Earlier this year, my Partner Daniel and I found ourselves in the Docklands in East London at sunrise. We were there to meet Alan Chang and Charles Orr of Tesseract, who have just announced their ambitious $78M raise to help fix Europe’s broken energy market. Having both previously worked at Revolut, where Alan was most recently Chief Revenue Officer, they both have a keen sense of the importance of ambition, focus and tenacity in the face of very large, very regulated, and very complex markets.
But let’s rewind to that first dawn meeting. What became immediately apparent to Daniel and I as the sun came up was that Alan and Charles, like Nikolay, were deeply hungry entrepreneurs who had a knack for identifying big hairy global problems, untangling their complex causes, breaking those down into a list of concrete actions, motivating humans around them to join them in their purpose, and together knocking out these actions and building solutions, bird by bird.
That morning, we were discussing European energy markets, and the confounding problem that despite the availability of a record supply of renewable electricity in Europe and the UK, which was costing next to nothing in marginal input costs, electricity prices across the continent had soared due to the invasion of Ukraine and misplaced policies of marginal-cost pricing.
That these prices are generating windfall profits for power producers is not news to any of us. What most of us haven’t done in response is to start a hugely ambitious network whose goal it is to lower energy bills, finance further investments into green energy, and help households and small businesses realize the wide benefits of wind, solar and batteries.
We are excited to be welcoming Alan, Charles and the whole Tesseract team to Balderton.