Legal & General Capital and Systemiq have announced an investment in Upside Energy, a Manchester-based company that has developed a cloud platform that uses advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence to co-ordinate connected devices to deliver flexibility services to the energy system.  

Upside’s software platform will allow customers to save on their energy costs or earn revenue by changing their demand curve to solve imbalances for the grid.  This could include many of Legal & General’s own property-backed businesses.

The Upside cloud platform is in its commercialisation and scale-up stage, and is being rolled out to the wider market.

Systemiq and Legal & General Capital have invested alongside Modern Energy, a North Carolina-based energy asset management firm, Bulldog Innovation Group, a Yale-affinity early stage venture capital firm and a group of individual investors. 

Jeremy Oppenheim, founding partner of Systemiq, said: “Advanced demand-side response systems such as Upside’s can enable a much faster and more substantial transition to a renewables-based grid by utilising smaller assets in flexibility provision, and smoothing the market by allowing faster response times and inter-utility provider (and consumer/asset owner) trading.”