There are roughly 6 million commercial buildings in the United States, and fewer than 3% of them generate any of their own power. Meanwhile, the bill for buying that power from the grid keeps going up: commercial electricity rates rose 23% between 2020 and 2024 and another 5.6% in the first seven months of this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Outages are more frequent. Interconnection queues stretch for years. And the hyperscalers are now lining up for every spare megawatt the utilities can find.
At the same time, the cost of producing power onsite has collapsed. Solar panels are 80%+ cheaper than they were a decade ago; batteries are close to 90% cheaper. For a growing share of warehouses, hospitals, grocery stores, and car dealerships, putting a system on the roof now beats buying from the utility. So why isn't every one of those buildings doing it?
Onsite energy has become a capital allocation decision for large companies, and the market hasn't given them the information to make it with confidence. If you run facilities across 200 locations, everyone who can tell you which sites make sense also has something to sell you. Developers quote their own equipment. OEMs quote theirs. Consultants charge by the hour and take six months. The buyer ends up with bids that don't line up, a timeline measured in quarters, and no real confidence in the number. Most do nothing, and the do-nothing option gets more expensive every year.
This is why we are pleased to announce that Origin Ventures has led an oversubscribed $11M Series A in VECKTA, a planning and procurement platform for onsite energy. We were joined in the round by Tech Square Ventures, VoLo Earth Ventures, Cove Fund, and Catalyst by Wellstar, among others. Origin Ventures has joined the board of directors.
VECKTA was built on the buyer's side of the meter. Give the platform a property address and it pulls 5,000+ data points (consumption, utility tariffs, local solar and storage pricing, incentives, grid carbon intensity) and returns a business case and a recommended system in under a minute. Do that across a portfolio and you have a ranked list of which sites to pursue and which to skip. From there, VECKTA runs a standardized RFP out to a marketplace of 3,000+ prequalified suppliers, so bids come back on the same terms and can actually be compared.
And it is not a solar shop. The platform models the full menu of onsite options - solar, battery storage, backup generation, EV charging, waste-heat-to-power - and recommends whichever mix actually pencils for that site, whether the goal is cost, resilience, or emissions. VECKTA has no equipment to push and gets paid when the buyer transacts. That is where we think the real value gets created.
VECKTA has already analyzed roughly 34K customer sites and customers include Honeywell, Wellstar, Lithia, Regency Centers, Phillips Edison, and Public Storage.
VECKTA is Origin Ventures' latest investment in energy infrastructure, joining Torus (storage and energy management for commercial real estate); H3X (electrifying heavy industry with its motors); and Surge (building the power infrastructure behind AI compute). Compute needs power, power is getting scarce, and the companies that help large buyers secure it on their own terms will only matter more from here. VECKTA is also a marketplace with software as the wedge, a model Origin Ventures has backed for two decades, and it has solved the hard side: demand. We remain extremely bullish on behind-the-meter energy, and on VECKTA's position at the front of the line.
We look forward to working with Gareth, Dan, Calvin, Felipe, and the entire VECKTA team. It's time more companies took a hard look at what's on their roof!
