Category Visionaries Jan Willem Rombouts, CEO & Founder of Beebop AI: $5.5 Million Raised to Power Grid Orchestration for the Clean Energy Transition
Apr 4, 2025
33:15
Beebop AI is pioneering a new middleware layer for power grid orchestration, securing $5.5 million in funding to help utilities and energy retailers optimize energy consumption and costs. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with Jan Willem Rombouts, CEO and Founder of Beebop AI, to discuss how his background at Goldman Sachs and experience building his first energy tech company shaped his approach to solving one of the energy transition's biggest challenges: balancing power grids in an increasingly renewable-powered world.
Topics Discussed:
- Jan Willem's journey from Goldman Sachs' trading floor during the financial crisis to energy tech entrepreneurship
- The painful lessons learned building Restore, which pioneered virtual power plants and was later acquired by Centrica
- How Beebop AI creates a middleware layer that orchestrates power consumption across customer devices like EVs, solar panels, and heat pumps
- Why power grid orchestration is critical to making renewable energy both reliable and affordable
- Beebop's strategic flywheel connecting utilities and device manufacturers
- The go-to-market strategies that helped Beebop gain traction with major European utilities
GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
- Engineer network effects into your go-to-market strategy: Beebop designed a utility-to-OEM flywheel where each new utility customer helps bring device manufacturers onto their platform, creating a powerful network effect. Jan Willem explained: "What we designed was that we would first contract these utilities... our anticipation was that they would be able to engage with these OEMs, with these manufacturers more easily, to essentially invite them to integrate with our platform." This approach turns customers into channel partners who can open doors that would be difficult for a startup to access directly.
- Break through complex sales cycles with land-and-expand: When selling to utilities and large corporations with notoriously long sales cycles, Beebop starts with a low-cost, high-value initial offering focused on insights and business case validation. Jan Willem noted: "Our initial proposition is very low cost and very high value... we allow them to see what the business case is... to create somewhat of a solid launching pad on which we can then expand and go to actual operationalization." This approach shortens time-to-value and creates internal champions.
- Focus on customer economics, not just your technology: Despite having complex technology, Beebop leads customer conversations with how their solution impacts key metrics like customer lifetime value, margin, churn, and customer acquisition costs. "Before we have explained anything about how new our software is, where it positions in the technology stack, we just show what kind of awesome products they can build... creating tens of percentages of discounts on their energy bills."
- Design for global scale from day one: Based on lessons from his first company, Jan Willem deliberately architected Beebop to work with market structures that are universal across regions: "What we did this time... is we chose markets that have a universal footprint and so that look essentially the same whether you're in the UK or you're in Texas or you're in Germany or you're in Sweden." This approach avoids the scaling challenges of having to constantly adapt to different regulatory environments.
- Bring process to event marketing: Beebop transformed their trade show approach by adopting a disciplined, metrics-driven strategy learned from Datadog's former CMO. Jan Willem shared: "The big learning for me was to be super intentional. If you go to a trade show, be super clear about exactly how many marketing qualified, how many sales qualified leads you want out of it, and then engineer a team with different roles and responsibilities." This systematic approach yields measurable ROI from events that many startups struggle to achieve.
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