He Sold the Round Before He Opened It: How Podero Staged a €5.5M Oversubscribed Seed
Three months of staged news, no-pitch coffees, and a round run like a sales pipeline. The full playbook.
Most founders open a round and then go looking for momentum. Chris Bernkopf built the momentum first, and only then let anyone know he was raising.
By the time Podero, his Vienna energy-software company, opened formal conversations, the signals were already in the market. Partnership news, customer collaborations and a steady drip of progress had been landing for weeks. The investors he wanted to talk to had already met him, over coffees with no ask attached. So when the round opened, the first “fundraising” call was really the second or third conversation, and nobody was hearing the story cold.
The result was an oversubscribed €5.5M seed, led by Planet A Ventures, with Systemiq Capital joining and both pre-seed investors, Pale Blue Dot and Push Ventures, doubling down. Bernkopf has since described the active phase of the raise as taking days, not months, with multiple term sheets arriving inside a single week once the first one was out. He picked the best fit rather than the biggest number.
This is not a story about a hot deck or a lucky warm intro. It is a story about choreography, run by a founder who treats fundraising as a process to be engineered rather than an event to be survived. That is what makes it worth copying.
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The Founder and the Company
Bernkopf is a lifelong builder, and the path is unusually varied even by founder standards.
As a teenager he saved up and trained as a glider pilot, which cost him under €2,000 and taught him early that taking on real responsibility is enriching rather than frightening. He read The 4-Hour Work Week at 18, decided the maths of founding looked better than the maths of a job, and started a t-shirt brand doing merchandise for sports clubs. An ed-tech company followed. Then came Alpas, a procurement search engine that went through Y Combinator and counted the kind of industrial names, BASF, ABB, SBB, that do not buy from startups casually.
The detail that tells you most about him: his master’s thesis was done at CERN. He got in not through an academic track but by cold-asking. A colleague he shared a small Vienna office with had spent a summer there and met a professor, and Bernkopf, in his words still “in my t-shirt selling sales mode,” simply asked the professor for a meeting. He is candid that he never went as deep into the CERN community as the PhDs did. The startup world pulled harder, because, as he puts it, in companies “it is easier to win together.”
He landed on climate because it “felt like the thing I could be doing for 20 or 30 years without ever regretting it.” Podero is the result.
His co-founder, Moritz Schrader, is the hardware counterweight: a trained electrician turned mechatronics engineer, formerly at Continental, where he holds IoT-in-vehicle patents, and at Volkswagen’s CARIAD software unit, where he shipped autonomous-driving software across millions of cars. The pairing matters. A software-and-sales serial founder beside a deep hardware-and-firmware operator is exactly the profile investors trust to sit between utilities and physical devices in millions of homes.
Even the name is a small lesson in resourcefulness. Schrader wanted a six-letter word with an available .com. They went hunting for one by scrolling Greek and Mediterranean town names on Google Maps, and somewhere in that process landed on Podero, close to “poder,” power.
What Podero Actually Does
Strip away the jargon and the product is simple to state. Podero is software for utilities that lets a household connect its devices, a heat pump, a home battery, an EV charger, an inverter, and then steers those devices so the end customer saves roughly 25% on energy. In the background, Podero aggregates the whole fleet of connected homes and trades that flexibility on the power markets: day-ahead, intraday in 15-minute blocks, and the balancing markets where the grid operator pays for second-by-second stability.
The company sells to the utility, not the homeowner. Utilities start on Podero’s white-label app, then usually move to integrating it through an API, because, as Bernkopf explains, the customer interface and the billing should be owned by one company, the utility. He frames Podero as first-level support for the utility and second-level support for the utility’s end users. It is the intelligence layer inside the energy bill, not another consumer brand fighting for the customer relationship.
The buy-versus-build question answers itself in the field. Bernkopf says he has not seen a clean in-house build from the incumbents. Even the most advanced players build only parts and buy the rest. Utilities want to keep the customer relationship and the trading desk; the steering-and-optimisation engine is exactly the piece they would rather not rebuild from scratch.
By the time it raised, Podero was live in six countries, reporting 99.98% platform uptime and more than 50 device-manufacturer integrations, with E.ON and TotalEnergies among its named utility customers.
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The Raise
When the round opened in early 2025, Podero was not selling a promise. It was offering allocation in something that already worked.
Bernkopf had a clear shape in mind for the cap table, and he got it: two climate-focused VCs and two energy-focused VCs, “the best of both worlds.” Planet A led, bringing the climate-platform support; Systemiq Capital came in from London with deep electricity-market expertise. The two investors from the pre-seed, Pale Blue Dot and Push Ventures, re-upped. That continuity, existing backers putting in more, is the single cleanest conviction signal a new lead can see, and Bernkopf treated it as such.
What he optimised for above everything was not the fund logo. “It is good to have a great fund name,” he says, “but you really care about the person behind the fund that you are working with.” With multiple options converging in the same week, the deciding variable was the partner he would actually sit across from for the next several years, not the brand on the term sheet.
His one honest caveat is the line that keeps the whole method credible: the staging compresses the timeline, but it does not compensate for a weak company. And he is unsentimental about what closing actually means. Raising, in his framing, is registering for the marathon, not finishing it. The week after the wire lands, you are back to the only two jobs that matter, selling and building.
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The Playbook
Here is the part you can actually copy. Bernkopf ran a repeatable system, six moves, and unlike almost every other oversubscribed-round story, he has been willing to describe the mechanics. The headlines:
1. Stage three months of momentum before you open the round.
2. Pre-meet every target investor with no-pitch coffees.
3. Run the round like a B2B sales pipeline.
4. Pick the person, not the fund’s logo.
5. Build a barbell cap table and bank the insider re-up.
6. Treat the close as the start line, not the finish.
The full step-by-step breakdown of each move, the exact news-staging calendar, what to say in a no-pitch coffee, the pipeline stages and how to force a clean decision window, the syndicate-design template, and the one-page checklist you can run on your own raise, is below for paid subscribers.