Welcome: Steve Horley, the newest member on our Board of Directors

By Guste Oct 29, 2019

We’re delighted to introduce you to the newest member on our Board of Directors Steve Horley. Steve brings a wealth of experience to the role, with over 25 years’ experience running tech businesses and we’re very happy to have him working with us.

He is currently an advisor to Tokyo Electric Power’s Corporate Venture Capital in Europe, is on the UK Board of HomeServe PLC, lead investor at Imont Technologies and an investor in Moixa.

Steve sat down with us to talk about what drew his attention to Moixa and his career so far.

You’ve previously led three businesses from early stage to mass-market, could you walk us through these?

Sure, before joining Moixa’s Board of Directors, I was most recently Managing Director at AlertMe. This became Hive when we sold to British Gas in 2015. Prior to that, I was Managing Director of Tiscali Broadband which we sold to TalkTalk in 2009 and a Senior exec at LineOne, in the very early days of dial up internet access.

I have a number of different roles now in Seed and Corporate Venture Capital. I’m particularly interested in early stage companies in the Energy & IoT space and have invested personally in a small number of companies, where I can add value and get actively involved.

Wow, you’ve worked across quite a variety of industries. When did you first become interested in energy and hear about Moixa?

During my time at AlertMe, I became very interested in energy in a smart home environment, this interest then led me to look into energy storage, and ultimately Moixa. I decided to invest in 2016, then last year I joined the Advisory Board and recently accepted a position on the Board of Directors.

What piqued your interest in Moixa?

I look for markets at inflection points. The energy market is changing, and it was clear to me that affordable energy storage was the missing catalyst for fundamental change in the industry. The lesson from my telecoms days, was the power of the network, which comes from connecting & aggregating homes. So, I was looking for a company that understood this and came across Moixa. In many ways, Moixa reminds me of the journey that AlertMe went through, but in a market with much greater opportunities and social impact.

What element of Moixa’s business model is most interesting to you?

I am a great believer in private enterprise as the most effective engine for social change.

The future of energy is distributed and distributed energy will rely upon intelligent software to optimise utilisation & generate a return on investment that can be more attractive than the old centralised-generation model. The industry is moving towards an energy as a service model and with GridShare, Moixa is in a great position to support this transition.

You currently work with two Japanese businesses, was Japan a market that you were looking to work in, or was it an organic opportunity that arose?

In 2016, I was invited to Utility Week Asia to speak about the business model for the first generation utility. It was there that I first met TEPCO Ventures, and Energy & Environment Investments. I kept in contact with both firms and am now fortunate to be an advisor to both.

Japan is a very interesting market. They are going through quite an energy transition, with recent retail deregulation driving competition and extreme weather & natural disasters creating heightened energy security concerns among consumers.

Moixa is a great example of how Japan is embracing new technology and business models to reduce their energy costs. Thanks to the partnership with ITOCHU, Moixa’s GridShare software now manages over 9,000 batteries across Japan, making it probably the largest residential Virtual Power Plant in the world.

We are thrilled to have you working with us, thanks for sitting down and talking to us about Moixa and why you chose to join the Board of Directors.

Thanks to you too! I’m really looking forward to supporting Moixa and seeing it continue to expand internationally. I am convinced there are great things to come.