Munich Startup: What problem does your solution address?
Lena Sophia Voß, co-founder: Commercial and industrial businesses invest in battery storage today and still don’t know what the system is actually doing, whether it’s profitable, or how they could earn more money with it. Planning happens in Excel, operations through isolated solutions, marketing doesn’t happen at all. That costs returns and confidence in the technology. We solve this with an end-to-end platform: from the profitability calculation before the investment through to automated marketing during ongoing operations.
Munich Startup: What can only you do right now?
Lena Sophia Voß: We combine three modules that no one else offers together: profitability planning, operations monitoring, and flexibility marketing – in one platform, specifically for commercial and industrial storage. No other solution thinks through the entire lifecycle of a C&I battery storage system. Our customers, including Deutsche Bahn, Enpal, and Sonnen, get a holistic software solution for their storage systems.
Energy as AI’s bottleneck
Munich Startup: What triggered the founding?
Lena Sophia Voß: We all three studied at CDTM and afterwards were in the USA in the middle of the AI boom at Google, Apple, and AI startups. What we learned there: the biggest bottleneck for AI is not compute, but energy. Data centers worldwide are running up against capacity limits and that makes it clear that the real challenge of the energy transition is not generation. The problem is that we don’t consume renewable energy when it’s produced. Battery storage is the answer to that. But hardware alone isn’t enough: without software that intelligently manages and markets this storage, the potential remains unused. That’s exactly the software that didn’t exist for commercial and industrial sectors, so we built it.
Munich Startup: Was there a moment when you thought about giving up?
Lena Sophia Voß: No. Not yet. The problem is too real, the market too big. We’re just at the beginning.
Munich Startup: How would you know in a year that you’re on the right path?
Lena Sophia Voß: We’re already on the right path – over one hundred paying customers show us that, who actively use our planning platform today and the first realized storage projects in live operations. In a year, we want to see all customers handling the entire software stack – planning, live operations, and marketing – through Furo. The market is there. The demand is there. Now it’s about speed.
“Hardly a better starting point in Europe”
Munich Startup: Would you found again in Munich and why?
Lena Sophia Voß: Yes, because of CDTM and one of Germany’s strongest startup ecosystems. But above all, because we have everything we need here: end customers from industry and energy, a dense investor network, and talent that understands both: technology and business. For a company like Furo, there’s hardly a better starting point in Europe.
Munich Startup: Focus or diversification?
Lena Sophia Voß: Focus. Always. We’re building Europe’s first flexibility platform for commercial and industrial battery storage.
