Highcast, a startup that supports industrial companies in their energy transition, announced a €2 million seed funding round, co-led by CS Venture, CentraleSupélec's alumni fund, and a private energy specialist investor. The round also included AFI Ventures - Ventech's impact fund, VIF (Wendel family shareholders), and Super Capital. Other renowned business angels such as Laurent Courtois, Vincent Bryant, and François-Régis Déhéry are also associated with this funding round.
Highcast: The Hybrid On-site + AI Approach Supporting Industrial Companies
Highcast has a dual mission: to help industrial companies optimize their electricity consumption and reduce their carbon footprint. Its vision is that it's essential to produce and consume during off-peak and lower-carbon hours.
To achieve this, Highcast structures its approach as follows:
- On-site: identifying the flexibility potential of each production unit without additional hardware installation.
- With AI:
- creation of an exclusive and personalized digital twin, which enables the construction of the ICE (electricity cost index), which integrates all contractual, regulatory, and market challenges.
- personalized multi-day forecasts of hourly electricity costs and, in the medium term, CO2 emissions.
The platform then offers a decision-making tool for production planning and scheduling, and finally formalizes a concrete operational view at the production line level itself.
"At Highcast, we believe that the energy transition creates opportunities and that mastering electricity consumption is an underexploited performance lever. We are working to provide large industrial companies with the management tools they need to reduce their electricity bills by up to 20%," comments Vivien Robert, co-founder and CEO of Highcast.
"CS Venture supports startups within the CentraleSupélec ecosystem, particularly deeptech and industrial projects. Also accelerated by 21st by CentraleSupélec, Highcast is a perfect illustration of our roadmap, and we are delighted to have led their first funding round," adds Cédric Curtil, Executive Director of CS Venture.
Controlling electricity consumption: a major economic and environmental challenge
Aware of the need to transition to renewable energies, industrial companies are increasingly electrifying their production processes and diversifying their electricity supplies as much as possible. This leads to a complexity that is often difficult to account for in daily operations due to the numerous constraints.
For industrial companies, managing electricity costs is therefore crucial for competitiveness and performance. While electricity costs have seen significant fluctuations in the markets, the magnitude of these variations has increased in recent years, particularly driven by the development of renewable energies, whose production is, by nature, more intermittent. For example:
- Explosion in the number of negative price hours - from January to September 2024, this figure is higher than the cumulative number of hours since 2017! (490 in 2024 vs. 407 cumulative from 2017 to 2023 - source: ENTSOE (Day-ahead Prices FR)
- Intraday fluctuations 2.5 times more extreme than before the 2022 crisis (source - idem)
A fundraising round to accelerate cost control and the move towards decarbonized energy
The objectives of the recently completed fundraising round are focused on strategic recruitments and platform development to integrate functionalities that align even more closely with the challenges of the energy market, the consideration of carbon impacts, and production constraints.
These objectives should enable the activation of untapped savings potential in factories.
“This funding round will notably allow us to realize the second part of Highcast's mission: to reduce the carbon footprint of industrial companies by providing them with a tool to measure, manage, and optimize their real carbon costs,” adds Flore de Lasteyrie, co-founder and CTO of Highcast.
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