Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) said its 1GT climate private equity strategy led a €49 million Series E funding round for Amber Electric, an Australian energy technology company that automates household batteries and electric vehicles to take advantage of real-time wholesale electricity prices.
The round included participation from E.ON, whose UK retail subsidiary, E.ON Next, has already integrated Amber’s technology into a live product. No company valuation was disclosed.
Amber Electric, founded in Melbourne in 2017, operates as an electricity retailer that gives customers direct access to wholesale power prices rather than the fixed or tiered rates offered by conventional utilities. The company says it holds more than 50% of Australia’s automated home-battery market, making it the country’s largest battery automation provider by that measure.
Amber’s core product, SmartShift, is an AI-driven optimization platform that combines real-time and forecast wholesale electricity prices with household solar-generation and consumption forecasts to automatically charge, discharge or export power from batteries and EVs at the times most likely to maximize customer savings or earnings.
The funding will support Amber’s expansion into Europe, building on the E.ON Next partnership, which launched a smart tariff called Next Optimise in March 2026 using Amber’s technology to automate solar-and-battery households on a wholesale-price-linked plan.
“We believe Amber will play a consequential role in enabling the energy transition in Australia, Europe and beyond,” said Vikram Raju, head of climate private equity investing at MSIM and 1GT. “As power systems become increasingly decentralized, energy flexibility and household-level engagement are essential to integrating renewable energy at scale. The combination of Amber’s differentiated technology, strong customer value proposition and relentless focus on innovation and excellence has set the Company on a compelling growth journey.”
Amber Electric Co-CEO Chris Thompson said the investment gives the company the backing to extend its position from Australia into new markets. He framed the opportunity in terms of helping utilities unlock flexibility from distributed energy resources at scale while letting households capture more value from the batteries and EVs they already own, and said 1GT is the right partner to accelerate that expansion across Europe.
The Amber investment adds to 1GT’s existing exposure to grid-edge storage and flexibility technologies; the strategy’s portfolio also includes Corvus Energy, a marine battery storage manufacturer. 1GT invests across the power, mobility, food and agriculture, and circularity themes.
Amber’s expansion positions it alongside a growing field of European home-battery automation and flexibility platforms, including Sweden’s Tibber, Germany’s Next Kraftwerke and Senec, and Octopus Energy’s Kraken platform in the United Kingdom, which has struck integration deals with inverter and battery makers including GoodWe and AlphaESS. Amber’s model combines electricity retailing with automated wholesale-price optimization, distinguishing it from aggregators that operate purely on top of customers’ existing retail contracts.
E.ON’s own household-flexibility push extends beyond the Amber tie-up: its Delta Green venture has offered UK households payments for grid flexibility through a separate scheme. The Amber round also lands amid a wider consolidation of household-storage aggregation in Europe, following moves such as Enpal and Entrix’s plan for what they called Europe’s largest virtual power plant.
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