc­tions in demand charges in the mid­dle of the day.

The round was led by DBL Investors, an in-demand ven­ture cap­i­tal firm that has made some of the most suc­cess­ful invest­ments in clean­tech and sustainability.

Nan­cy Pfund, the man­ag­ing part­ner at DBL, recent­ly joined forces with Ira Ehren­preis, for­mer­ly a gen­er­al part­ner with Tech­nol­o­gy Part­ners, to over­see a $400 mil­lion fund devot­ed to busi­ness­es mak­ing a social or envi­ron­men­tal impact. Pfund and Ehren­preis were both ear­ly back­ers of Tesla.

In an email to GTM, Pfund called the invest­ment a “fit­ting sequel to our ear­li­er invest­ments such as Pow­erlight, Tes­la and SolarCity.”

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it Green­tech media.