New startup ideas · Physical world · Climate and energy
startup idea
Kilowise
Spend management for electricity - FinOps for every meter an enterprise owns.
Kilowise is self-serve SaaS that ingests utility bills, interval meter data, and tariff structures for every site a global enterprise operates, then finds billing errors, picks better tariffs, and forecasts power spend and carbon per facility.
- Software subscription
- Enterprise
- $100B+ market
- Creates a new category
- Global from day one
4/5
venture judge
8
similar startups, last 2 years (31 all-time)
95%
of 3 nearest real companies still alive
yes
2 matching federal grants and programs
Direction supported by government programs and grants
Scorecard
One score that balances how trendy the idea is, the demand for it and its potential for 100x, with competition measured relative to every other idea in the catalog. Recent startup trends first, government priorities second.
68
Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 41.7 x 1.64
Active
competition: more crowded than 65% of ideas · headwind x0.67
+1.2
government priorities, secondary (2 matching grants)
Trend
42
Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.
- Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)23
- Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector68
- Sector direction (live batch)50
- 2026 trend analyst25
Demand
67
Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.
- YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)0
- Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)100
- Operator judge: real pain100
100x potential
78
Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.
- Venture judge75
- Market size axis100
- Moat axis100
- Neighbours still alive71
- Technologist judge50
Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 272 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were spend, management, electricity, finops, meter, enterprise, owns, self-serve.
The idea in full
- What
- Kilowise is self-serve SaaS that ingests utility bills, interval meter data, and tariff structures for every site a global enterprise operates, then finds billing errors, picks better tariffs, and forecasts power spend and carbon per facility. Teams sign up and connect their first sites in a day and pay per meter; Kilowise field teams handle meter hookups and utility data plumbing in messier markets. Every connected meter enriches a cross-country corpus of tariffs and consumption patterns that makes the next customer's benchmarks sharper.
- Why now
- WattShift (TS 2026) is building a US utility rate database and YC W26 funded Condor Energy for enterprise energy procurement, while this cluster jumped from 91 new companies in 2023 to 170 in 2024 - enterprise power cost is becoming a managed spend category the way cloud cost did.
- Wedge: first customer and entry point
- Multi-site logistics and retail chains in two countries, starting with automated bill-error recovery, which pays for the subscription in found money within the first quarter.
- Path to 100x
- Enterprise electricity is a $100B-plus annual spend with no system of record, and the first product to hold both global tariff data and customer interval data compounds a moat every rival must rebuild meter by meter. The category winner becomes the default line item on every CFO's stack, then takes a share of procurement and flexibility dollars flowing through it.
- Ceiling
- If it stays an analytics layer that never touches the procurement dollars, it tops out as a reporting tool priced per seat.
- Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
- Condor Energy handles the procurement transaction; Kilowise runs the continuous spend operation after the contract is signed. WattShift is a US rate database; Kilowise closes the loop globally with the customer's own meter data.
- Main risk
- Fragmented utility data access keeps onboarding manual, so gross margin looks like a services firm instead of software.
Five judges
Each judge scores every idea in the catalog with a named rubric; the venture judge decides whether a card is shown at all (4-5 is venture-grade).
Venture investor
4/5
Revenue within a year, self-serve per-meter pricing on $100B+ of enterprise power spend, with a tariff-plus-interval data corpus that compounds per customer.
Bootstrapper
4/5
Bill-error recovery for multi-site retail chains pays for the subscription in found money in the first quarter, which is revenue within months.
Operator
5/5
Bill-error recovery pays back the subscription in one quarter, and the CFO who owns the $100B power line item signs it.
Technologist
3/5
Bill and interval data ingestion is unglamorous plumbing, though the cross-country tariff corpus does sharpen with every meter connected.
Risk
5/5
Thousands of multi-site enterprise buyers, revenue within a year, and bill-error recovery that needs no license or platform's permission.
trends
2/5
FinOps-for-power leans on a 2024 cohort jump that has since reversed to 32 new companies in 2026; the bill-audit product needed no 2026 shift.
Similar startups in the directory
Companies whose pitch matches most of the idea's terms (spend, management, electricity, finops, meter, enterprise, owns, self-serve): 31 all-time, 8 from the last two years. Same matching as Idea Check.
Provider of a closed-loop reporting and automation platform designed to know return on ad spend. The company's reporting and automation platform is a self-serve cross-network online advertising platform which helps to create and manage campaigns across networks as well as automate the workflow, enabling enterprises to measure the performance of Ads, gain full insight into their campaign performance and streamline campaign optimization.
AI-native BPO for enterprise order-to-cash
Liability insurance for AI Agents. You deploy agents, we cover you.
We build so they Belong. Founded by Spotify's ex-Global Head of Music and Avicii's manager.
StitcherAI helps organizations avoid wasting 1/3rd of their Cloud, SaaS, and AI investments by better aligning spend with business priorities.
Data and RL environments to automate knowledge work
Coverbase automates 90% of vendor management so companies can spend time actually bettering security and compliance.
Optimal AI-Driven Marketing for Enterprises
Procurement negotiations, simplified.
Developer of a digital platform designed to help small and medium-sized enterprises manage their spending wisely. The company's platform allows enterprises to handle their expenses, and purchases, register bills directly into one consolidated platform, and have a real-time view of all the transactions through the corporate cards given to the employees, enabling small and medium-sized enterprises to simplify expense management operations.
Service-as-a-software for physical operations - AI that builds and runs enterprise in-house EV fleets end-to-end.
Developer of a spend management platform designed to help small and medium-sized enterprises to manage and track expenses. The company's platform provides an intuitive user interface, insights, digital requisitions, bulk payment transfers, budgeting, and expense tracking, enabling businesses to digitize their daily operations.
The generator's reference companies
Real companies the model named as closest when it wrote the card, with their fate. A check mark is a company the radar could verify in its directory.
Public money in this direction
US federal grants, SBIR/STTR awards and open opportunities from the radar's public-money feed, matched to the idea's terms; the sector totals give the context.
2
grants and programs matching the idea
180
startup-relevant grants in Climate and energy
$155M
awarded in the sector, tracked
19
opportunities open now in the sector
- SBIR Phase I: Wireless Sidestep Network: Harnessing Sub-terahertz to Enable New Degrees of Freedom in AI Data Center Architecturesawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · SBIR Phase I · $305K · posted 2026-08-18
- STTR Phase I: A New Class of Injection Molded Biosymbiotic Devices for Long-Term, Multimodal Physiological Monitoringawardhigh relevance
National Science Foundation · STTR Phase I · $305K · posted 2026-08-13
Market signal
What the radar sees in Climate and energy: new companies by cohort year, the forming YC batch, and outcomes since the February snapshot.
Climate and energy · 92 → 112 → 184 → 97 → 32 new companies 2022 → 2026 · 91% aliveYC S26: 2 in this cluster, 1% of the batch (was 1% in X26) (F26 is still forming: 21 listed)Since February, of 118 YC companies here: 0 acquired, 2 shut down, 4 rewrote their pitch
Design attributes
The card is one cell of a designed set: every axis below was chosen before the text was written, and the text had to realize it.
- Buyer
- Enterprise
- Business model
- Software subscription
- Path to 100x
- Creates a new category
- Market size
- $100B+ market
- Capital intensity
- Capital-medium (ops, field teams)
- Speed to revenue
- Revenue within a year
- Technical depth
- Real engineering
- Go-to-market
- Self-serve
- Moat
- Data moat
- Geography
- Global from day one
- Regulation
- Some regulation
- Vibe
- Hot space
Listed under
An idea sits in its own sector and in any sector its text clearly touches.
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Fictional company written 2026-08-26 from MarkosWeb data; the companies, grants and numbers around it are real and tracked. Treat the idea as a research prompt, not a plan.