Utrecht-based startup Zympler raises €1.5 million for energy management platform

Zympler, a Utrecht-based startup that connects and manages energy systems at businesses, closed a seed round of €1.5 million on 5 September 2025. The company, founded in 2023 by Tom Selten, Jorrit Salverda and Reinout de Jongh, previously operated under the name Simpl.energy.

The funding round was led by Arches Capital. ROM Utrecht Region participated through its Startup Innovatie Fonds, which is partly financed by the Province of Utrecht and the European Fund for Regional Development. Zympler currently employs between eleven and fifty people and is active at more than twenty locations in the Netherlands, including at R. Nagel Transport and on the campus of Eindhoven University of Technology.

With the capital raised, Zympler intends to further develop its platform, grow its user base and establish strategic partnerships with energy suppliers and installers. The company aims to be operational at one hundred locations by the end of 2026.

What the platform does

Zympler targets businesses that run multiple energy systems in parallel: solar panels, batteries and charging stations for electric vehicles. The software connects those systems and controls them based on current and forecast conditions. For example, the system charges a battery when electricity rates are low, and activates charging stations as soon as the company's own solar panels generate sufficient power.

Zympler describes this itself as a digital Chief Energy Officer for businesses. The software predicts consumption, reduces energy costs and helps address grid congestion, a problem affecting a growing number of companies as demand for grid capacity is rising faster than available infrastructure.

The target market consists of companies in transport, logistics, real estate and the installation sector. These are sectors where electricity consumption is rising rapidly due to the growth of electric mobility and the shift to electric processes, while grid connectivity represents a bottleneck.

Investors and public co-financing

Arches Capital acted as lead investor in the round. Alongside this private party, ROM Utrecht Region participated, the regional development agency that makes early-stage investments in companies in Utrecht and the Utrecht region through the Startup Innovatie Fonds. That fund is co-financed by the Province of Utrecht and the ERDF, the European structural fund for regional development.

The combination of a private lead investor and public co-financing through a regional fund is a common pattern in seed rounds for Dutch deeptech and cleantech startups. ROM funds often serve as a catalyst for private capital flows into early-stage companies in their region.

Grid congestion as context

The timing of this round coincides with a widely recognised problem in the Dutch energy market. Grid operators such as Liander and Stedin have been reporting for several years that waiting times for new or expanded grid connections for business customers are increasing, sometimes to several years. Companies with high energy demand, such as transport and logistics firms with charging infrastructure, are looking for ways to operate within available grid capacity.

Software platforms that actively manage consumption from own generation and storage offer a way to reduce peak load on the grid without being directly dependent on a heavier grid connection. Zympler is positioning itself in that segment, alongside a growing number of other Dutch and European energy management software providers.

For the Dutch startup scene, Zympler's round illustrates that early-stage financing in the energy transition software space remains available, even for companies less than two years old. The participation of both a specialised private investor and a regional ROM confirms a pattern that is frequently visible in the Utrecht ecosystem, where public-private collaboration in seed rounds in sustainability sectors is a recurring feature.