Romo Wind, a Switzerland -based wind farm optimization company, has raised €4.8m ($6m) from a consortium including local industrial technology company ABB’s corporate venturing unit.
Alongside ABB Technology Ventures in Romo’s round were Yellow&Blue Investment Management, the corporate venturing unit of energy group Vattenfall’s Nuon subsidiary and which led the round, and B-To-V Partners, a network of 200 entrepreneurial private investors, along with the portfolio company’s founders.
Romo owns a patented wind measurement technology for measuring the speed and direction of the wind that hits the wind turbine originally invented by Professor Troels Friis-Pedersen at the Department of Wind Energy (formerly RISØ), Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
Romo has signed contracts with large utility wind farm owners jointly owning approximately 18 GW of installed capacity.
Girish Nadkarni, president of ABB Technology Ventures and a member of the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist 100, said: “The Romo Wind iSpin technology will become an essential component and retrofit tool for improving and controlling the performance of wind turbines.”
Albert Fischer, managing director of Yellow&Blue Investment Management and also a member of the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist 100, added: “We have been impressed by the management’s ability to build a sound company based on an intelligent business model and a disruptive technology that accurately measures wind hitting a wind turbine – including wind speed and direction – a notoriously difficult task.”
Separately, B-To-V Partners’ Black Lane portfolio company has raised money from the Alternative Strategic Investments (Alstin), the holding company of financial advisory firm AWD founder Carsten Maschmeyer. Black Lane’s, which offers a mobile booking service for chauffeur and limousine rides, other investors, included RI Digital Ventures and Car4You.