Portfolio Highlights: Community Energy Labs
For 17 years, VertueLab has provided funding and holistic support to startups at every stage of their journey in our shared fight against climate change. We’ve had the honor of helping accelerate countless climate technologies from ideation to community deployment through our funds while connecting directly with the entrepreneurs behind the magic. Join us as we take a deeper dive into VertueLab’s portfolio, speaking directly with our supported startups to hear more about their stories and awe-inspiring technologies.
In this installment of our Portfolio Highlight series, we take a closer look at Climate Impact Fund portfolio company, Community Energy Labs, a company on a mission to make smart energy management and decarbonization both accessible and affordable for community building owners. Keep reading below to find out more about our chat with Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Tanya Barham.
VERTUELAB: What first inspired you to start Community Energy Labs (CEL)? What specific problems does CEL solve for?
I was working with utilities and community organizations to identify workforce training and technical project development in energy. At the time, millions of Americans were being impacted by two major trends that have been reshaping energy and buildings since the mid-2010s. Regulators and utilities are changing electricity pricing to reflect grid supply and demand, while stricter building codes aim to cut energy costs and carbon impact.
In general, the projects I was working on were large capital projects that were either utility owned or financed projects with private owners. But I saw that new rules and pricing were hitting parts of the commercial building market that had never needed advanced energy management. For example, by 2026, Washington’s House Bill 1257 will fine commercial buildings over 50,000 sq. ft. for inefficiencies common in K-12 schools. But today’s energy management systems are pricey, complex, and hard to maintain, with long payback periods. Capital projects also presented major challenges in terms of timelines and ease.
I was inspired to see if there was a way to address an underserved segment of the market. I set out to find a solution that building operators with aging buildings, large bills, and fixed budgets could adopt quickly. My main motivation was to identify and develop a technology that would help building owners keep up with the pace of change in the building energy market without necessarily having to wait 5 years for a capital project or bond to get underway.
What were some unique challenges CEL faced?
Every startup is its own little snowflake. In my experience, most startups I have built or steered encountered a lot of difficulties proving that there were enough buyers in their market who needed this solution. For CEL, I always knew that I wanted to make sure there was a real problem and a big enough market to scale. [Because] of that, I did a lot of customer validation and had a really clear sense of the problem, the market, and the customers and buyers in our segments. Once people heard we had a plan to address their needs, our waiting list exploded. Within a year of launching a prototype we had over 133 customers on the waitlist to try our product, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Maturing a data/ML product that interacts with real buildings using a cross-functional team (software engineering and building controls) is not easy work. I think about the first space shuttle a lot - like wow what a feat! This isn’t just building an enterprise software product. The tough piece was finding the right tech stack that could scalably address that market. Our energy management solution tries to strike a balance between affordability and sophistication. It balances two objectives for building owners that are often at odds: keeping occupants comfortable and saving on energy bills. The way it accomplishes this is technically very tricky. It requires us to build systems that are thinking about building operations in very novel ways, however, it has to accomplish these objectives using existing equipment. Navigating those tricky implementation steps with a small team requires an abnormally high level of focus and alignment. This is really the story of a lot of R&D that attempts to make it to market. Personally, it can feel excruciating when we have customers that want to use the final product now.
How has partnering with VertueLab changed things for CEL?
The Community Energy Labs team
I have worked in early technical innovation in energy before and seen nascent markets (grid-forming solar inverters for one) mature into fully commercial verticals. I started working in solar in 2002, and in the past 20 years the rate of growth and change in that market has been incredible to watch. I knew our product would be similar and that we would need several years to work out the kinks in the fundamental science, product development, and scaling mechanisms, which is to say I always knew we would need early, non-dilutive and patient capital. VertueLab was invaluable in helping us identify non-dilutive funding sources (SBIRs) and programs where the funders’ missions were tightly aligned with the kind of market problems and technical solutions we were trying to address. Once identified, they trained us in successfully organizing and communicating our responses to solicitations, securing funds and staying aligned so that the funder continued to see value in investing in the maturation of our solution. The skills we learned from VertueLab have helped us secure millions of dollars in early R&D, demonstration and testing, and technical support that we needed to prove out and mature our early innovations. When we were ready to begin selling paid pilots and early licenses, they were one of a series of pre-seed impact funders who invested in our work.
What is ahead for CEL?
Tanya at a recent pilot at Lincoln Elementary
Our team is excited to have proved the fundamental feasibility and worth of our technical innovations and to have customers who are eager to expand our early demonstrations to other locations. We are excited about serving our waitlist and providing real, tangible, and fast impact to our customers who really need something now. That has meant a systematic gap analysis on our prototype’s architecture and a 2025 roadmap that is geared to help us transition from science experiment to version 1 of a scalable commercial product. We’ve already begun implementing important elements of this roadmap and are excited to see improvements in the stability and transparency of our platform. That’s exciting because it means that once done, we can start ramping up onboarding from our waitlist — AKA solving real problems for customers — and also begin focusing on new feature, product and service enhancements!
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who are interested in pursuing a similar path?
Focus on boring old business fundamentals. Don’t believe the hype. Focus first on customers, markets, and jobs to be done. Once you know those, do a common sense check on the feasibility of building a differentiated product that will ultimately cost less to deliver than what your customers will pay at a scale that is meaningful. As time wears on you will learn a lot more about the accuracy of your research and predictions, but you have to start with the basics: you have a solution to a problem that a lot of people have and can deliver that solution at a cost that is below what people are willing to pay.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs fall in love with an idea of a problem or a technology first. That attachment to an idea can lead you to ignore what the market and customers are trying to tell you, and the market is fickle and brutal under the best of circumstances. Do yourself a favor and take a hard look at the vessel you are choosing to navigate those waters with before you climb aboard. Once you’ve made the commitment, it’s important to balance a realistic take on the market/environment with what is going on on your boat (both your crew and your vessel). Too much focus on your internal work and you crash into a preventable obstacle. Too much focus on the news cycle, competitors, other business’ success or failure and you fail to execute. It’s a very taxing job that involves providing huge amounts of emotional labor without a lot of resources or expectation that you will receive much support yourself. Be intentional about setting up support before you begin the journey and really diversify the number of advisors, investors, and peers on whom you can rely for advice and tough love.
Thanks for joining us for this edition of Portfolio Highlights! You can find out more about Community Energy Labs here. Stay tuned for our next installment!
