In the race to balance a grid increasingly powered by intermittent wind and sun, most bets are on lithium. Shuffle Energy, a Cambridge software company incorporated just last May, is quietly placing a different wager. Its bet is that the most scalable, untapped battery in Europe is already installed in millions of homes, quietly holding hot water [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF].
The company’s cloud platform connects heat pumps and hot water tanks to energy markets, offering manufacturers and installers a way to monetize the thermal storage they’ve already sold. Instead of asking these hardware companies to build their own energy trading and control stacks, Shuffle provides the backend infrastructure for a share of the revenue [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. It’s a classic software wedge: turn a cost center,customer support for smart devices,into a new, high-margin income line.
The thermal flexibility wedge
Shuffle’s premise rests on a simple, physical truth. A hot water tank is a battery. It stores energy as heat, which can be charged (by an electric heating element or a heat pump) when power is cheap and plentiful, and discharged (by drawing a shower) hours later. Aggregating thousands of these tanks creates a virtual power plant that can shift megawatt-hours of demand. The company’s software identifies market opportunities, aggregates connected assets, and sends signals to switch them on or off via controller APIs [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF].
For a heat pump manufacturer, this is a potentially elegant solution to a commercial problem. Selling a smart, connected device is one thing. Deriving ongoing value from that connection is another, often requiring expertise in grid codes, market bidding, and real-time control that sits far outside a traditional appliance maker’s core competency. Shuffle’s revenue-share model proposes to handle all of that, turning a complex regulatory and technical challenge into a passive income stream.
The team and the early capital
The founding trio,CEO Simanand Gandhi Jeyaraj, CCO Andrew Jordon, and CTO Rob Boland,steered the company through its incorporation in May 2024 and a subsequent rebrand from Komodo Energy [Companies House, May 2024]. Public profiles show Jeyaraj as a Chartered Engineer, but the collective record on prior commercial exits in energy markets is light. The more notable governance move came this year with the appointment of Jordan Brompton, co-founder of myenergi, as a non-executive director [Shuffle Energy]. Bringing in an executive from a successful adjacent hardware company suggests a deliberate focus on the manufacturer sales channel.
To build the platform, the team raised a $425,700 pre-seed round in February 2025, backed by a consortium of climate and tech investors including SFC Capital and One Planet Capital [third-party funding database, February 2025]. The round is modest, even for a UK pre-seed, which implies a focus on capital efficiency and a near-term need to demonstrate tangible utility partnerships or manufacturer integrations.
| Founder | Role | Notable Background Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Simanand Gandhi Jeyaraj | Co-founder & CEO | Chartered Engineer [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] |
| Andrew Jordon | Co-founder & CCO | Spoke at #21toWatch awards [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] |
| Rob Boland | Co-founder & CTO | Listed as CTO on company profiles [F6S, May 2024] |
| Jordan Brompton | Non-Executive Director | Co-founder experience from myenergi [Shuffle Energy] |
The path to proving the model
With the platform defined and initial capital in hand, Shuffle’s next twelve months are about moving from concept to contracted flexibility. The company has listed itself as a “pioneering thermal energy flexibility platform” with UK100, a network of local government leaders, and participated in an Innovate UK FutureBuild Connects event in January 2026 [UK100, September 2026] [Innovate UK FutureBuild Connects, January 2026]. These are ecosystem signals, not commercial traction.
The real milestones to watch for are unannounced. They will be the signature of a first heat pump manufacturer onto the platform, or a pilot agreement with a flexibility aggregator or grid operator. A single, named partnership would transform the narrative from a clever idea to a viable route to market. The company’s recent job listing for a Senior Software Engineer also hints at the build phase accelerating [Shuffle Energy].
Where the calculus gets tricky
The ambition is clear, but the unit economics of thermal flexibility are notoriously hard to master. The value of shifting a kilowatt-hour of hot water heating depends entirely on the spread between high and low power prices in a given market, which can be volatile. Furthermore, you are asking software to manage hardware in people’s homes, where customer comfort is non-negotiable. A platform that saves a few pounds a year but leads to a single cold shower will be uninstalled immediately.
The competitive landscape is also opaque. Shuffle isn’t competing with a direct, named startup clone. Its competition is inertia, and the in-house development teams at large appliance makers or established energy majors who might decide to build this capability themselves. The company’s answer to that risk is its core proposition: the revenue-share model lowers the barrier to entry so significantly that it becomes cheaper and faster to use Shuffle than to hire a team to replicate it.
A back-of-the-envelope sketch shows the scale of the opportunity, and the challenge. Assume a modestly sized heat pump manufacturer sells 10,000 units a year. If Shuffle can connect half of those and shift an average of 3 kWh per unit per day,roughly one hot water tank cycle,that’s 15 MWh of daily flexible load. In a market with a price spread of £50 per MWh, that could generate £750 of daily grid value, or about £270,000 annually before the revenue share. The slice that flows to Shuffle must cover its cloud costs, trading operations, and support to find a sustainable margin. The incumbent it must beat isn’t another startup; it’s the internal spreadsheet at a heat pump company that concludes the hassle isn’t worth the potential return.
Sources
- [Companies House, May 2024] SHUFFLE ENERGY LIMITED overview | https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15724867
- [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF] Product and market description
- [Shuffle Energy] Board Appointment Announcement: Jordan Brompton Joins Shuffle Energy as Non-Executive Director | https://shuffle.energy/blog/board-appointment-announcement-jordan-brompton-joins-shuffle-energy-as-non-executive-director/
- [third-party funding database, February 2025] Pre-seed funding round report
- [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Simanand Gandhi Jeyaraj - Shuffle Energy | https://www.linkedin.com/in/simanand-gandhi-jeyaraj/
- [F6S, May 2024] Shuffle Energy | https://www.f6s.com/company/shuffle-energy
- [UK100, September 2026] Directory of Business Supporters | https://www.uk100.org/join-us/directory-business-supporters
- [Innovate UK FutureBuild Connects, January 2026] Shuffle Energy participation profile | https://www.b2match.com/e/innovate-uk-futurebuild-connects-1/participations/616052
- [Shuffle Energy] Senior Software Engineer job listing | https://shuffle.energy/jobs/senior-software-engineer/