Exnaton: The Venture Leader Cleantech building software for renewable energy providers

12.10.2022 09:00, Tracy Woodley

The Swiss National Startup Team welcomes new members: A jury selected 10 startups for the Venture Leaders program dedicated to the cleantech sector. During their roadshow, the Venture Leaders Cleantech will meet international investors and industry leaders and access industry-specific expertise and networks to grow their companies. Allow us to introduce you to each of the Venture Leaders Cleantech 2022 ahead of the October 2022 roadshow in Munich: Meet Anselma Wörner, the co-founder and COO of Exnaton.

Name: Anselma Wörner        
Location: Zurich
Nationality: German
Graduated from: Ph.D. from ETH Zurich in 2020
Job title: Co-Founder & COO
Number of employees: 15
First touchpoint with Venturelab: Venture Kick in 2020

Explain in one or two short sentences what your startup does and why: We build software for energy providers to enable them to offer new products around renewables to their end customers. With our software, energy providers can set up energy communities in which households can share renewable energy from local assets like solar panels, biomass plants, or storage systems and pay dynamic real-time prices depending on whether renewable energy is available. 

How and where did you come up with the idea for your startup?
Arne, Liliane, and I worked on this topic during our Ph.D. research and we felt like there was huge potential in providing software for energy providers to push forward the integration of renewable energy sources.
 
What do you expect from the Venture Leaders roadshow, and how will it help you achieve your vision?
I am looking forward to connecting with other climate tech startups, as I am sure we share similar questions and problems. In addition, we are currently expanding into other European countries, so it will be great to expand our international network in the industry. 
 
Who does your product or solution help, and how?
Our software helps utility companies to offer new products around renewable energy, for instance, energy sharing models or dynamic tariffs. With the increasing share of renewables in the energy supply mix, existing tariff structures are largely outdated, and wholesale market prices are becoming more and more volatile. With our solution, utilities are getting themselves futures-proof for a sustainable, decentralized energy market.
 
What are you most excited about at work right now?
I am most excited about bringing our solution to more and more users and about expanding our footprint into other European markets, to help mitigate the energy crisis which is currently going on. It is very motivating to work on such a relevant and exciting topic
 
How did you build your team?
The three co-founders, Arne, Liliane, and I, have been working together for years during their PhDs and so we already knew each other very well when we started the company. From then on, we started hiring our first team members step by step, first mostly in the technical team, and by now also on the business/sales side. We have grown into an amazing team who shares the vision of using technology for something impactful and who helps us build a scalable and sustainable business. 
 
Which market are you addressing and what is the potential of your startup?
We are currently selling our software to medium to large energy providers (also ‘utility company’) in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and Luxembourg. 

Our customers use our software to create new products for their residential end-customers, i.e. households and small businesses. The residential energy market in Europe is huge as every single household consumes energy and will need to move to renewables in the next years. That is why we see huge growth potential for our software in the European countries and plan on expanding country by country into new markets. 
 
What are your key achievements to date? 
We already work with 15 utility companies across four European countries and have converted our first customers to a recurring SaaS subscription with multi-year contracts. We are already an official SAP partner and offer our software as an add-on for SAP for utilities. We are on track to become the dominant provider of energy-sharing solutions in Europe. Besides these achievements, we have won numerous startup awards and raised our first financing round last year with Global Founders Capital as a lead investor. 

What is one thing not many people know about you?
I am a Formula 1 fan (guilty pleasure…).

What is your favorite podcast and why?
I like some of the podcasts by Die Zeit, like “Was jetzt?”, “Alles gesagt” and “Servus, Grüezi, Hallo.”

What is your favorite book?? 
Probably Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
 
How did you come up with the name of your startup? 
Echnaton was an Egyptian pharaoh that put the sun above all gods which we thought fit with our focus on solar energy. As we were implementing a local exchange, we replaced the CH with an X and came up with Exnaton. 

Who inspires you and why?  
My amazing colleagues inspire me every day. Among us founders, it has always been the case that, when one of us is down, one of the others pushes us up again and I am very grateful for this. 

Which startup do you wish you had founded and why? 
I guess Tesla as they are a trailblazer for the energy and mobility industry, although I wouldn’t like to copy Musk’s personality (which probably goes hand in hand though…)

What is the most challenging aspect of being a founder?
Responsibilities are manifold, so keeping all balls up in the air at the same time without losing sight of the long-term vision can be really challenging. 

What is the most rewarding aspect of being a founder?
Seeing rough ideas that you had with your two colleagues at a tiny university desk grow into real products that are out in the world and a small team that we started growing into a real company simply feels amazing. 

What is something you wish you had known about being a founder?
I guess it surprised me (or even still does) how much administrative work and managerial tasks you do as a founder of a new and growing company. 

What is the most important lesson you have learned as a founder?
With all of the admin and operational stuff, it is easy to get lost in the daily business rather than focusing on important strategic decisions and vision. So, as founders, we consciously have to take time to recenter on this and to zoom out to look at the bigger picture. 

What is the best advice you have ever received and from whom?  
It’s hard to pick a single “best” one, but one of the less standard ones is a statement that a great coach in a leadership workshop once explained. She stated that people don’t just always behave the way they just are in their personality, but that people usually “behave in situations”. 

When you try to really understand the situation someone is in (which is usually easier than foolishly trying to analyze someone’s personality), you often find you understand their behavior a lot better and you might be able to deal with them a lot more constructively. I feel like this approach helps me in managing people and building up a growing and diverse team.  

What is your greatest professional failure, and what did you learn from it?
I believe we presented our ideas way too technical in the first stage of our startup, sometimes probably embarrassingly. We definitely had to take a few good steps away from the way you present ideas in the scientific community and this tendency to point out the detail might still be one of our weaknesses, as all three of us founders have a scientific and rather technical background. 

How do you stay on top of industry trends? 
I spend quite a lot of time reading the news and listening to podcasts and I have Google Alerts for many topics. 

How do you foster creative thinking among your team members? 
We try to consciously take breaks during the workdays together with the whole team and encourage the team to participate in learning events or conferences to get nudges to think outside the box. 

Who do you look to for guidance and mentorship? 
We are privileged to work with a lot of great mentors from Innosuisse, on our board, and with some of our stakeholders who I turn to for advice. 
 
Venture Leaders Cleantech is organized by Venturelab and supported by Alpian, AMAG, EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich, EY, Helbling Technik, Romande Energie, Canton Vaud, and VISCHER and Venture Leaders alum Patrick Maillard.