Novele has closed a $17 million Series A round to scale its AI-powered energy management and distributed energy storage platform for commercial buildings, the New York City-based company announced.

The financing round was led by boisei labs, with participation from Locke Health, Arup Ventures — the venture investment arm of global environment consulting firm Arup — Barton Malow, and several major commercial real estate owners and operators who also put capital into the deal.

Founded in 2021, Novele builds energy management and distributed energy storage systems that let commercial buildings predict, reshape and optimize their power consumption in real time. The platform pairs two product lines:

• BoardOS, an AI-powered intelligence and autonomous operating layer;
• EnergyBoard, distributed energy storage hardware that allows a building to function as a grid asset and a distributed energy resource.

A third product, RippleBoard, extends the platform to data centers — a segment the company flags as a key driver of accelerating electricity demand.

What does the capital buy?

Novele said it will deploy the new funding across three tracks: scaling installations across its active pipeline, supporting the development and training of BoardOS, and expanding its workforce.

The company did not disclose the size of its installation pipeline, current deployed storage capacity, or a target headcount figure.

The round lands as electricity demand in the U.S. climbs under the weight of AI infrastructure, data centers and advanced manufacturing — loads arriving on a grid that can take years to expand. Novele's pitch is that new capacity can instead be drawn from commercial buildings already connected to it.

Charles Conwell, CEO and co-founder of Novele, said: "Commercial buildings are among the largest consumers of energy in this country, yet most have remarkably little ability to understand, predict, or control how they use power. As electricity demand accelerates, the grid needs flexibility, and there is an enormous amount of it hiding inside the buildings we already have. Novele gives owners the intelligence and control to unlock it while improving cost, resilience, sustainability, and the tenant experience."

Why did investors move?

The syndicate mixes a venture lead with strategic capital from the built environment: a construction firm in Barton Malow, an engineering consultancy's investment arm in Arup Ventures, and unnamed commercial real estate owners and operators — in effect, a slice of the customer base underwriting the rollout.

George Perry, President and Founder at Boisei Labs, said: "Building owners have a clear economic and operational reason to adopt the platform—lower costs, greater resilience, and more intelligent control of their energy, while every deployment also creates a more flexible and efficient electric grid. The striking alignment across customer value, technological innovation, and broader societal benefit is what made Novele such a strongly compelling investment for us."

What happens next?

The metric to watch is conversion: how much of Novele's undisclosed active pipeline turns into commissioned EnergyBoard installations and contracted distributed energy resource capacity over the next 12 to 24 months, and whether the Series A syndicate's real estate participants become anchor customers at scale.