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PowerLabs, a Lagos-based energy and ClimateTech startup building AI-powered energy orchestration systems for commercial and industrial businesses in Nigeria, has announced the close of its undisclosed pre-Seed round led by French VC firm Breega. The round saw participation from global and Africa-focused investors like Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures.
The funding will help the African startup accelerate the rollout of its Pai Enterprise, the AI-enabled energy orchestration platform, across commercial and industrial enterprises in Nigeria. The startup also plans to use the funding to set the foundation for expansion into key West African markets.
“Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that don’t speak the same language. At PowerLabs, we believe decentralisation doesn’t have to mean disorder. We’re building the intelligence layer that will prove that distributed energy resources can operate as a unified source while leveraging its disaggregation to offer flexibility, cost efficiency, carbon neutrality and redundancy… more than a centralised energy system ever could,” said Tobechukwu Arize, CEO and co-founder, PowerLabs.
Founded in 2023, PowerLabs aims to solve the energy challenge faced by businesses in Nigeria. Businesses often have to rely on distributed energy systems, including the national grid, generators, solar, inverters, and battery banks. While the power source is no longer a problem, these distributed systems don’t communicate with each other, and PowerLabs wants to fix this with its AI-powered software solution.
Pai Enterprise, launched in June 2025, is PowerLab’s answer to the challenge of disconnected energy sources faced by businesses in Africa. Rather than simply monitoring energy usage, the platform senses, communicates, and actuates across multiple distributed energy sources in real time, continuously modelling supply, demand, and operational constraints to enable organisations to run their own intelligent microgrid.
It is designed with five business verticals in mind: hospitals, data centres, factories, gyms, and tower companies. In hospitals, Pai Enterprise helps with real-time monitoring of critical circuits, protecting intensive care units and operating theatres from voltage drops and supply fluctuations. Data centre operators can optimise the performance of solar systems and generators to track efficiency and reduce emissions without compromising uptime, while factories can use granular energy analytics across production lines to turn power from a fixed overhead into an optimisable cost.
Pai Enterprise is also designed to help gym operators to track energy across the grid, generator, and solar to eliminate wasteful consumption. Tower companies get real-time load profiling and demand analytics to help cell tower operators right-size generators, UPS units, and battery backup. It also delivers instant alerts on irregular loads to ensure mobile networks stay fully operational.
According to the World Bank, power shortages cost Nigeria roughly $29 billion each year, with many households receiving only around 6.6 hours of grid electricity per day. In 2024, Nigeria’s manufacturing sector spent ₦1.11 trillion (~$815 million) on alternative energy, a 42 per cent increase from the previous year. PowerLabs wants to plug the leaks by allowing these distributed systems to communicate through its Pai Enterprise and increase energy efficiency.
This vision seems to have resonated with investors at Breega. “Tobechukwu Arize and David Adebiyi bring a rare combination of deep technical expertise, clarity of vision, and relentless execution,” Haïle Amegashie – Tevoedjre, VC Investor at Breega, said in a LinkedIn post.
The investment is also a direct expression of Breega’s deepening commitment to the African startup ecosystem. Since the announcement of its dedicated Africa Seed I fund, the firm has opened offices in Lagos and Cape Town to support its pan-African strategy.
The announcement comes at a time when investor appetite for African startups building a coordination or communication layer for Africa’s energy stack is growing. The continent has seen significant growth in solar energy, but the software intelligence has lagged behind supply, and with the pre-Seed funding, PowerLabs will be able to accelerate Pai Enterprise deployments and build the intelligence layer needed to make distributed assets work as a whole.
