Tendril Completes $12 Million in Series B Funding to Secure Leadership Position in...

Tendril Completes $12 Million in Series B Funding to Secure Leadership
Position in the Energy Management Market
New York-based RRE Ventures Leads Series B Round

BOULDER, Colo., March 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Tendril has completed a Series B
round of funding worth $12 million that will fuel the company's rapid
expansion in providing energy management solutions to the utility industry.
The lead investor in this round is RRE Ventures in New York
(http://www.rre.com), who joins Vista Ventures, Access Venture Partners and
Appian Ventures as major investors in Tendril. This investment follows
Tendril's announcement earlier this quarter regarding the beta release of the
Tendril Energy Management System (EMS), which facilitates dialogue between
consumers and utilities for more intelligent, consumer-centric control of
energy consumption.
"RRE invested in Tendril because it provides critical technology for
energy management and because its open-standards approach is exactly what
companies in the utility industry are looking for," said Stuart Ellman,
Managing Partner of RRE Ventures. "A number of trends such as rising energy
costs and environmental awareness are driving dramatic growth in the
deployment of technology to manage electricity demand and usage. Tendril's
message of open standards and its consumer-centric approach to solving this
problem has solid traction with major utilities that are planning large-scale
rollouts of residential energy management solutions, and we expect continued
progress based on the strength of Tendril's EMS product."
"There was very strong interest in this round of investment, and we felt
that RRE would be an ideal partner because of its amazing track record in
helping startups reach their potential," said Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril.
"Tendril is experiencing very strong customer-led growth, and this funding
combined with RRE's expertise will go toward building out the infrastructure
to deliver the Tendril Energy Management System to an increasing number of
utility companies."
Tendril's unique, user-centric approach to energy management contrasts
strongly with previous, centrally-driven efforts to control energy consumption
in residential markets. By providing consumers with real-time information
about their consumption and by innovative approaches such as real-time
benchmarking and verifiable pay-for-performance programs, Tendril is committed
to helping utilities and their customers reduce consumption AND improve
customer service.
The Tendril Energy Management System is a mixture of software and in-home
hardware that has an open architecture to provide seamless integration to any
ZigBee Smart Energy products for the home. It improves operational efficiency
for utilities by engaging residential consumers in a dialogue about reducing
load both continuously and at critical peak times, and it provides consumers
with real-time information about energy consumption in a variety of formats
including in-home displays, a web portal and smart thermostats. In addition,
the Tendril Energy Management System offers a full, open API to integrate with
existing back office enterprise systems including meter management and billing
systems as well as load monitoring and security applications.
For more information about Tendril EMS and the central role it plays in
enabling deployments of residential energy management initiatives, visit
http://www.tendrilinc.com/products_ems.php.
About Tendril
Tendril is bringing 21st century energy efficiency to the energy industry
by providing technology that enables an important dialogue between consumers
and their energy providers, allowing them to manage consumption and supply of
energy in a smarter, more efficient way. Tendril's technology plays a critical
role in creating an open, extensible, standards-based, end-to-end energy
ecosystem that connects consumer devices (like thermostats) to utilities' back
office applications, enabling consumers and energy companies to understand and
generate smart energy for life. For more information about Tendril visit
http://www.tendrilinc.com.
ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works
The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to
enable reliable, cost effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring
and control products based on an open global standard. The ZigBee Alliance
membership comprises technology providers and manufacturers worldwide.
Membership is open to all. Additional information can be found at
http://www.zigbee.org.
Tendril and Tendril EMS are trademarks of Tendril Networks. All other
trademarks are property of their respective owners.
SOURCE Tendril

Elisabeth Monaghan, +1-303-514-8383, emonaghan@trippecompany.com, for Tendril