Thread by @reganbozman

Today @daylightenergy_ is announcing their $9M Series A led by a16z

Even more excitingly they are finally sharing more about the next gen distributed energy platform they've been building for the last two years

1/ Some more on our thesis and why we're so excited

2/ Testnet of the Daylight protocol is now live - you can start earning rewards by connecting a distributed energy device to their mobile app

godaylight.com

3/ We met the Daylight team (a few rebrands ago 😆 ) in 2022 when they wanted to build token incentivized VPP's (virtual power plants)

@MikeZajko had started to get excited about DePIN and energy is arguably the largest physical network you can tackle

From our original memo:

4/ We co-led a seed round and the team got to work

Mike should get all the credit on our side but he is at the beach this week and has limited Twitter clout, so I get to post on his behalf :)

theblock.co/post/187115/an…

5/ The vision that Daylight is sharing publicly today is even more ambitious than the one we originally backed

They want to build the onchain economic system that incentivizes and rewards the growth of distributed energy and electrification

6/ Energy is going through a transformational shift as it decarbonizes. But the grid is increasingly unreliable:

-Electricity from renewables is intermittent
-Hangover from decades of under-investment in energy infra
-Increased demand but not enough new transmission

7/ The traditional electricity model is building huge new power plants and new transmission lines

Permitting times for plants take years and transmission can take even longer to build

8/ Luckily there is an alternative - decentralizing the grid. Think co-locating a data center with the solar that powers it.

By investing in distributed energy resources, we push energy generation to the edges.

This alleviates capacity issues without a ton of capex

9/ Grid decentralization presents a problem of externalities

Distributed energy resources are only valuable at scale; but they require individual decisions

Electricity is also not regulated nationally - there are 3K+ electric utilities in the US with 0 incentive to share data

10/ Daylight is an insanely ambitious solution to build a unified distributed energy connectivity layer

They want to enable all relevant stakeholders - energy retailers, VPP aggregators, asset developers, and applications – to integrate distributed energy resources at scale

11/ The protocol is a marketplace for distributed energy capacity and energy data.

It incentivizes users for providing energy capacity to the network

Users can connect energy devices like thermostats, batteries, EV's, energy meters and start collecting real-time energy data

12/ Despite operating in crypto since 2022, you probably haven't heard of Daylight

And this is because they took the hard road and actually validated demand for their marketplace first

They're just now getting around to the supply side

13/ The team has been building out the Daylight Marketplace, which connects homeowners with energy upgrades - solar, batteries, insulation

The Daylight Marketplace is the first application on the Protocol

They're actively working with energy companies serving 10,000s of homes

14/ Huge respect to Jason and the team for what they've built - we know they're just getting started

We will be rooting for them

Except this October when A&M takes on LSU. Gig 'Em 🤠