EqualOcean has been informed that Zendure(Chinese: 征拓), a global home energy storage and energy management brand, recently completed nearly CNY 100 million Series A++ financing.
Founded in 2017, Zendure is a leading home energy solution tech-based company that provides users with plug-and-play smart microgrid systems. Its founding team entered the high-end consumption technology overseas track as early as 2013, with 10 years of user insights, market discovery and R&D achievements, and rich industrial resources. At present, the company has more than 190 employees, with R&D accounting for 45% of the total.
With the accurate judgment of overseas related policies and a keen understanding of overseas users' needs, Zendure team was the first to enter the European balcony energy storage market and launched the phenomenal pop-up product SolarFlow, which sold 316 sets in 7 minutes, equivalent to an amount of 500,000 euros, and the number of orders exceeded 4,100 sets in 30 days, equivalent to an amount of 4.54 million euros, and tens of thousands of units have been delivered so far.
The reason behind the big sales of balcony energy storage is that Europe is constantly updating its policy to favor plug-and-play grid-connected PV/energy storage: Europe allows grid-connected inverters (micro-inverters) within 800W to be plug-and-play, of which Germany is also exempt from 19% VAT, benefiting the sales and search of German micro-inverters and balcony power stations. However, Germany's 30 million households' micro-inverter penetration rate is only 3%, there is huge potential for improvement, and the balcony energy storage market has just started, which is a blue ocean to be explored in the popular energy storage track.
At the same time, the U.S. off-grid energy storage favorable policies are constantly updated, such as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to off-grid energy storage 30% tax rebate subsidies, the FIT policy expires, photovoltaic feed-in tariffs continue to fall, will weaken the local consumer demand for traditional grid-connected photovoltaic systems and energy storage. Zendure's popular off-grid energy storage product, SuperBaseV, has more than 30 new distributors and contracts totaling USD 150 million as of Q1 this year.
In the next two years, Zendure will continue to improve, iterate and launch new products based on the concept of a plug-and-play appliance-based energy storage system, taking SolarFlow, the existing balcony energy storage product, and SuperBaseV, the plug-and-play off-grid energy storage product, as the entry point to create the best home energy storage products and intelligent home energy management system for users.
This round of financing was invested by top institution Sinovation Ventures (Chinese: 创新工场), old shareholder Houxue Capital (Chinese: 厚雪资本), industrial investor Zhejiang XIngyue Group(Chinese: 浙江星月实业), Scheme Capital(Chinese: 势能资本) acted as the exclusive financial advisor. Liu Bingbin, CEO of Zendure, said that the proceeds will be used to deliver SolarFlow and SuperBaseV, and to further invest in R&D, accelerate product iteration, deepen channel construction and strengthen the overseas customer service system.