Thursday, September 22, 2011

FirstFuel finds $2.4M, changes name from iBLogix

By Rodney H. Brown

FirstFuel Software Inc., A Boston maker of building energy analytics software formerly known as iBLogix Inc., has landed $2.4 million in an initial round of financing, according to a release from the company. Leading the round was Battery Ventures and Nth Power, with participation from individual investors.

According to the release, FirstFuel will use the new funding to speed up adoption of its Rapid Building Assessment platform, which the company says allows for “zero-touch analysis of the energy performance of commercial buildings.”

While this is the first institutional funding for FirstFuel, the company, in its iBLogix days, took in $250,000 from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and also landed a grant worth an undisclosed amount from U-Launch, a program administered by the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, the New England Clean Energy Foundation, the Association of Cleantech Incubators of New England (ACTION) and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

The release cited a Fraunhofer Center study that concluded that “the remote disaggregation technique developed by FirstFuel has the potential to be a valuable engine for the large scale benchmarking of buildings and to identify energy-saving opportunities without on-site audits.”

FirstFuel was founded as iBLogix in 2010 by CEO Swapnil Shah; senior vice president, products and buildings Ken Kolkebeck; and science advisors Nalin Kulatilaka and Robert Kaufmann of Boston University.