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From Trading Floor to Power Grid: How Jan Willem Rombouts is Orchestrating the Energy Transition
The global push toward renewable energy has created a critical challenge: how do you manage power grids designed for centralized, steady generation when your energy now comes from intermittent, distributed sources like wind and solar? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jan-Willem Rombouts, CEO and Founder of Beebop AI, revealed how his company is building power grid orchestration technology to solve this problem—and the strategic go-to-market decisions that helped them secure $5.5 million in funding.
Goldman Sachs to Green Energy: A Quantitative Approach to Climate Impact
For Rombouts, the journey to energy tech entrepreneurship began on Goldman Sachs’ credit trading floor during the 2008 financial crisis. That high-pressure environment taught him crucial lessons about optimization, risk management, and operational excellence.
“That was a baptism by fire, I think, in terms of starting a career,” said Jan Willem. “I lived right through that on the credit trading floor of Goldman. But a top team, top people at that time, a culture of excellence that I really learned a lot from.”
After five years at Goldman, he was seeking a way to apply his mathematical expertise to something with greater societal impact. The energy transition presented the perfect opportunity: a complex system in desperate need of optimization.
“I was really looking to apply some of those skills, some of that experience, into something that I felt was really impactful. And the climate transition, the energy transition, to me was sort of a perfect match,” Jan Willem explained.
Painful Lessons from Building a New Category
In 2010, Rombouts co-founded Restore, pioneering the concept now known as virtual power plants. These systems aggregate thousands of industrial machines that can be temporarily shut down to stabilize the grid during energy shortages—providing the same service as gas-fired power plants, but in a cleaner, more distributed way.
While Restore was ultimately acquired by Centrica, the UK’s largest energy company at the time, building it was far from easy. The company had to create an entirely new regulatory framework before they could operate.
“I think what you encounter is on the one hand you have an investor landscape, VCs that invest to get certain returns and then you have the reality of an energy market where regulators, policymakers are just not in a hurry. And it’s a completely different pace,” Jan Willem recalled.
This mismatch between venture capital timelines and regulatory realities taught Rombouts a critical lesson he would apply to his next venture: avoid markets that require fundamental regulatory change.
Beebop AI: Strategic Positioning to Avoid Regulatory Bottlenecks
After selling Restore and taking a sabbatical that coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rombouts found himself drawn back to entrepreneurship. But this time, he was determined to build differently.
“I resolved not to go into a market where I needed to really shape the regulation from scratch,” Jan Willem noted.
This strategic decision led to Beebop AI’s positioning as a middleware layer in the energy ecosystem. Rather than trying to reshape markets, Beebop focuses on connecting and orchestrating existing devices like electric vehicles, solar panels, and heat pumps—shifting their power consumption to times when energy is abundant and cheap.
More importantly, Rombouts specifically targeted market structures that function similarly worldwide:
“What we did this time with Beebop, and that was really based on those learnings, is we chose markets that have a universal footprint and so that look essentially the same whether you’re in the UK or you’re in Texas or you’re in Germany or you’re in Sweden.”
This approach allows Beebop to scale globally without drowning their engineering team in country-specific customizations—a problem that had plagued Restore.
The Go-to-Market Flywheel: Utilities, OEMs, and Network Effects
Perhaps Beebop’s most innovative aspect isn’t its technology but its go-to-market strategy. Rombouts engineered a powerful flywheel effect by connecting two key stakeholders: utilities and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
“One strategic decision that made all of the difference and continues to make all of the difference for us right now is a flywheel that we really engineered in our go-to-market motion,” Jan Willem explained.
The process starts by signing utilities as customers. Those utilities then approach device manufacturers (like EV charger companies) and ask them to integrate with Beebop’s platform. Once those manufacturers are onboard, Beebop can approach new utilities with an even more compelling offering—now enhanced by existing manufacturer integrations.
“You have a utility to OEM, to utility to OEM flywheel that starts there,” said Jan Willem. “And what’s interesting is that we then see those OEMs say, ‘Hey, I see the value that you’re creating now where customers of my product are getting energy discounts from their retailers because of Beebop. Hey, I know a couple of other utilities that we work with. Why don’t I introduce you?'”
This approach transforms Beebop’s customers into channel partners, creating powerful network effects that would be difficult for competitors to replicate.
Breaking Through Complex Sales Cycles
Selling to utilities is notoriously difficult, with long, complex sales cycles that can doom startups. Rombouts tackled this challenge by engineering a land-and-expand strategy that gets Beebop in the door quickly.
“How do you engineer the sales motion that breaks through that long and complex sales cycle?” Jan Willem asked rhetorically. “What we did was to engineer a land and expand strategy. And that means very simply that our initial proposition is very low cost and very high value.”
Beebop starts by providing utilities with insights about their customers’ energy flexibility potential and helping them build internal alignment around the business case. Only after establishing this foundation do they move toward full implementation.
This approach creates a “solid launching pad on which we can then expand and go to actual operationalization,” according to Jan Willem.
Disciplined Event Marketing
Another key element of Beebop’s GTM strategy is their systematic approach to trade shows. Rather than viewing events as a necessary evil with unclear ROI, Rombouts brought process and discipline to this marketing channel.
After connecting with Alex Rosen, Datadog’s former CMO, Jan Willem implemented a structured approach to event marketing that transformed their results.
“The big learning for me was to be super intentional. If you go to a trade show, be super clear about exactly how many marketing qualified, how many sales qualified leads you want out of it, and then engineer a team with different roles and responsibilities,” Jan Willem shared.
This disciplined approach paid dividends at energy industry events, creating engagement that outpaced much larger competitors.
“At some points we’re running around the show and Alex was just saying, ‘Look at all of these booths and look at Beebop.’ And it was just a long line of people queuing up to see the demo… All around there, you saw people sort of sitting, watching their smartphone, hoping that somebody would come by.”
The Middleware Vision: Becoming Energy’s Cloudflare
Looking to the future, Rombouts sees Beebop playing a role similar to how middleware companies like Cloudflare emerged during the internet revolution—creating essential infrastructure that powers an industry transformation.
“If you think back of the cloud revolution, there are quite a lot of abstraction layers that were plugged in and became billion dollar businesses,” Jan Willem observed. “The way that I look at Beebop is we are one of those core middleware layers for the power system of the future.”
By creating a platform that intelligently orchestrates energy consumption across millions of devices, Beebop aims to make renewable energy both more reliable and more affordable—accelerating the clean energy transition.
“If we can integrate the consumers’ devices into the power system, that is going to accelerate the energy transition in a way that truly excites me,” Jan Willem concluded.
For B2B founders, Rombouts’ journey offers valuable lessons: design your GTM strategy with built-in network effects, break through complex sales cycles with land-and-expand approaches, and position new categories through value demonstration rather than technical education. Most importantly, apply painful lessons from previous ventures to architect a more scalable business the second time around.
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