June 16th, 2022 — The mass-adoption of electric appliances is one of the greatest challenges, and opportunities, associated with addressing the climate crisis. Over half of American homes and businesses today burn natural gas, oil, or propane on-site for heating, generating 560M tons of carbon dioxide each year—approximately 10% of total US emissions. Home and business owners face a wide range of obstacles to fully electrify their equipment, including a highly fragmented installation process and a myriad of decisions to make around potential payback and environmental impacts.
Demand for home electrification today is largely driven by homeowners who seek more comfort, emissions reductions, and cost savings. Over the past several years, the home electrification market has grown into a complex landscape of solution providers, many of which focus only on specific energy or appliance applications. Homeowners face a wide array of disparate solutions, technologies, and contractors that are difficult to organize, compare, and optimize.
Helio’s end-to-end digital solution enables a more efficient, holistic, and customer centric approach to home electrification. By consolidating all stages of the sales, project design, contract and installation processes, and aggregating contractors, Helio solves several key pain points for customers starting the home electrification journey.
Decarbonizing residential buildings is a massive—but complex—opportunity.
U.S. residential home electrification is a multi-trillion dollar addressable market but the fragmented nature of the sector makes it difficult for solutions to scale.
While installing electric equipment - like heat pumps - in new buildings often makes clear economic sense, retrofitting existing buildings with electrification equipment is a more complicated calculation, as it is highly dependent on energy prices and geography for any given home.
Even so, over half of U.S. households could together save more than $27B per year on their energy bills if they were to switch to electric appliances, while also dramatically reducing their carbon footprint.
The market has focused on improving technology, but it’s time to think about the customer.
By the end of the decade, expected global revenue for all-electric home technologies is expected to grow fivefold to over $12B.
Demand for electrified homes has grown steadily over time, with the percentage of U.S. homes heated with electricity growing from 26% in 1990 to 39% in 2018.
Customers need a nuanced, customized approach to electrifying their homes, but there are few solutions that aggregate information across technologies and contractors with the customer experience in mind.
Helio offers a turnkey, full-home electrification platform for homeowners.
Helio enables customers to transition away from fossil fuels and fully electrify their homes.
The process starts with a digital assessment of the customer’s home, which uses easy-to-access data run through Helio’s proprietary modeling system to quickly and accurately design and share a quote within an hour.
Helio then coordinates with their vetted network of contractors for site visits to confirm quote estimates, and oversees and executes the installation, taking a margin on the overall cost of the equipment and installation.
Headquartered in Denver, Helio works with a network of contractors in Colorado with plans to expand to California and New York.
Powerhouse Ventures is proud to join Helio’s $4M seed round, led by Lowercarbon Capital with additional participation from Matchstick Ventures and MCJ. We look forward to working with Co-Founders Eric Reinhardt, Clay Dusel, and Bill Lucas-Brown and the entire Helio team to digitize and streamline home decarbonization.
Special thanks to Marie Thompson and Shaandiin Cedar.
To read more about Powerhouse Ventures’ other publicly-announced investments, visit our Insights page.