Factor acquired by Gentrack for $34.9m

Today we announce that our portfolio company Factor has been acquired by Gentrack for up to NZ$34.9m.

Led by the inimitable Jessica Venning-Bryan, Factor is a modular calculation platform for energy sellers. It replaces the legacy pricing systems most retailers still run on a patchwork of in-house tools and spreadsheets, which haven’t kept up with the way the grid is changing. In our diligence, one of our advisers described it as “one of the last bastions of spreadsheet chaos.”

We first reached out to Jess in September 2024 when Lachlan dropped her a LinkedIn message. She ran ten minutes late to the first meeting (which she’s never quite lived down), but by the end of it we knew we wanted to back her. The internal note after that meeting was simply: “worth backing just for the founder. At pre-seed that’s really all there is.” That call has aged well. Over the following month we got to know her properly on the Clean-Tech Trek to the US led by Phil Anderson in late 2024.

We gave Jess and Simon an initial pre-seed SAFE, wiring the money on Christmas Eve to keep the company funded through summer. We then doubled down on her $3m seed round in April 2025 alongside Icehouse Ventures, Blackbird, Black Nova, K1W1, Flying Fox, Func Ventures, AngelHQ and Metagrove. That was only 13 months ago. 

Factor was the investment that catalysed Ralph and Luca to focus on energy software. They’ve since ended up addicted to it, particularly where there’s data, AI, and sticky customer relationships. It was the first of a run of energy investments that now includes Maestro, Supa Energy and Hachiko.

Factor sits at the heart of how we think about energy. Generation is commoditising. Solar modules have come down 99% in cost over the past 50 years and batteries are heading the same way. The alpha is migrating to the orchestration layer that manages, stores, prices, and distributes what gets generated. Pricing and forecasting infrastructure is the unglamorous part of this, but without it retailers can't offer time-of-use tariffs, EV plans, demand response or anything else that underpins a modern & decarbonised grid. Factor is a definitive example of this: by enabling on-demand pricing, they ensure the "cheapest electron," which is now the cleanest, becomes the primary signal for consumer behavior.

What makes this exit particularly satisfying is that it’s a New Zealand one, end to end. Factor was built in NZ and Gentrack is headquartered here. The IP, the team, the customer relationships and the value created on exit all stay onshore. Factor’s people and product become part of a publicly listed NZ company with global reach, and most of the proceeds will recycle back locally. 

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Jess was always on a plane. Its been amazing to watch her juggle her young family, a start-up and everything that comes with it. It has been one of the easiest and most enjoyable founder relationships we've had at Motion Capital, and we're stoked for Jess, Simon, and the rest of the team.

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