Hard Krypton Exclusive | Virtual power plant company completes hundreds of millions of yuan in financing, and is expected to achieve profitability in 2027

Author | Yang Yuan

Editor | Peng Xiaoqiu

Hard Krypton learned that recently, Hefei Origin Force Integrated Energy Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Origin Force Energy") has completed a new round of financing. According to the company's disclosure, the financing amount of this round amounts to hundreds of millions of yuan, and the investors include Hefei Renchuang Phase IV Venture Capital Partnership (Limited Partnership) and Hefei Renxin Venture Capital Partnership (Limited Partnership). The funds raised in this round will be mainly used for the R&D of products and vertical energy models, regional market expansion, and partial energy asset investment.

Founded in 2021, Origin Force Energy mainly develops businesses around virtual power plants and comprehensive energy services. Through its self-developed DAO OS, it connects distributed energy resources such as photovoltaics, energy storage, charging facilities and industrial and commercial loads, and participates in subsequent asset operation and power market transactions.

Founder Xu Yu was engaged in international engineering and trade in the early stage, then entered the energy industry, participated in equity investment of energy enterprises, investment, construction and operation of energy assets, and once served as senior executive and partner in enterprises of electrical equipment, charging and swapping, energy storage and other fields. At present, the company's R&D team covers power system, energy trading, AI algorithm, software engineering, electrical engineering and other directions.

In the past few years, most domestic virtual power plants are still in the stage of resource access, platform construction and business model exploration. As new energy gradually participates in the power market, merely completing the access of energy resources such as photovoltaics and energy storage does not mean that these resources are able to participate in transactions and generate revenue.

Xu Yu told Hard Krypton that in the past few years, the company was mainly in the stage of product R&D and business model verification. With the advancement of the spot power market and the gradual clarification of the path for virtual power plants to participate in market transactions, Origin Force Energy has begun to extend its business from system and software delivery to energy asset operation and trading.

Take a 2.5MW/5MWh user-side energy storage project in Hubei as an example. In 2026, the local user-side electricity price began to be transmitted through spot prices, and the time-of-use electricity price was cancelled. The original charging and discharging strategy formulated based on the fixed peak-valley price difference can hardly continue to generate revenue.

After Origin Force Energy took over, it connected the energy storage and load data to DAO OS, and readjusted the charging and discharging strategy according to the spot price and load forecast; on this basis, it aggregated the energy storage into the virtual power plant to participate in auxiliary services and demand response, and provided power trading agency and settlement services at the same time. The company stated that after the above adjustments, the return on assets of this project has increased from a negative value to about 4%.

At present, Origin Force Energy has aggregated more than 10GW of new energy assets, accessed more than 100 parks and over 5,000 industrial and commercial users, and obtained relevant qualifications for virtual power plants, power sales and energy aggregators in 9 provinces. Among them, the resources that actually participate in market transactions are about 2GW, mainly photovoltaics and energy storage.

Compared with the scale of resource aggregation, the scale of resources that actually enter market transactions is more directly related to whether virtual power plants can generate continuous revenue. On the one hand, Origin Force Energy aggregates distributed energy resources to participate in power trading, auxiliary services, demand response and other markets; on the other hand, it also provides energy asset operation services for industrial and commercial users, and obtains revenue through technical service fees, operation management fees or revenue sharing and other methods.

At present, the company's revenue mainly comes from DAO OS system and algorithm services, virtual power plant operation, power trading, energy asset services and comprehensive energy businesses, with a revenue scale of tens of millions of yuan, and has not yet achieved profitability. Xu Yu said that the company has been in the investment stage of technology, product and business model verification in the past few years, and is expected to achieve profitability in 2027.

From the system level, DAO OS mainly undertakes functions such as energy asset management, power market operation, operation and maintenance, and user-side services. Compared with EMS which is mainly responsible for station-level monitoring and control, Origin Force Energy hopes to further integrate resource organization, market transaction, revenue settlement and user operation into one single system.

AI is applied to price, load and power generation forecasting, and further participates in business strategy solving and scheduling execution. With the expansion of the scale of managed assets, Xu Yu summarizes the problems that AI hopes to solve as improving the "per capita operating capacity" — that is, through the capabilities of forecasting, strategy generation and scheduling, to reduce the dependence on manpower in the process of transaction, operation and maintenance, and asset management.

At present, there are differences in the construction progress of provincial spot power markets, market access conditions and transaction settlement rules. Origin Force Energy hopes to reduce the business deployment cost in different regions through standardized software products and resource access methods, but the specific trading strategies still need to be adjusted according to the local market rules.

After this round of financing, Origin Force Energy will continue to invest in the R&D of vertical energy models and products, and at the same time promote the replication of existing businesses to more regions.