Before there was a unicorn, there was a farm. Philipp Schröder, the man who now runs one of Europe's most richly valued energy startups, reportedly grew up on an organic farm in northern Germany. It is a detail that appears in only one author profile, and he rarely dwells on it. But it helps explain a life spent around people who grow their own energy, in the literal sense.
The career that followed was a string of bets on the sun. In 2008 he founded a small energy company, Nycon Energy. In 2011 he joined the solar developer JUWI. Then came sonnen, the battery maker, and after that a stint as head of Tesla in Germany, selling home batteries and cars to people who had never thought of their cellar as a power station. In 2015 he went back to sonnen. In 2018 he started CAPinside, a software company in an entirely different field.
It is the quiet price of a capital-hungry model: you can grow fast by buying installers, but you cannot print patience.
What nobody on the outside saw was the pattern. Each job had given him one piece of the same puzzle: panels from one employer, batteries from another, a consumer brand from a third. None of them put the pieces together for the household that actually pays.
In July 2021 he started 1Komma5° in Hamburg to do exactly that. The pitch was a single package: solar panels, a battery, a heat pump, a wallbox, and a software layer that decides when to store power and when to sell it back to the grid. The installer was not an afterthought. 1Komma5° bought up local installation businesses and put them under one brand, because he had seen at Tesla and sonnen how often a good product died on a bad roof.
Investors moved quickly. A €200m Series A followed in 2022, and Klarna co-founder Niklas Adalberth invested through his Norrsken Foundation. A pre-IPO round reportedly followed in 2025, valuing the company at about $1.2bn.
Then the market turned cold. In October 2026 the company raised fresh money at a $1.35bn valuation, but the planned stock market listing stayed on ice. It is the quiet price of a capital-hungry model: you can grow fast by buying installers, but you cannot print patience.
So the farm boy's company sits in an awkward adolescence. It has the valuation of a champion and the balance sheet questions of a builder.
There is a lesson for first-time founders in how long Schröder waited. He did not start 1Komma5° at 25 with an idea. He started it after more than a decade of selling, installing and arguing with customers about the same product. The idea looked obvious only because he had been standing inside the problem for so long. Experience was his unfair advantage, and he spent thirteen years collecting it.