Meet Spine: The software backbone powering the future of green energy infrastructure

Here at Zinc we are driven by one ambition: to back exceptional founders using science and technology to solve the most complex challenges facing the health of people and the planet. We call this opportunity Science-for-Impact.

Today, we are excited to announce our pre-seed investment into Spine, a groundbreaking startup, led by serial founder Peter Bance, building the critical software infrastructure for the next generation of renewable energy assets.

The challenge: Green infrastructure is scaling, but software hasn’t kept up

The global energy transition is accelerating. As billions flow into solar, wind, and especially grid-scale batteries, one thing is becoming clear: managing these assets efficiently is hard. Batteries, in particular, are incredibly complex, not just chemically, but financially and operationally. Their performance, longevity, and profitability is contingent on second-by-second decisions that Excel spreadsheets and human intuition simply cannot handle.

This is where Spine comes in.

Introducing the Spine Platform

Spine is building the digital backbone for green energy infrastructure: a secure, flexible software platform that enables renewable asset managers to take full control of their portfolios. Think AWS for clean energy.

Spine connects to physical assets like batteries and overlays them with advanced monitoring, control, and AI-driven applications, from predictive maintenance to automated energy trading. This empowers asset owners to move away from relying on opaque third-party operators, and instead, use their own data and tools to maximise performance, reduce costs, and extend asset life.

Spine’s vision is to become the standard platform on which a global ecosystem of AI applications for energy assets can run. That means Spine doesn’t just scale with one company or market, it scales with the entire industry.

Meet Peter, a world-class founder with a seriously impressive track record 

Founder Peter was influenced by an early connection with nature and environmental stewardship, which aligned with his academic path to a PhD in physics and followed by a move into commercialising cleantech innovation.

He brings decades of cleantech and deeptech leadership experience, including as founding CEO of Ceres Power, a green energy spin-out he scaled from a lab project into a public company on the London Stock Exchange, raising £100m and building a global supply chain. He went on to found Origami Energy, a software company focused on managing distributed energy assets, from which the vision for Spine was born.

Beyond his track record, we are impressed by Peter’s clarity of thought, deep domain expertise, ability to make decisions and execute at pace, and a relentless drive towards. He is assembling a world-class early team with deep technical talent, and his vision for Spine is both ambitious and executable – and we believe Peter is the right person to do it.

Why now?

A powerful convergence of market, technology, and policy trends means there has never been a better moment to turn Spine’s bold vision into reality:

• Massive market momentum: Global investment in renewable infrastructure is exploding. In the UK alone, Spine’s first customer manages a portfolio of over 1GWh of battery assets.
• An urgency to professionalise: As portfolios grow, so does the complexity. Spreadsheets and siloed vendors won’t scale. Spine meets an urgent, unmet need.
• Technology readiness: Advances in cloud infrastructure and AI/ML have now made it feasible to automate decision-making at scale, something Peter was too early for at Origami, but which Spine is now able to capitalise on.
• The UK’s global edge: The UK is a powerhouse in renewable finance, a hotbed of AI talent, and home to an innovation-friendly deregulated energy market, making it a perfect launchpad for Spine to build and export a global standard.

The opportunity for global impact

Zinc’s Environment team backs founders that can deliver outsized commercial returns alongside demonstrable environmental impact. By unlocking higher returns and lower risk for renewable asset investors, Spine will accelerate the global buildout of solar, wind, and battery projects, speeding up the transition to a net-zero grid.

At the same time, it reduces waste by extending asset life, enhances grid resilience, and democratises access to data and control, shifting power – literally and figuratively – back to asset owners.

The journey ahead

Spine is already powering two battery sites for the UK’s largest battery owner-operator. With the successful close of this £500k pre-seed round, they will launch a suite of AI-integrated proprietary and partner-built applications, grow the core team and expand its customer base and asset footprint within the UK and beyond.

At Zinc we partner with founders who have the grit, ambition, and clarity to tackle complex problems at scale. Peter’s vision for Spine is a perfect embodiment of that.

Spine is building the software platform the green economy desperately needs. It is creating technology that will impact entire infrastructure systems, with the potential to impact gigawatts of renewable energy assets and billions in capital deployment. Spine has the potential to become one of the most consequential environment software companies to emerge from the UK in the next decade.

We believe that the UK is the best place in the world to start and build a Science-for-Impact venture. We’re proud to be Peter’s first institutional backer, and even prouder to help support the UK’s leadership in clean energy, finance, and deeptech through this partnership.