The Efficient Energy chiller is said to be more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than that of the competition. A failed round of financing is now endangering the company.
Even big names don’t protect you from possible bankruptcy: Efficient Energy, in which the well-known Biontech founding investor MIG Capital invested, has filed for bankruptcy. At the beginning of June, the district court in Munich appointed the lawyer Matthias Hofmann from the law firm Pohlmann Hofmann as provisional insolvency administrator.
As the FAZ reports, the impending insolvency is due to a failed round of financing in the targeted amount of 20 million euros. The start-up held talks with a strategic investor until May, but these then failed, according to Efficient Energy CEO Georg Dietrich. The existing investors such as MIG Capital or the Hexal founders were not willing to contribute the money alone.
Dietrich joined the company as CEO in 2018, twelve years after it was founded. Before that, the two founders, Oliver Kniffler and Holger Sidlak, worked on the company’s product: the eChiller chiller. The company has since secured 200 patents.
eChiller does not use harmful F-gases but water
In contrast to the competition, the company’s refrigeration machine does not use F-gas as a refrigerant, but water. F-gas is short for “fluorinated greenhouse gases”, which do exactly that: increase the greenhouse effect on our planet, i.e. accelerate climate change. Water, on the other hand, is not harmful to the climate on the one hand and cheap, non-flammable or toxic on the other. In addition, the eChiller machine should consume less electricity than the competition and achieve savings of up to 80 percent.
The start-up was able to win major customers such as Siemens or the German Aerospace Center, which can use the machine to cool servers, buildings or production processes. According to its own statements, the company has commissioned more than 170 systems for customers.
So far, new EU legislation has played into the hands of the startup, according to which F-gases are to disappear from refrigeration technology. The quotas are to be reduced by 80 percent by 2030.
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New investor or buyer wanted
100 people currently work for the company from Feldkirchen near Munich. According to the company, your salary should be secured through the insolvency money up to and including August of this year.
Efficient Energy is now looking for new investors or a buyer. “We have a technology that has already proven itself on the market and full order books,” advertises CEO Georg Dietrich in the official insolvency report. The company also communicates that the customers are showing solidarity with the company and have not yet canceled the orders despite insolvency.
When asked by the start-up scene, Efficient Energy said that there should already be people interested in an investment or a purchase.
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