Kavaken Raises £1.1M to Monitor Renewable Energy Performance With AI

Kavaken, a UK energy technology company, has raised £1.1 million from 2040 Ventures, Bogazici Ventures, Rockstart, and Vestel Ventures to develop its AI-powered platform for monitoring the performance of renewable energy installations. The company's software continuously analyses data from solar photovoltaic and wind energy assets to detect performance anomalies, identify underperforming components, and help asset owners and operators maximise the energy generation from their installations.

The global renewable energy installed base has grown dramatically over the past decade, with solar and wind installations now representing a significant and fast-growing share of total electricity generation capacity. As this installed base grows, the challenge of managing it efficiently becomes increasingly important: an underperforming solar array that generates 10% less electricity than its rated capacity due to soiling, shading, or component degradation represents a meaningful loss of revenue for its owner, multiplied across the thousands of assets that make up a utility-scale portfolio. For commercial and industrial solar installations, even smaller performance deviations translate to real cost over the twenty-year life of the asset.

Current performance monitoring often relies on basic yield comparisons and periodic site visits, which are too infrequent and insufficiently granular to catch subtle performance issues quickly. Kavaken's platform analyses the continuous data stream from inverters, sensors, and weather stations across an installation to build a detailed performance model of the asset, detecting deviations from expected performance at the individual module, string, or inverter level. The AI identifies the likely cause of each anomaly — differentiating between soiling, shading, cell degradation, equipment fault, and measurement error — and prioritises maintenance interventions by their expected impact on generation, enabling O&M teams to focus their resources on the actions that will recover the most energy.

The international investor base — combining Turkish energy investors (Bogazici, Vestel), European clean energy funds (2040 Ventures), and a global accelerator (Rockstart) — reflects Kavaken's ambition to serve renewable energy operators across multiple geographies. The funding will be used to develop the platform, build the customer base, and expand into new markets.

Sources

• Kavaken — company website