Span raised a second Series B in 13 months to chase IRA-funded home electrification

Span makes smart electrical panels and EV chargers that dynamically manage a home's power loads; its panel's circuit board carries the compute power of an Android phone.

$96M Series B2 (April 2023) led by Wellington Management, following a $90M Series B in early 2022

Founder and CEO Arch Rao set out to replace the electrical panel — the unloved hub between the street's grid and a home's wires — with one that can intelligently manage loads, letting Span's EV charger negotiate the maximum charging rate the house can handle.

The IRA, passed August 2022, offers up to $4,000 for panel upgrades with the full rebate for lower-income households; Rao said the economics let Span serve households hit hardest by outages and gas prices on the road to '10 million households or so by the end of the decade'. New funding goes to larger panels for multifamily buildings and smaller ones for apartments, all on the same core IP.

Raising a second full Series B 13 months apart, at a higher valuation, in the 2023 downturn is a rare signal that climate hardware had investor demand software lacked.

The decision is explicitly policy-driven: the IRA's rebates didn't change what Span sells, only who can afford it and when.

The panel is a boring, overlooked chokepoint — whoever owns the load-managing hub owns the home's entire electrification retrofit.

TechCrunch read the raise as evidence that hardware's difficulty builds a moat software teams can't copy, aligned with government incentives.

When policy shifts your demand curve forward, raising again at a higher valuation — even in a downturn — is cheaper than waiting for the market to arrive.

As of the April 2023 announcement, Span planned to spend the round on new panel sizes and to ride the rebates down-market; whether the second-B gamble paid off was not yet visible in the source.