(Bloomberg) -- A Swedish startup focused on energy storage and grid technology raised an additional €20 million ($21.7 million) from a financing round backed by investors including Hennes & Mauritz AB chairman Karl-Johan Persson and led by Northzone Ventures Sweden AB.
Flower Infrastructure Technologies AB, founded four years ago by John Diklev while a university student in Stockholm, lays claim to having Sweden’s largest portfolio of battery systems for electricity storage. The funding announced Thursday completes a €45 million round, taking total investments to €100 million, according to a statement.
Flower’s Diklev says the company’s aim is to offer services that can stabilize grids increasingly reliant on weather-dependent sources of energy such as wind and solar. That poses particular challenges in parts of Sweden, where the shuttering of nuclear reactors has led to price volatility and increased the risk of outages.
“We need more flexibility in energy systems to be able to add renewables and make the transition as cost effective as it needs to be,” Diklev said in an interview.
In April, Flower bought the largest battery facility in Sweden from wind energy developer OX2 AB, and now owns 65 megawatts of installed storage capacity, with another 70 megawatts under development. With the latest financing secured, the firm says it plans to expand in countries including Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Flower posted revenue of about 100 million kronor ($9.4 million) last year, and this year’s result will likely fall just short of a profit, according to the founder.
“We want to be in markets that are not perfectly correlated to build a stable revenue base, and we need to become a lot bigger than we are today,” Diklev said.
(Adds details on company’s performance. An earlier version corrected spelling of founder in third paragraph.)
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