4Home, Sensus unveil partnership details

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based 4Home’s technology is getting traction from the likes of major electric utilities Southern Company (NYSE:SO) and Cleco (NYSE:CNL), with the help of its partner Raleigh, N.C.-based Sensus, a heavyweight in the meter industry.

Until today, the pair has been nebulous about what they are doing and where they are doing it. 4Home executives and Sensus HAN-DR Product Manager Jon Rappaport told the Cleantech Group details about the nature of their relationship and what they plan to do together in the energy market. 

“We’re the only viable solution from an AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) vendor that’s embracing water, gas and electric in the products we’re building,” said Rappaport, comparing them to competitors such as Tendril Networks or Greenbox Technology that are addressing one or two, but not all three. Boulder, Colo.-based Tendril Networks recently secured $30 million in a round led by VantagePoint Venture Partners (see VantagePoint leads $30M round in AMI solution leader).

Other competitors in the energy management space include Blue Line Innovations and  AlertMe.com, which recently secured $13 million in Series B financing. Cambridge, England-based AlertMe offers a kit that’s shipped to consumers to help manage energy consumption (see AlertMe closes £8 million to expand in Europe).

Sensus provides data collection and metering solutions for water, gas and electric utilities around the world. The partnership—announced earlier this year to create home-area networking (HAN) and demand response (DR) solutions for utilities—combines Sensus’ metering expertise with 4Home’s software platform of digital and physical home control services.

4Home’s platform includes everything from energy management, home security and monitoring as well as media and entertainment management, with a cleantech mission. Its real-time services can be utilized at home or remotely through a mobile phone, television or computer to help customers change their behavior and address the global renewable resource dilemma.

4Home has raised more than $7.5 million to date from Pond Venture Partners, Parker Price Venture Capital and angel investors.

4Home executives have been on the road pitching to Sensus accounts and currently have at least six contracts in place, set to be delivered in early September, and more in progress.The company declined to name all the companies but said it has HAN trials underway through Southern Company’s subsidiary Alabama Power and Louisiana public utility Cleco. Rappaport said the deployments range from 500 to 15,000 units.

4Home intends to provide its solutions to customers through telcom or utility companies, and interest has been picking up especially from utilities, said 4Home’s CTO and co-founder Jim Hunter. He said the utilities see the value proposition of being able to shed demand during peak times.

“They don’t want people to use less energy; they want people to do it at different times,” Hunter said. “The key to that is interaction with the customer.”

Individual customers, property management owners or corporate sustainability managers don’t interact with 4Home itself, rather its platform sits on top of hardware.

“4Home is like the equivalent of an Intel CPU,” said Nate Williams, 4Home’s vice president of marketing and business development. “There’s no 4Home brand.”

Through the partnership with Sensus, 4Home is making a back-end server that’s connected to AMI networks and can serve up various user interfaces. Consumers are able to leverage the technology through Yahoo! TV or their personal Google pages. They’ll be able to opt to receive notifications such as an instant messages or e-mails when, for example, water rates go above a certain level. And the technology has “real feel” features so users feel like they are turning down the thermostat or water dial, Hunter said.

“We are seeing a lot of (utility) customers have different requests, and we have been able to support multiple protocols,” Williams said.

But a utility's customers shouldn’t have to feel the brunt of the software cost, Hunter said. 4Home plans to charge a one-time per-person, per-home fee through the utility, and the utility then hosts the software. There’s also a maintenance fee charged to the utility, he said. Without disclosing specific costs, he said the price point is less than $10 per customer, and utilities haven’t balked at the rates because it’s minimal compared to building a power plant.

Rappaport said Sensus chose 4Home as a partner because of its robust platform on which Sensus could build its energy services. Sensus’ largest customer, Southern Company, has more than 5 million meters.

“Clearly we needed to be able to handle the scale,” Rappaport said.

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