Morgan Stanley's climate private equity strategy, 1GT, led a €49m Series E round in Amber Electric, an Australian platform that lets households store, use, and trade their own clean power. 1GT invests in growth companies across power, mobility, food and agriculture, and circularity. The round also drew in a strategic industry backer. It follows a recent partnership with E.

ON, one of the UK’s largest energy suppliers, which participated in the financing, giving Amber both growth capital and a utility partner as it pushes into new markets. Founded in Melbourne in 2017 by Chris Thompson and Dan Adams, Amber acts as an energy retailer serving Australian households directly, giving them access to real-time wholesale electricity prices and the software to automate home batteries and electric vehicles. Its Smart Shift technology combines forecasts of wholesale prices, household solar output, and consumption to let customers use cheap renewable power when it is plentiful and sell excess energy back to the grid at the same price large generators earn.

With more than 50% of the automated battery market, Amber is the largest battery automation provider in Australia."We believe Amber will play a consequential role in enabling the energy transition in Australia, Europe and beyond," said Vikram Raju, head of climate private equity investing at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and 1GT. "As power systems become increasingly decentralized, energy flexibility and household-level engagement are essential to integrating renewable energy at scale."Amber’s co-founder, Chris Thompson, said that decentralising energy systems created a significant opportunity to help utilities unlock the flexibility of distributed energy resources at scale, while helping households extract more value from assets they already own. He added that 1GT was "the right partner to help us accelerate our expansion across Europe.".