A Lagos based climate tech startup, PowerLabs, is seeking to transform how businesses manage electricity by introducing an AI driven system that coordinates multiple power sources into a single, efficient network. Founded in 2023 by Tobechukwu Arize and his team, the company is positioning its solution as a response to Nigeria’s fragmented energy landscape, where grid supply, diesel generators, solar panels, and batteries operate largely in isolation.
Nigeria’s power sector continues to face deep structural challenges, with actual electricity supply falling significantly below its installed capacity due to gas shortages, ageing infrastructure, and recurring grid failures. Despite recent interventions by the federal government under President Bola Tinubu to stabilise the sector, businesses and households remain heavily reliant on costly alternative power sources, exposing inefficiencies in how energy is generated, distributed, and consumed.
PowerLabs’ approach centres on what it describes as an “intelligence layer,” a system that combines embedded hardware with cloud based software to monitor, analyse, and automatically manage energy usage across different sources in real time. Its flagship platform, Pai Enterprise, uses sensors installed on electrical panels to track performance metrics and deploy artificial intelligence to optimise switching between grid, solar, and generator power, reducing costs while improving reliability.
The startup is initially targeting large scale users such as factories, hospitals, banks, and telecom infrastructure, where energy inefficiencies translate into significant financial losses. By orchestrating existing energy assets rather than building new ones, PowerLabs aims to unlock a more coordinated and data driven power ecosystem, with long term ambitions of enabling energy sharing across users.
Backed by investors including Breega, Catalyst Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures, and Kaleo Ventures, the company says its Nigeria first model could offer a globally relevant blueprint for managing increasingly complex energy systems.