Vensum Power gets €9m Series A from Lifeline, L&T and Eviny to start building its converters in 2027

Vensum Power, a power-electronics company based on the Aalto University campus in Espoo, has raised a €9m Series A to put its converters into mass production in 2027. Lifeline Ventures, India's Larsen & Toubro Group and Eviny Ventures, the investment arm of the Norwegian energy company Eviny, co-led the round, which takes Vensum's total funding to €15.2m.

The deal matters beyond Finland because of where the bottleneck now sits. Grid connections for chargers, batteries and data centres are scarce, and some of the electricity that does arrive is lost as heat every time it is converted from one form to another. Vensum is betting that smarter control of that conversion step can give operators more usable power from the capacity they already have.

From lab hardware to a factory line

Chief executive Peter Nisula described the round as the point where Vensum stops being a technology developer and becomes a manufacturer. The plan is to begin volume production in 2027 with products for EV charging, battery storage and DC microgrids. Vensum has said it expects revenue to start in the same year.

The money will go on production capacity, more engineering work and the step up to volume manufacturing. Vensum has not disclosed a valuation or how the shares were split among the three co-leads. No customer contract was announced with the round either, so the 2027 timeline is a target rather than a booked order.

Production is the hard part in this business. Power converters sit inside equipment that cannot be allowed to fail, from grid-connected batteries to fast chargers, so new designs go through long validation and certification before buyers will deploy them at scale. Component sourcing and build quality will count for as much as the control software Vensum is known for.

What software-defined conversion does

Vensum calls its patented platform Software-Defined Power Conversion, or SDPC. It relies on soft-switching methods known as zero voltage switching and zero current switching, which cut the energy lost each time a transistor turns on or off. That makes higher switching frequencies practical, and higher frequencies allow smaller converters with more power.

Digital control is the other half. According to the company, its converters adjust in real time to shifts in load or input voltage and keep running close to peak efficiency across a wide operating range. Conventional designs tend to lose efficiency once they move away from the conditions they were tuned for. Vensum says its approach also means fewer parts, less heat to remove, a smaller footprint and the option to run diagnostics and push updates remotely.

The platform is also meant to save engineering time. Vensum builds every product from the same set of tested hardware, firmware and control modules, which it reconfigures for new voltages and power levels. The company says this lets it bring out new converters much faster than with conventional designs built for one application.

Why data centres are the next target

AI data centres are the market Vensum wants to enter after its first production run. Operators there face rising electricity demand and limited supply, and every percentage point saved between the grid and the processor frees capacity for more computing.

"The question in data centres is no longer only how powerful the chips are, but how efficiently the used electricity actually reaches them," Nisula said.

He added that the software control keeps the converters at very high efficiency even when loads swing quickly.

The investors fit that plan. Larsen & Toubro is a large Indian engineering group whose businesses span grid transmission, heavy engineering, defence, infrastructure and data centres. Eviny works in renewable energy and energy infrastructure. Both are new backers. Industrial and energy investors of this kind can bring commercial relationships as well as cash, which a small hardware company needs as it scales up.

A company that nearly stopped in 2022

Jyrki Penttonen and Mika Marjalaakso founded Vensum in 2018, building on research from Aalto. In 2022 Penttonen, then co-founder and CEO, died suddenly, and the remaining team had to choose between closing the company and carrying on. Nisula joined as CEO that spring.

A year later Vensum raised a €3.8m seed round led by Lifeline Ventures, with Grid.vc, Harjavalta and Business Finland also taking part. Business Finland's share included a €1.7m R&D loan and €400,000 of deep-tech funding. That money went into pilots, product development and hiring engineers. The team was still small at the start of 2024, with 11 people according to an Aalto University profile at the time.

The Series A is more than twice the size of the seed, and Lifeline has come back for a second round. The next test is whether Vensum can turn its converters into certified, repeatable products and sign its first volume customers in EV charging and storage during 2027, before trying to win business from data-centre operators.