Factor

The nature of distributed energy is change. Weather shifts generation patterns. New technology changes how customers consume and produce energy. The market moves, and the products retailers have built need to move with it. For retailers pricing DER products, the ability to reforecast quickly is not a nice-to-have. It is what separates businesses that are keeping up from the ones getting ahead. A price built on assumptions that no longer reflect reality is a commercial risk sitting inside every contract on your book. The retailers who will lead in this space are the ones who can respond to change as it happens, not months later when the next contract renewal comes around. Factor was built for exactly this. Reforecasting at the speed the DER market demands, so your team is always working from an accurate picture and your products stay competitive as the market evolves. usefactor.com

Factor is built with the full capability required by the largest, most complex energy retailers in the world. The forecasting depth, the pricing flexibility, the ability to handle DER products at scale across multiple markets and customer types. But that same platform scales down. A smaller or challenger retailer that wants best-in-breed pricing and forecasting technology, without the cost and complexity that usually comes with it, gets access to exactly that. Most energy tech is priced and structured for one type of business. Factor was built to work across all of them, without stripping out capability at the lower end or pricing out the businesses that need it most. The tools the biggest retailers rely on, available to the retailers that are growing into that space. Want to see it for yourself? https://lnkd.in/e3nE2PaB usefactor.com

V1, V2, V2.11, V3.4 final... If you've ever priced a contract in a spreadsheet, you know exactly what that looks like. And you probably also know the feeling of opening one of those files a year later and having no idea how you got to the number you got to. It's not a people problem. It's a tooling problem. Spreadsheets weren't built for the complexity of modern energy pricing, and the workarounds that made them functional in a simpler market are starting to break down. Factor was built to replace that process entirely. The price, the scenario, the variable- tracked and auditable in a single platform.

Businesses with large sites have a role to play in the energy transition that is critical to everyone's success. On-site generation serves the business itself, can benefit the surrounding community, and reduces the infrastructure investment required to get energy to those areas. It's one of the more elegant solutions available, and it's sitting underutilised largely because businesses haven't had enough of a commercial reason to move. That's where retailers come in. The right product, priced in a way that reflects what on-site generation is genuinely worth to a business, changes the calculation. Retailers who can build those incentives into contracts are the ones who unlock that investment and accelerate the transition in a way that works for everyone. Building products that do that requires pricing capability sophisticated enough to handle the complexity. Let's show you how you could be doing this today with Factor. 🎥 https://lnkd.in/eQbm5wvF

This game is too high-stakes to be pricing your most important customers on spreadsheets or clunky software. As the energy world has grown more complex, the tools that once did the job have become less reliable: more prone to error, slower to deliver results, harder to trust. Modern pricing needs to run quickly, efficiently and accurately. That's what good SaaS looks like. If your pricing team is still building calculations by hand or relying on systems that were never designed for fast forecasting and pricing, let's talk.

UK home solar is about to stop being a niche tariff edge case. As more behind-the-meter generation comes into the market, the real challenge for retailers is not just settlement or billing. It is pricing. If a household can generate, export, store, join a community VPP, or take part in a small microgrid model, yesterday���s flat retail tariff starts to break down very quickly. This is the shift we think matters. Plug-in solar does not just change the household economics of energy. It opens the door to more community-led and distributed energy models, but only if retailers can price them fast enough to make them viable in the real world. That means being able to model complex contracts, forecast changing load behaviour, and test new tariff structures without sending teams back into spreadsheets or long implementation projects. If retailers want to enable and incentivise these products, they need pricing capability that works now, not after the market has already moved. At Factor, we built for exactly this kind of complexity. Retailers can price new energy contracts in minutes, which matters when the product mix is changing faster than traditional pricing infrastructure was designed to handle. The opportunity is bigger than solar panels on more roofs. It is the ability to support the next layer of distributed energy, from community VPP participation to small-scale microgrid models, with pricing that is commercially workable from day one. https://lnkd.in/eBQBSKDx

Are you making the most of every lead that comes through your door? When we talk to customers, we hear the same thing again and again: they're limited not by opportunity, but by their tools. Pricing and quoting take so long that they end up chasing only the top 10% of contracts and leaving the rest on the table. It's exciting to see how much more our customers get through when they switch to Factor. It's not just about doing more work. It's about freeing up your pricing team from manual processes so they have the capacity to work more strategically. There's no shortage of opportunity out there for retailers. What's missing are the tools to go after it. That's where we come in.

🔌 New Zealand’s startup scene loves a good success story, but few have moved as fast – or gone as deep – as Wellington energy software venture Factor. ⚡ In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I talk to Factor co‑founder Jessica Venning-Bryan‑Bryan about how she and co-founder Simon Pohlen assembled a team with serious domain expertise, built a specialised energy pricing platform, landed major customers offshore, and sold to NZX‑listed utility software company Gentrack Ltd (Global) in barely two years. 💡 The exit, announced in May, was valued at $24.9 million with a $10m earn-out tied to hitting $17m in annual recurring revenue within three years. Gentrack funded the acquisition out of its cash reserves. 🪫 Venning‑Bryan doesn’t sugar‑coat the journey. She talks candidly about the “fastest and longest” two years of her career – the tension between capital efficiency and ambition, the stress of fundraising, and the constant questioning of whether the team was moving fast enough or in the right direction. 🔦 If you’ve ever wondered what startup life really feels like beyond the glossy pitch decks, this conversation delivers the unvarnished reality. 🔘 Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Links in the comments BusinessDesk NZ

Storms. Heatwaves. Shifting geopolitics. Grid demand that moves faster than anyone predicted. None of it comes with much warning anymore, and energy retailers are the ones who have to absorb the shock in real time. We built Factor around that reality from day one. Almost a decade of building and running our own retail business taught us that resilience isn't a feature you add later, it's the foundation you build on. That means Factor is flexible by design, with new functions constantly added to help customers manage shifting conditions. It's also configurable, so if something is specific to a customer's business, their own team can build the solution inside Factor rather than waiting on us. Compare that to the old way - New condition, new spreadsheet, built from scratch, every time. With a real product underneath you, you're not starting over. You're just switching on functionality you haven't needed yet. 🎥 Watch the full conversation: https://lnkd.in/ekSDqeg9