Midori, an innovative SME that creates and sells energy analysis and smart metering services, announces the closing of a €1.7m round underwritten by FairConnect, a company specialising in the provision of connected insurance services for motorbikes and property controlled by the Palamon fund, Club degli Investitori, one of the leading business angel groups in Italy, and Club Acceleratori, investment vehicle managed by SiamoSoci.
Midori was founded at the end of 2011 in Turin by a team of experts and professionals in energy efficiency, ICT and social psychology, driven by the desire to bring technological innovation to the service of energy saving. Born and grown in I3P, the incubator of Politecnico di Torino, it is now based at the Energy Center, a hub in the Piedmont capital specialising in the field of energy-environmental innovation. In 2018 it was the protagonist of a first round of investment through Mamacrowd, the most important Italian platform for equity crowdfunding investments, which brought into the company around 50 crowd members and the Accelerators Club, who strongly believed in the Midori project and contributed in a decisive way to the company's growth in recent years.
Midori's flagship product is NED, a connected service enabled by a single sensor which, thanks to advanced machine learning and data analytics algorithms, can track the electrical activity and consumption of the main household appliances. NED immediately starts to learn the consumption habits of the people living in the flat and offers, day after day, personalised indications on how to reduce unnecessary energy waste and understand the state of health of the home appliances. Midori's offer is integrated in the ecosystem of Utilities that can differentiate their proposal, offering customers a new and advanced tool to control costs and risks in the home.
The transaction was supported by KPMG Advisory as financial advisor and McDermott Will & Emery as legal advisor to FairConnect, while Club degli Investitori made the investment through Simon Fiduciaria of the Ersel Group. The capital raised will be used to consolidate in the utility market, develop a presence in the insurance market and jointly create with FairConnect new solutions that pursue cost and risk management in the property sector, both private and commercial, and to strengthen the team to increase the ability to analyze Energy Big Data.
"The entry of FairConnect and the Investors' Club in Midori's capital is not only an important milestone, but above all the beginning of an exciting phase in which we will have to demonstrate how innovation, typical of startups with a strong technological vocation like Midori, can and must meet the business needs of a market - that of cost and risk control in the property sector - which is changing rapidly and looking for new opportunities," said Christian Camarda, founder and CEO of Midori. "To do this we will be able to count on FairConnect's enormous experience and expertise in the implementation and sale of related services and on the strategic support of the Investors' Club. We are excited about this partnership and ready to take on the many challenges we will encounter."
"In the initial stages Midori, as a facilitator of services that can be combined with the Connected House ecosystem, had developed an offering for the Utility market," said Biagio Franco and Marco Morchio, co-champions of the deal for Club degli Investitori. "The meeting, and subsequently the partnership with FairConnect, generated the awareness that we could extend the value proposition to property monitoring. The value of this paradigm shift, supported by a complementary and convergent business vision, is enabling us to extend both the content and the scope of the offering. For Midori and FairConnect, the potential competitive advantages in the connected property arena are very compelling."
"We are thrilled to form a strategic partnership with Midori and to co-invest in the project with such an experienced and high quality partner as Club degli Investitori," commented Carmine Carella, CEO of FairConnect. "The combination of the Midori and FairConnect teams in the property sector will enable the creation of scenarios for the preventive management of energy costs and risks associated with property, as well as the development of coaching services for private and professional users".
