Green Voltis gets €13.5m from CATL-linked Lochpine to trade batteries and power Nordic data centres

Green Voltis, a Stockholm company that uses software to operate and trade battery storage on European power markets, has raised €13.5m in a Series A. Lochpine Capital, a dollar fund set up with backing from Chinese battery maker CATL, is the only investor. The round gives a two-year-old company a well-funded backer from the hardware side of the storage business, and it is also a bet that battery trading know-how can be turned towards the power problems of AI data centres.

The company says it now has more than 1.2 GWh of storage capacity either under contract or already running. It has market access live or being set up in 10 European countries.

Where the €13.5m goes

The money will be split three ways. One part goes to research on its two products: Aether, an AI agent that forecasts electricity prices and places trades, and Chronos, the energy management system that controls equipment at battery sites. A second part pays for growth in what it calls key European markets, which it did not name. The third funds a new line of business it calls Power-to-Compute.

That last item is the newest. The company has lined up around 120 MW of land in the Nordics that already has, or can get, a grid connection, and wants to build data centre sites on it with compute operators. The founder has been clear about what the figure means. In an interview he said the 120 MW is land and connection capacity held in reserve, not finished or running data centres. Turning it into projects that deliver computing power is the next job.

The logic rests on grid queues. According to the company, a data centre waiting to connect in hubs such as Frankfurt, Amsterdam or Dublin can face delays of seven to ten years. A site that can cut its load when the grid is under strain may get power sooner, and that kind of flexible control is what Green Voltis already sells to battery owners.

“The next wave of demand comes from AI,” said Martin Kievit, CEO and co-founder.

Licences, stacking and a benchmark

The core business is a full-service offer for standalone battery projects and for batteries installed alongside wind or solar. A local engineering team handles grid connection, commissioning and the tests a site must pass before it can sell balancing services. After that, Chronos runs the site, including grid-forming operation, and Aether trades its output.

The company says it holds its own licences to act as a balancing responsible party, a balancing service provider and an electricity retailer, rather than trading through someone else's. According to the founder, few young virtual power plant firms in the Nordics do this, and he said only two such companies in Sweden hold the balancing responsible party licence.

Its trading method is what it calls revenue and capacity stacking. Instead of committing a battery to one market in each time slot, the system splits power and capacity across several at once, such as day-ahead, intraday and frequency services, while meeting each product's delivery rules. The company built Chronos itself partly because the local energy management products it found could not combine those power curves.

On results, Green Voltis says the assets it manages have consistently earned more than Clean Horizon's index, an outside yardstick for what storage sites earn. It says the industry average over the same period sat at about 75% of that index. These figures come from the company and have not been checked independently.

Kievit framed the case around a grid that gets harder to run as more renewables come online. In his words, “flexibility now sets the pace of the energy transition.” Speaking for the investor, Lochpine partner Blake Niu, who runs its private equity team, made a similar point, saying grid connection and power trading “are among the scarcest capabilities in Europe’s energy transition.”

Why a CATL-backed fund

The investor matters for more than the cheque. In the founder's telling, Europe's storage market is shifting from selling equipment towards selling a complete service that also covers engineering, maintenance and trading. Many integrators find it hard to build trading desks of their own in Europe, so pairing with a specialist is one way to fill the gap. He described the tie-up as complementary: CATL brings industrial resources, customers and a project pipeline, and Green Voltis brings forecasting, trading and asset operation.

Kievit, Ali Shi and Gino Zhang are named as co-founders in recent reports, which date the company's start to 2024. The founder interviewed about the Lochpine deal, Yao Hong Shi, spent 16 years at Huawei and rose to vice president before leaving in 2023. The company has not said whether he and Ali Shi are the same person. The wider team includes people from Huawei, Ericsson and T-Mobile alongside power specialists from Rolls-Royce, Brady and Varberg Energi.

This is not the company's first outside money. It reported a $10m angel round in July 2024 from Cyber Creation Ventures, Planetree Investment and Unity Ventures. In September 2025 it followed with a strategic round of undisclosed size led by DeepMind Capital, around the time it showed Aether and an investor modelling tool called Terra AI at a McKinsey summit.

The founder argues that many larger players still trade with rule-based software, which leaves room for an AI-first approach. The data centre plan is less proven. It depends on compute partners the company has not named, and the test for the 120 MW is whether one of them commits to build.