ENIQO: Failing in Four Acts

As so often in life, the best opportunities come about by chance. In mid-2023, a shareholder of the newly founded ENIQO GmbH asked me whether I had the time and interest to support the project with my experience as Head of Product & Technology. ENIQO's goal, he said, was to bring compact battery storage into every household and let those households take full advantage of dynamic electricity tariffs.

The project was incredibly exciting and I learned a lot, but we failed spectacularly. And that failure was a play in several acts.

Act 1: Finding Our Way

When I joined ENIQO, there was already a well-established team of several shareholders who each brought something to the table: The software came from a software company, the idea and the hardware know-how from another shareholder, and two founders who had already pulled off an exit were supposed to take care of sales and marketing. Pretty soon, though, it turned out that nobody could take over product and project management, meaning someone who coordinates the software developers and keeps on top of the hardware at the same time. That's where I came in.

What convinced me most was the product itself, since I had already installed balcony solar panels at home and was using a small battery storage system. I noticed that in summer, with a bit of luck with the weather, you can be independent of the grid for several days, sometimes even weeks. Wouldn't it be handy if that were possible for every household with very low upfront costs? To this day, I believe that small battery storage systems can be a real benefit for any household if they're built right. That's why our idea was to make them modular and practical: either so they look sexy enough that you're happy to show them off, or so you can tuck them away in places where you'd hardly notice them.

On top of that, all electricity providers were to be legally required to offer dynamic tariffs from 2025. In theory, that would have meant that every tenant could benefit from dynamic electricity prices too, as long as the losses from converting AC to DC and back again weren't too high.

Act 2: Delusions of Grandeur

The mood in the team was euphoric, and there was a real sense of new beginnings. Renewable energy was booming in 2023, and Northvolt was about to build a huge battery factory in Schleswig-Holstein, so the willingness to support battery projects was noticeably higher. When we presented the product fairly early on at E-world in Essen, we also got really good feedback. It wasn't hard to develop slight delusions of grandeur. :)

On the technical side, though, we quickly ran into our first problem: At the time, there were no devices on the market that could read conventional electricity meters (so not smart meters) in real time and send the data to the battery, which is a prerequisite for zero feed-in. Before the battery storage could work at all, we had to change course and first develop our own reader, which we named Nancy. One of our inspirations was Tibber, who use their own hardware to read their customers' meters for their own tariff.

Nancy was supposed to clearly stand out from what was already on the market. Our goal was for people living in apartment buildings to be able to use dynamic tariffs too, which is still difficult in Germany today: Tenants often have no access to their own meter, or there are various meters in the basement. And if you live on the fourth floor, you usually don't have Wi-Fi down there either. So the original idea was to connect the meter via LTE and partner with municipal utilities.

Accordingly, Nancy turned out pretty big, partly because it contained a battery. Our hardware shareholder initially believed the device had to work offline, because there supposedly weren't any power outlets near electricity meters. The reality today looks different, though, since almost everyone has an outlet near their meter. Apart from that, given its size, the battery would only have lasted a few days before it needed replacing. A completely flawed concept.

On top of that, the reader could be attached via cable to meters further away. Everything was designed to be very extensive, and in the end, we simply over-engineered it instead of starting with the simplest product: We didn't go from easy to hard, we went the exact opposite way. Honestly, we also got far too tangled up in small details, and we started thinking way too early about how to increase the company's value and worked on patents instead of pushing the product forward.

Act 3: Finding Our Way Back

We realized fairly early on that it wasn't really working, because in my opinion the biggest problem was time: Hardly any of the shareholders were actually on board full-time. We dropped the weekly management meetings we'd set up to stay aligned after just a few months, and after that there was practically no direct coordination anymore. Instead, we communicated asynchronously and, unfortunately, often past each other.

Just a few weeks after the start, we also parted ways with one of the shareholders. The reason was a fundamentally different idea of what ENIQO was supposed to be: He saw us as a hardware company that makes money with its devices. All the other shareholders, on the other hand, saw us as a software company, for which the hardware is just a means to an end so our software can be used everywhere. We wouldn't make money with the hardware itself anyway, it would be too expensive for that. In the medium term, the money was supposed to come from software subscriptions and partnerships, for example with municipal utilities. It fit the picture that he wanted to build a purely offline device, while we were betting on a cloud solution that can be controlled centrally. The cloud turned out to be the right decision in the end, but the discussion about it cost us far too much time and energy.

Software development also took much longer than expected. One reason was that the electricity meters sometimes differed a lot: Some used different protocols, others had hardware defects or were special in some other way. This was also before the age of AI, so we had to figure out many techniques ourselves, and instead of building our own team, we relied on external software developers.

Only later did Nancy turn into Nancy Lite, which we built without a battery and which could be placed directly onto the electricity meter. That was exactly the lightweight version we should have started with from the beginning, but it came far too late: By then, we had already spent a lot of money on the software and hardware development of the heavy version.

Act 4: Reality

Despite everything, we wanted to see it through and decided to go to market with a prototype. We had prototypes and packaging, and actually everything was ready for the release in August 2024. That turned into October, then November, and by then at the latest everything fell apart, because the money had run out.

During this phase, we made one last attempt and wanted to turn ENIQO into a community product: With local energy trading, you could have bought electricity from your neighbor, for example. That would have required legal changes, though, and in Germany you can't count on those happening quickly. In fact, so-called energy sharing has only been possible since June 2026, almost two years after ENIQO came to an end.

At 95 percent completion of the reader, it was over, and we were even further away with the batteries. In the end, we simply ran out of money, and another investment round never came together. On top of that, the team didn't gel, there were too many internal problems, and we had relied on market developments that didn't come at the speed we'd hoped for.

Ironically, time would have caught up with us either way: Three years later, these meter add-ons cost just a few euros, and batteries can be sourced cheaply from Asia. So our business model wouldn't have been sustainable in this form anyway.

Looking back, we should have gone for a bigger investment round first before diving into patents, because the burn rate was simply far too high. And we should have filled the key positions with our own people instead of relying on external developers.

One insight only came afterwards, when I had AI rewrite the entire firmware of one of our devices over a weekend. What we spent a lot of money on back then, an AI now handles almost autonomously in just a few days. That's one of the reasons I trust AI so much and approach projects completely differently today. What that looks like at Peuka is in Not a Single Line of Code by Hand.