Breega, the Paris-based venture capital firm with over €700 million in assets under management, has led an undisclosed pre-seed round into PowerLabs, a Lagos-based energy tech startup reimagining how businesses manage power across Nigeria and beyond. The investment is one of the latest signals from Breega’s dedicated Africa fund, which has been actively deploying capital into early-stage startups across the continent since completing its first close in 2024.
PowerLabs, founded in 2023 by CEO Tobechukwu Arize and CTO David Adebiyi, is building what it calls an intelligence layer for distributed energy — a platform that helps businesses monitor, optimize, and automate decisions across multiple power sources, whether that’s the national grid, diesel generators, solar panels, or battery storage.
Nigeria’s Energy Crisis as a Design Constraint
To understand what PowerLabs is building, it helps to understand the problem it’s solving. Nigeria’s national grid has collapsed more than a dozen times in less than two years. The African Development Bank estimates the country loses 5.8% of its GDP annually due to inadequate electricity. Diesel prices have surged more than 68% in the recent past, and electricity tariffs continue to climb. The practical result is that most Nigerian businesses operate their own parallel energy infrastructure — a patchwork of generators, inverters, solar panels, and grid connections that are expensive, carbon-intensive, and maddeningly hard to manage.
PowerLabs’ flagship product, Pai Enterprise, is a hardware-software combination designed to bring order to that chaos. The Pai device collects high-resolution data on power consumption and availability across a site, while the software layer aggregates and analyzes that data to deliver actionable insights — predicting upcoming costs, scheduling maintenance, identifying inefficiencies, and automatically switching between power sources to minimize fuel consumption and maximize uptime.
“Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic, a clutter of devices that do not speak the same language,” said CEO Tobe Arize. “At PowerLabs, we believe decentralization does not have to mean disorder. We are building the layer that transforms these diverse systems into a coordinated, intelligent ecosystem, where energy devices, applications, and services work in harmony to deliver smarter, more personalized power experiences.”
The platform’s modular architecture allows integration with third-party meters and renewable systems, positioning PowerLabs not just as a software play but as connective tissue for the broader energy transition in markets where the grid cannot be relied upon.
The Scale of the Opportunity
The numbers make the market opportunity hard to ignore. If Nigeria were to replace all of its diesel generators with solar, the country would theoretically gain eight times the current capacity of the national grid. For large factories, data centers, and chain retailers, the cost of energy is not a marginal line item — it is a core operational constraint, and one that Pai is directly designed to address.
Catalyst Fund, which also backed PowerLabs alongside Breega and Kaleo Ventures, framed the startup’s value proposition clearly in its investment thesis: by deploying Pai, businesses can monitor power supply patterns, track real-time consumption, and automatically switch between sources, improving resilience during grid collapses while steadily reducing the share of diesel in their energy mix.
The climate dimension is baked into the model, not bolted on. Every percentage point of diesel displacement translates into lower emissions, lower costs, and greater energy security — a combination that is both commercially attractive and directly aligned with Nigeria’s climate adaptation needs.
Why Breega
For Breega, PowerLabs represents a natural fit with the thesis behind its Africa Seed I fund. The firm has been explicit about targeting sectors where technology can have transformative impact on Africa’s most pressing infrastructure challenges — fintech, health tech, logistics, and energy are all in scope. Its portfolio already includes companies like Hohm Energy, a South African clean energy platform, suggesting a pattern of climate-adjacent bets across the continent.
Breega also brings more than a check. The firm prides itself on a “founders-for-founders” model, where its investment team — composed largely of former operators and entrepreneurs — works hands-on with portfolio companies on hiring, sales, marketing, and strategy. For a nine-person team at pre-seed stage, that kind of operational scaffolding can matter as much as the capital itself.
The investment also fits neatly into Breega’s broader Africa expansion. The firm opened offices in Lagos and Cape Town alongside the launch of its Africa fund, and has set a target of at least 40 investments from the vehicle. PowerLabs adds to a portfolio that already spans Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, and other markets across the continent.
The Bigger Picture
PowerLabs is operating in a space that has attracted growing attention from investors globally. Africa’s solar boom has largely played out in two waves — off-grid solar for rural households, and utility-scale projects — but the messy middle ground of commercial and industrial energy management has remained underserved. That is precisely where PowerLabs is planting its flag.
“Distributed energy resources are often seen as fragmented and chaotic,” Arize has said. PowerLabs’ bet is that the companies best positioned to solve that problem are those built from the ground up within African markets — not those adapting legacy models from the EU or the US to a fundamentally different context.
With Breega now on the cap table, the startup has both the capital and the connections to find out if that bet pays off.
PowerLabs was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. Breega’s Africa Seed I fund targets investments between $100,000 and $2 million in startups across Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, and Francophone African markets.
