Micha Grueber On Raising $400 Million To Build A Climate Tech Startup That Helps Customers Reduce Energy Bills And Carbon Footprint

Micha Grueber’s story stands out in the dynamic world of entrepreneurship thanks to the resilience, adaptability, and strategic foresight he has demonstrated. Micha is the founder of 1KOMMA5°, a home electrification company with a vision to revolutionize adopting clean energy.

1KOMMA5° has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, G2 Venture Partners, and b2venture.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Micha Grueber’s global experiences taught him to embrace uncertainty and adapt quickly, which are vital traits for any founder.
• Whether family or colleagues, working with trusted and complementary people is crucial for long-term success.
• Exposure to diverse business models honed Micha’s ability to analyze and scale companies quickly.
• Checking ego at the door and focusing on rational thought leads to better outcomes in business challenges.
• Micha’s approach at 1KOMMA5° combines private equity’s structured growth with venture capital’s tech innovation for long-term sustainability.
• Growing alongside the company means constantly evolving, empowering teams, and adapting to unexpected challenges.
• Managing a business exit remotely, as Micha did during COVID-19, underscores the importance of flexibility and trust in teams.

 

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About Micha Grueber:

Micha Grueber has had a long and varied career in finance. Micha began as a Summer Analyst Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs in 2007.

Micha then moved to Wölbern Private Equity GmbH as a Student Intern in 2008. In 2010, they joined M.M.Warburg & CO as an Analyst and Associate.

In 2014, they became a Member of the Management Board of halbersbacher privathotels gmbh. In 2016, they were appointed Kaufmännischer Leiter at SABIO GmbH (a Serviceware Company).

In 2019, they became Chief Financial Officer at CAPinside. Most recently, in 2021, they took on the role of CFO & Co-Founder at 1KOMMA5° GmbH.

Micha Grueber received a Bachelor degree in Wirtschaftsmathematik from the University of Hamburg in 2010. Prior to that, they obtained a Bachelor degree in Politikwissenschaften, Philosophie from Bowdoin College in 2008.

Connect with Micha Grueber:

• LinkedIn
• TheOrg
• Crunchbase
• PitchBook

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All righty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. So today we have a really amazing ah founder joining us. you know We’re going to be talking about The way you know the experience ultimately is going to shape you up as a founder, also thinking about prior, perhaps corporate jobs and initiatives that you can take on to be able to form you better to as a founder, to shape your lens, your perspective on business, as well as the exit process, and also going about building, scaling, and financing. In their case, they’ve raised over 350 million on the equity side, and then also 50 million on the debt side. We’ll talk about both as well.

Alejandro Cremades: But again, you know, brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Mika Gruber. Welcome to the show.

Micha Grueber: Thanks very much for having me. Hello, Ilhanu.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born and raised in Hamburg. Give us a walk through memory lane. I know that you traveled quite a bit all over the world, but how was life growing up for you?

Micha Grueber: Yeah, so I grew up in Abbot, Germany, which is Germany’s second largest city in a pretty standard middle class environment and a fairly international background. As as you mentioned, I’ve traveled pretty early on. My dad actually grew up in India and had a lot of connections to the US, both friends and family. So we’d always visit um early on. um And that piqued my interest in sort of international travel and also spending some time abroad, which ended up leading me to the US for an exchange year in high school and then ultimately to college in the Northeast.

Micha Grueber: of the US and um I think that sort of shaped the way that I think about the world, but taught me to adapt to new environments, building communities around um new environments and so on. And I think it’s prepared me well for the challenges that you you encounter in business as well.

Alejandro Cremades: What about for dealing with uncertainty?

Alejandro Cremades: How do you think that helped you? you know Going to new places, meeting new people, new friends, dealing with uncertainty, especially at an early phase in your life. I’m sure that that was quite the lesson.

Micha Grueber: Oh, for sure. I mean, um it’s so I have this little sign in my office now looking at it right now, i actually, that that says life begins at the end of your comfort zone. And I know it’s a bit of a cliche saying, I guess, but it it really rings true to me because it’s easy to say, but it’s very difficult to truly act on that. And I think having these early experiences as 15, 16-year-old traveling half across the world, um not knowing anyone really um having to sort out you know how this new culture, how how this new environment works, um and really going beyond that sort of comfortable life that that I knew before has helped me overcome any sort of self-doubt and challenging myself to

Micha Grueber: try new things and and seeing also I think what that does to you both on a personal growth level, but also um how it helps you to push your limits and know what you’re capable of has been really valuable in in my experience early on.

Alejandro Cremades: So for you, you ended up being going to high school in the US, you did college too, but then you went back to Hamburg to get a degree. And then after this, you got into investment banking. I mean, investment banking is quite a good, team um it’s so it’s a really good way to understand how businesses work, you know, how to differentiate the good from the bad. How do you think that helped you with perhaps understanding, you know, and preparing yourself for what you’re doing today?

Micha Grueber: So I think the great thing about working in investment banking is that you learn about a ton of businesses in a very, very fast-paced environment. You need to handle multiple deals at the same time. You need to be able to digest a ton of information very quickly and getting brought up to speed in totally different business models um across a variety of sectors.

Micha Grueber: and um always taking the likes different lenses of different stakeholders and I think adopting that understanding what drives each stakeholder um and then of course providing the best advice to your client um has helped me understand a new set of information very quickly and and also has allowed me to understand what you need to do in order to scale a business of your own successfully, because I’ve seen it in so many different variations and different versions. um And I think that’s a super valuable exercise to do for anyone really starting their career.

Alejandro Cremades: So in your case, the next chapter was to be able to work with your um basically with your uncle. And that was more in the hospitality sector. That was your first day a getting your feet wet when it came to becoming an operator. How how was that experience? Also working with family, too.

Micha Grueber: So what I decided after a few years was that I really wanted to have a deeper look into a company, not just from that transactional period, which of course is a ah very narrow window of a company’s history and and what a company is made up of. And I had the opportunity to join my uncle’s business, um which was really in its starting phase at that point as well.

Micha Grueber: and It has taught me a ton about, um, building things from the ground up with more or less nothing. Um, and of course it is, um, made me appreciate, uh, surrounding yourself with the right people and this can be family can, can also not be family. Right. But, um, I think, um, more importantly, you need to surround yourself with the right people that understand you and and no um you know who has which strength and how they compliment each other. I think it’s a super valuable lesson. And doing that with someone that I was very familiar with on a private level um certainly helped facilitate that. But all in all that, that has sort of served the foundation for a super important premise for me, which has always been, ah it is on the one hand a luxury, but it’s also a

Micha Grueber: necessity for me to surround myself with people that I actually enjoy spending time with and and build businesses with them is much more important than other elements, let’s say commercially or so on, um because ultimately you spend such a large time of your life with them building a particular project or a business. um You want to make sure that that you actually enjoy that process, right?

Alejandro Cremades: Now, in your case, ah the next chapter was um a SaaS company and then Cap Insight. On both, you were able to experience what the full cycle is from you know starting point to like exit, um especially in the last one, you know which was a digital exit, given the circumstances, not with COVID and all of that. So how was it different from what you had experienced with your uncle and And how was that you know experiencing also the the exit process with those two companies?

Micha Grueber: So I would say that that lesson that I just described really um transcended into into those jobs as well, even though I didn’t know the people as well prior to starting. But ultimately, I’ve i’ve been fortunate enough that I found people that you know appreciate the way that I think businesses should be built, and and they appreciated my knowledge of of certain things. and in the finance sector and in the you know administrative side of things. And um that has helped, especially in such a turbulent episode of an exit um where you really need to, I mean, you spend 12, 14, 16 hour days um and you need to trust your each other blindly. um You need to know how to interact, especially in negotiation situations and so on. And I think that, um

Micha Grueber: really, um, fuses people together, um, around that one sort of culmination event that’s happening in the exit case. And I think, um, that is also served as the foundation of, of what we’re doing now with one comma five is that we, uh, especially one of my co-founders, um, who, uh, I’ve worked with at cap inside, um, we’ve got to know, gotten to know each other so well.

Micha Grueber: throughout that exit period. And we know exactly what each other’s strengths are. We know we read each other blindly and know how to use that in any sort of situation. And I think that has been a phenomenal experience to have. It was super intense, especially with the cap inside exit, which happened at the first height of the COVID wave. So everything was fully digital.

Micha Grueber: Um, and, uh, you know, we had one live session at the end for final negotiations, but that was it. So, um, I think that was, uh, yeah, also really valuable experience to manage that in a fully digital session.

Alejandro Cremades: How was that? Because I mean, at that point, people needed the face-to-face, the typical acquisition process is like locking yourself in a room, a conference room in a hotel and just getting everything done. I mean, having that transformation of all of a sudden everything being digital and and just being awkward at the beginning that everything is digital, even the toughest parts are digital. How was going through that?

Micha Grueber: Yeah, I mean, especially in Germany, which unfortunately is not the the most digitalized country in the world. um It was a pretty big change from these typical face-to-face meetings, um yeah not having so many online meetings at all and yeah doing all the the DD sessions more or less online.

Micha Grueber: um doing model review sessions, doing, you know, the legal sessions, whether any kind of DD portion was was all done digitally. And then, you know, as I said, very few face-to-face meetings, I think um it was challenging. um But in the end, also another great experience to show, you know, having ventured outside of what what we knew and and challenging yourself to to try something in a different format has also shown that it’s possible. And and then it works really well that way as well. and And I think that is shaped also the way that we like to work at 1.5 where it’s a sort of middle ground of those two formats where of course, because it’s a very key central business, you have a lot of online presence and a lot of online meetings.

Micha Grueber: But we also appreciate the value of having face-to-face meetings. And I think that has served as well, and combining those two formats.

Alejandro Cremades: So how, how did you guys get going with one comma five? How, how, how how did that happen?

Micha Grueber: Yeah, so some of the basic premises and and theses all of that business as it is now, we discussed for quite some time sort of at night or having a beer after work or or so on. And it was driven by several aspects of um previous engagements, primarily from Philip, who at his time at Zonnen as a managing director realized the value of the last mile um and in the solar insulation space.

Micha Grueber: And that was sort of the first piece of the puzzle, which I really resonated with coming from sort of the transactional side of things, um looking at a true buy and build case um as a starting point um in order to to build an install base that will allow us to scale as quickly as possible to then produce the the ultimate product, which which is our heartbeat AI platform. And I’ll go into that a little bit more in detail later. But um having discussed all this, thinking about, OK, when’s the right time to truly start something on your own? um And who are the people that you want to do it with? And of course, you never know that.

Micha Grueber: um upfront, um but at the time we just decided, okay, this seems to be the right thing to do. We had all the pieces together, or or at least we thought at the time, um had the two other wonderful co-founders and we just kind of took the plunge. um As you typically do, started working nights and weekends to hammer out a pitch deck, um set up the company, and then You just get going. Um, and this was in the middle of 2021 and, um, yeah, have been added ever since the last three years. And, um, yeah, we grew the company to about 600 million in revenue in 75 locations across seven markets now. So.

Alejandro Cremades: that’s impressive So for the people that are listening to get it, what ended up being the business model of 1, 5? how do you guys make money

Micha Grueber: Yeah. So. 1.5 at its core is really a home electrification company, which provides our customers with a solution to electrify power, heat, and mobility, and thereby allows them to operate their home CO2 neutrally. And how do we do that? First, we, of course, provide them with the necessary hardware, so think solar panels, storage solutions, heat pumps, um and then, and this is perhaps more important is we provide them access to our technology platform, which is called heartbeat AI. And this platform manages these hardware components intelligently and serves as the gateway to electricity markets, which then allows our customers to systematically procure the cleanest and cheapest energy at any given point in time. And ah so that’s what we do in a nutshell.

Alejandro Cremades: So for you guys ah too, i mean what what ended up being that day journey of going through the capital raising? Because you guys have raised equity on one end and then also debt on the other one. So how how has it been really going through the motions for you all?

Micha Grueber: Sure. I mean, um yeah as always, fundraising is sort of the second job that you have on top of running a business. So it’s always a ah huge project. And of course, the focus of the particular raises have changed at the beginning. It’s about getting a proof of concept on the acquisition side and then you know, it transcends into the proof of concept on the technology platform side and so on. But ultimately, our chairman always talks about the three T’s, which is timing, topic and team. And of course, the topic is is super relevant. I think you don’t need to spend too much time on that. um the The team, I think there’s obviously, we have a great group of people together, but I think

Micha Grueber: Another huge factor of success is that ah the team needs to not only have that potential but execute, right? And and that’s a ah big difference. um But if you execute, and and we’ve had investors who have looked at our board recordings, and they’ve found something that we said we would do in September, and then looked at it in December of that year, and we executed exactly as we’d said we would. And that was sort of their main conviction point where they’re like, okay, these guys not only are promising the world, they’re delivering as they say. And, and that I think factors into this portion of of team as well. And then of course, timing is always the case um with the ah Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is, you know, cause this huge spike in energy prices has certainly helped us um

Micha Grueber: accelerate the business, um, to towards it, where it’s at now. Um, but again, those three components all need to come together and, and that makes a good recipe for a successful fundraise.

Alejandro Cremades: And what about equity versus debt for a company like this? How do you how do you think through that?

Micha Grueber: Yeah. So, um, we, we started with, with equity. That’s, that’s what we’re most familiar with, but what makes sense to to start, but ultimately for, especially for So the way that we grow quickly, especially internationally, is we acquire companies that that install these products that we offer to our customers. And this is a typical yeah buy and build, roll out play that’s more known in the private equity scene rather than the venture capital scene maybe. And um that portion long-term definitely makes sense to finance with a debt portion as well. Then of course,

Micha Grueber: debt is a more rigorous and structured form of financing that, you know, a newer company that has just been founded doesn’t necessarily receive so easily. Um, and we’ve been fortunate enough within just a year and a half of founding, we’ve we’ve been able to secure a first deadline to do that. And, um, ultimately we want to, um, decouple sort of the, the,

Micha Grueber: inorganic growth section and funding the inorganic growth with further debt. And then also have an equity portion where we fund our investments into the technology platform and so on. So the way that we look at it is basically fusing a more traditional PE growth model with a tech-heavy, SaaS-like venture capital funded model.

Micha Grueber: building a very exciting hybrid.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously, when when you have um you know investors that are investing in you guys, you know they’re investing in the vision too. um so um And I think that that’s saying, not only the investors, but then also the employees, potential customers. If you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of 1, 5 is fully realized, what does that world look like to you?

Micha Grueber: um I would say every suitable building, um not only in Europe, but throughout the world is equipped with a solution such as ours, um which essentially eliminates the need for fossil fueled power production. um And it also will systematically reduce the need to invest into grid infrastructure renovation, but also expansion um because the power is produced where it is needed um at the home or the factory, the warehouse, wherever it is. and And if we can do that, we’ll have a tremendous ecological impact that is also benefiting our customers economically um by systematically having a cheaper price of power that they can procure

Micha Grueber: based on their generator that they have on their very own roof.

Alejandro Cremades: So what about the um you know if I was to put you into a time machine too? know And let’s say I bring you back in time, you know maybe a couple of years you know ago, um let’s say around 2021, where you were starting to incubate the idea of getting going with 1,5. And let’s say you have the opportunity of showing up and being able to have a conversation with that younger self, and you’re able to give that younger self one piece of advice for launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Micha Grueber: I think it’s about fully understanding the power that emotional intelligence wields over accomplishing your goals.

Micha Grueber: um

Micha Grueber: Oftentimes, um you know, ask yourself, is your response, your approach to a particular challenge that you have is that driven by emotion, or slash ego, or is this based on you know rational thought? And in 95% of the times, um if it’s driven by the former, then the outcome is probably going to be trickier, um and probably won’t get you the

Micha Grueber: effective result that you want in the long term. And I think that’s a painful exercise that we try to do, basically checking our egos and everybody has an ego at the door when we start talking about the business and constantly telling her challenging ourselves. um Is this something that is driven by emotion or is there a rational thought?

Micha Grueber: driving a particular argument. And I think that cannot be overstated enough as hard as it as it is. um But again, also a part of the exercise of constantly going outside of your comfort zone to become a better version of yourself.

Alejandro Cremades: And what about, you know, when we’re thinking about learning learning here and and becoming a better version of yourself, when when you’re in a company that is growing so fast, you also need to be developing yourself fast. So what have you, you know, what has been your experience, you know, and your journey through transforming yourself to keep up at the same speed as the growth of the company?

Micha Grueber: So I think a lot of it you learned as you go, especially if you scale so quickly. I think it would be ah naive to say that we’ve seen everything coming exactly that way. Obviously we had a ah product strategy and a business plan and and the long-term goal is what we’ve envisioned, um but having it play out in a particular way is is just unrealistic to say that this is exactly what we had thought would happen. And what does that mean? You constantly adopt and and you also um focus more about enabling teams around you, building teams around you that um share your vision, share the way that you work, and that you are able to trust to

Micha Grueber: take care of challenges, take care of projects. um And um I think that’s the sort of ultimate satisfaction as well as as a founder, but but also as a company builder is to enable teams to grow beyond what they thought was possible as well. and Because you you’re constantly experiencing that yourself and and using that experience to scale and multiply um within the teams that you’ve built around you is um super important on the one hand. So we focus a lot on team building and we’re fortunate enough that we have a huge influx of highly talented people that that want to work on this project with us. um But of course, um identifying the right people who not only have that sort of desire, but also a certain set of character

Micha Grueber: um to go beyond and everyday work to to make this a bigger and and better version of what it was yesterday is the key. And I think that’s the, I would say the the biggest learning experiences is that, yeah, multiplying what you have in yourself basically in the teams around you and and using that to inspire them to to work in a similar fashion.

Alejandro Cremades: And for the people that are listening, Mika, what is the best way for them to reach out and say hi?

Micha Grueber: Contact me on LinkedIn any time. Happy to reach out.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, easy enough. Well, Mika, thank you so much for being on The Dealmaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Micha Grueber: Grueber: Thank you so much, everyone.

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