Dartboard Energy

What do they actually do

Dartboard Energy provides an analytics portal for owners and operators of grid-scale batteries. The product ingests wholesale market data (starting with ERCOT) and an asset’s historical dispatch/performance, then benchmarks trading and operational outcomes. It highlights missed revenue, node-specific performance, and risk/return tradeoffs, and delivers findings as readable reports, dashboards, and written explanations Dartboard homepage, blog deep dive.

Today the company is in early pilot-style deployments rather than a broad rollout. Customers typically link assets and data, Dartboard runs counterfactuals and benchmarks, and customers receive concrete insights on where trading or control choices could have performed better. The near-term focus is ERCOT battery projects, with ongoing content and sign-up flows to drive pilot engagements Dartboard homepage, YC profile.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Battery project owners / single-asset operators: They run a single grid-scale battery and need to know if trading and controls are leaving money on the table; existing tools don’t quantify missed revenue or suggest concrete changes Dartboard homepage, blog.
• Portfolio managers and investors: They oversee multiple projects and need consistent, comparable metrics to judge performance and risk, but rely on ad‑hoc reports that make cross-market monitoring difficult YC profile, homepage.
• Trading / dispatch teams: They make bid and dispatch decisions in fast markets but lack clear, data-backed feedback on which strategies maximize revenue or reduce downside at specific nodes blog.
• Operations / performance engineers: They manage controls and maintenance but can’t easily connect settings or degradation to lost market value, making it hard to prioritize interventions homepage, blog.
• Project developers and acquirers: They need standardized counterfactuals to underwrite or value assets, but lack reliable benchmarks showing what assets could have earned across strategies and markets YC profile, homepage.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Founder-led outreach to ERCOT battery owners/operators, supported by technical blog posts to pre‑qualify interest. Offer short pilots that ingest historic dispatch and deliver a concrete missed‑revenue benchmark report to convert to paid homepage, blog.
• First 50: Turn early pilots into public case studies and referrals, run targeted webinars for operators/traders, and use YC/founder networks and LinkedIn to land more single‑asset customers while closing a few portfolio managers via demos homepage, YC profile.
• First 100: Standardize onboarding/reporting, introduce a portfolio/investor tier and reseller partnerships (e.g., O&M firms, trading shops, asset managers), and hire a small sales/CS team to support expansion into additional ISOs YC profile, blog.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

U.S. utility-scale battery capacity reached roughly 26–29 GW by end-2024 and is projected to approach about 65 GW by 2026–2027, indicating rapid growth in the asset base Dartboard targets EIA, Utility Dive.

Bottom-up calculation:

Industry reports indicate ~12.3 GW added across ~180 projects in 2024 (avg. ~60–70 MW/project), implying several hundred active U.S. battery sites today and potentially 700–900+ as capacity scales; this aligns with public project databases listing hundreds of live U.S. projects Wood Mackenzie/ACP, Cleanview database.

Assumptions:

• Average new utility-scale project size ~60–70 MW to translate GW into site counts.
• Customer pool includes owners/operators of standalone grid-scale batteries (>1 MW) in wholesale markets.
• Growth to ~65 GW by 2026–2027 increases site counts proportionally as average project sizes remain similar EIA/Utility Dive.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Modo Energy: Market intelligence and benchmarking for battery storage, including ERCOT asset comparisons and strategy insights; overlaps with Dartboard’s benchmarking use cases Modo ERCOT analysis.
• Fluence IQ (Mosaic): AI-powered bidding/optimization software for storage and renewables; active in ERCOT/CAISO and focused on automated market participation rather than post-hoc benchmarking Fluence.
• Ascend Analytics (SmartBidder): Bid optimization and risk management platform used by battery owners in ERCOT; skews toward real-time bidding and strategy rather than explanatory benchmarking Ascend–TGA ERCOT.
• Habitat Energy: Third-party optimizer providing algorithmic bidding, QSE/trading services, and risk management for large ERCOT battery portfolios; more managed-optimization than analytics-only Habitat in ERCOT.
• GridBeyond: Optimization software and trading services for batteries (incl. ERCOT), positioning around bid strategy and revenue capture; overlaps if Dartboard expands into real-time recommendations GridBeyond ERCOT.