FLOWER has raised over €117M ($133.5M) through a mix of equity and project debt, attracting funding from top-tier investors like Sony Innovation Fund.
FLOWER has raised over €117M ($133.5M) through a mix of equity and project debt, attracting funding from top-tier investors like Sony Innovation Fund, Northzone, Ellevio, and Sebastian Knutsson. John attributes fundraising success to radical transparency, a wide investor pipeline, and strong narrative momentum.
Being transparent for me is crucial especially in our business. It's complex enough as it is and creating this alignment in the ownership in the perception of what we're doing would be a severe mistake. Second one is make sure you do the leg work and have that big pipeline. Thirdly, I think it's coming down to salesmanship as well like trying to build the momentum and understand how you create that momentum in the rounds. You also you also sell the product in efficiently. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the dealmaker show. So today we have a really exciting founder, you know, a founder from Sweden and we're going to be talking about the good stuff like the building, the scaling, the financing, you know, how you go about building the team, you know, trying to access capital at every stitch of the way. So brace yourself for a really incredible conversation. So without further
ado, let's welcome our guest today, John Diglev. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Alejandro. Great being me here. Thank you for having me. So originally from Stockholm, from Sweden, and I know you haven't really uh moved much, you know, from your specific location right now. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? I mean, Sweden is probably the best place on earth to grow up in, I would argue. Uh, of course a little bit biased, but um, born and raised in Stockholm and I've stayed sort of stayed here throughout my life and then ventured out on different adventures uh, on the course of of growing up. But, uh, always had my base in Stockholm. And talking about growing up, I mean, you were always a follower of your sister, you know, same school, same everything except for medicine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think my parents had a plan for us how we should progress
through life until a certain age. When she chose medicine, I chose to to go into engineering instead. So I think it was both a uh interest but also part sort of choosing my own path that didn't didn't line with hers. So why engineering and physics? Um I've always liked maths and physics and and then that sort of logical part of the world. I'm a very logically driven person. Um but uh found out that for physics uh I did it was more math than I had uh braced myself for. So eventually changed my bachelor to industrial engineering and management instead. So buying and selling stocks was also something that you started to develop quite early. How old were you when you started buying and selling stocks? I mean actually I was wi with my wider families my grandparents enrolled all of us in in a yearly Swedish competition since I was one year old. Uh so that's the first time I bought the stock. I
bought a candy stock. I think my mom picked it for me. But then started pick up the the the actual hobby when I was about 16 and been doing it since. And you know that led into a group of friends into creating your own investment thesis. I mean, that's quite amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I I did it just because I thought it was fun. Uh, it's a good challenge. Uh, it's a like a little bit of an intelligence like it's like playing chess. Who's the smartest guy in the room? Uh, that that's always uh been appealing to me. So, then how do you how do you all of a sudden, you know, decide that the best route to follow is venturing into the into the unknown into into becoming an entrepreneur? because obviously Sweden, you know, is quite a traditional, you know, country. You know, it reminds me a lot of Spain where I'm from and and it's either you become a doctor, a lawyer or consulting, but
yeah, becoming a founder. So, tell us about that. Yeah, I mean uh I think it's partly true, but I I've I've also heard recently that Sweden has the second highest amount of uni corners per cop Silicon Valley. So, so we we're following in the tracks of like the Spotify and Skype and the likes. Um but I'm actually I'm coming from the family of entrepreneurs. So my parents, my grandparents have all had their own companies. So my mother actually made me promise that uh that or at least advised me to I would say uh to to not start my own thing immediately. Uh but yeah, I I didn't stay true to that. So COVID came, it was hard to find a job. So this was in 2020 when I founded a company. However, like inflation was still low, capital markets were alive and kicking. Uh so it turned out to be easier to raise uh money for a startup than to find a job at that point. Um so that's the way we went
about doing it. Yeah. So then let's talk about that. How did the whole idea of flower come together? Yeah. I think it's it's quite interesting because um from an academic perspective, everyone's always known since we started talking about h adding intermittent renewable power supplies to our energy system that we need to increase the amount of flexibility and storage capacity. And when I was doing my thesis, I realized that no one had actually solved that or at a credible level were trying to solve that. So uh I I basically took the the what we've learned in school as sort of a being true we need to solve this problem with not knowing when the sun is shining or wind is blowing and said okay someone needs to start building the solution to this and that's where flower the name comes from as well is is flexible power. So we work with flexibility in all its form to try to address that sort
of underlying challenge with energy transition. How can we rely on a renewable intermittent power supply? So in that regard then um tell us about the business model. How do you guys make money? How do we make money? Yeah, that's a brilliant question. Uh decently complex. Uh once I had an investor tell me like John, you're running a technology company, a hedge fund and and infrastructure company. Uh he added also how could I invest? And I think that's true because what what we're doing is that we're connecting to different what we call flexible assets. But that could be anything from an EV charger to a large scale battery where we basically can control the the ex power exchange with energy system and that's sort of inherently what we call flexibility that capability to control that power exchange. What we then can do is a suite of different things. So we can do something called like
ancillary services which is basically like insurance contracted energy system. We can do different trade types of energy trading. So buying and selling power. It could be both like arbitrage or speculative. Uh but then what we're doing that sets us slightly apart is that we're buying something called power purchase agreements. So we we'll commit to buy power from a wind farm for example for seven plus years uh and say we will buy your volatile production. We will add our base of flexibility to this and then we sell base load power meaning fixed volume fixed price contracts to industries or other retailers. And in that middle essentially what we do is that we say we will manage that intermittency. We will refine those volatile green electrons uh and then we'll sell base load power so that industries can rely on renewables plus flexibility um to manage their operations and have
predictability in their cost base. What was that moment where you felt like you guys were turning a corner and you thought you were into something here? I mean there's been so many corner to turn along the journey. So, uh, uh, once very early on in our journey, I told my wife like, "Now we're out of the bankruptcy sort of trap. Like, regardless of how it goes, we're not going to go bankrupt." I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but that was a moment when we at least felt very safe. But, um, I mean, one of the big things we've done is that we we invested a lot into infrastructure and physical assets being specifically batteries. uh one of the we bought the biggest battery farm in Sweden and it was basically us as a startup competing with infrastructure capital in in buying that one. So we weren't the sort of favorite in that race. Uh and we were actually kicked out of the process a
couple of times. Uh first because they didn't believe we had funding, then because uh our offer was too low uh and we needed to yeah secure more funding. So it was a a roller coaster of being kicked out, asked please can we please come back in and then eventually we got kicked out uh but managed to be flexible on the soft terms of the deal I would say. Uh so we ended up getting the battery at the end of the day. Uh and but our financing actually sort of fell through a few weeks before we were meant to sign. So then we had to scramble to secure new financing with just a few weeks more financing that we'd raised since the start of the company. So uh that was a real uphill battle. Um but we just said uh like we need to we need to push the limit here. We need to do this. Uh so when that ultimately fell in place it felt it felt like we've turned the corner and and and like taken a significant
step forward because…