This Entrepreneur Raised Over $133 Million To Optimize And Manage Clean Energy Systems in Europe Using AI-Powered Tools

When COVID-19 upended the global job market in 2020, John Diklev didn’t find a job—he built a company instead. His thesis-driven insights into the challenges of renewable energy evolved into FLOWER (Flexible Power), a cutting-edge energy tech company based in Sweden.

In this interview, John walks us through his journey from stock-savvy teenager to climate-focused founder. He touches on product innovation, capital raising strategy, regulatory battles, and team building. His views include a healthy dose of Swedish pragmatism and fierce conviction.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Stockholm Roots and an Engineering Mindset

John Diklev grew up in Stockholm, Sweden—a place he calls “the best in the world” to grow up in. While his sister followed a path into medicine, John charted a different course in engineering and physics.

John’s love for math, logic, and structured thinking led him to study industrial engineering and management, which served as the perfect bridge between analytic precision and business acumen.

John’s early passion for stock trading was sparked by family involvement in Swedish investment competitions, and this further honed his instincts for market behavior and long-term strategy. He developed his own investment thesis.

“It was like chess,” John reflects. “A constant challenge to see who’s the smartest in the room always appealed to me.” This perspective spurred him to venture into the unknown, choosing to be an entrepreneur in a country where medicine, law, and consulting were the main career paths.

As John points out, Sweden has the second-highest number of unicorns per capita outside of Silicon Valley. He himself is following in the tracks of Spotify and Skype and comes from a family of entrepreneurs. His parents and grandparents all have their own companies.

John set out to find a job during COVID, but instead realized that inflation was low and the capital markets were alive and kicking. Raising money for a startup was actually easier than finding a job at the time. And that’s where he set his sights.

Building FLOWER: From Thesis to Venture

The seed for FLOWER was planted during his thesis work, where John saw a glaring problem. He realized that the academic community widely acknowledged the need for adding intermittent renewable power supplies to the existing energy system.

While people accepted that they needed flexibility and storage solutions for renewable energy systems, no one was building at scale to solve it. “I basically said, if we all agree this is a problem, someone needs to build the solution,” John shares.

And so FLOWER—short for Flexible Power—was born, with a mission to address the underlying challenge of energy transition. How can we stabilize renewable energy through intelligent power management and energy storage?

A Business Model That Defies Categorization

FLOWER connects with flexible energy assets like EV chargers and large-scale batteries to control the power exchange within the energy system. The objective is to manage the volatility of wind and solar energy by using energy storage to create a stable and reliable system.

FLOWER transforms unpredictable green electrons into stable, baseload power for industries. Its model involves buying power through long-term PPAs (power purchase agreements) from wind farms for more than seven years, and managing the intermittency.

The company purchases the volatile production and adds a base of flexibility. It then sells a fixed volume of power at fixed price contracts to industries and other retailers that can rely on renewables plus flexibility to manage their operations and have predictability in their cost base.

Acquiring the Largest Battery Farm in Sweden

One investor summed up the business model accurately. He said, “You’re running a technology company, a hedge fund, and an infrastructure firm.” And he wasn’t wrong. John has invested a lot of capital into building the infrastructure and physical assets, specifically batteries.

At one point, FLOWER bought the biggest battery farm in Sweden, becoming a startup competing with infrastructure capital for the purchase. Facing rejections at multiple stages, FLOWER was twice kicked out of the process..

Yet John kept negotiating and ultimately won the bid by being flexible on deal terms. Just weeks before signing, their financing fell through. The team scrambled and raised more capital in that short window than they had since the company’s founding.

When the deal closed, it marked a major milestone: “That’s when I told my wife, ‘We’re finally out of the bankruptcy zone,’” John says.

Raising Funding for FLOWER

FLOWER operates at the intersection of energy markets, software, and asset development. But with complexity comes capital needs, and FLOWER has raised over €57M ($64.88) in equity and an additional €60M ($68.29) in project debt since inception.

Storytelling is everything that John Diklev was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

However, as John explains, they’ve only burned around €6M to €7M (~$7M) on operating expenses since the onset. FLOWER’s capital strategy reflects John’s thoughtful approach to financial management.

They use debt for project financing, which is cheaper and more scalable for physical assets, while reserving equity for strategic growth and corporate operations.

But FLOWER doesn’t plan to own all assets long-term. Instead, they are forming joint ventures with partners with a lower cost of capital, allowing FLOWER to optimize its capital structure while focusing on innovation.

“We’re not building just a software company that plays a key role,” John explains. “To make a real impact, you also need real assets.” Capital pools won’t adapt to fit the company’s needs. They must slice the risk and diversify the risk profiles within the company to suit different capital pools.

Fundraising Wisdom: Brutal Honesty and Pipeline Discipline

When it comes to fundraising, John highlights three key ingredients:

• Radical transparency – “It’s a complex business. We lay it all out: the problems, the risks, and how we solve them. It builds trust.” John believes in listing the problems they’re facing, along with their solutions and their plans for growing within the space.
• Pipeline diversification – “You can’t bet on one investor. It’s a numbers game. The work is tedious but necessary.” Navigating negotiations is a time-consuming and painstaking process, but that’s part of the game.
• Salesmanship – “You’re not just raising capital—you’re selling equity. Building momentum is a craft.” John’s fundraising mantra is clear: close the round, but be happy with the round you closed.

Building a Scalable and Healthy Team

FLOWER’s team has scaled from 10 people to nearly 140 in just two years. In the early days, everyone wore multiple hats—sometimes ten at once. To manage scale, the company developed an organizational blueprint, placing each employee on a future-looking organizational chart.

John said to his team, “You are sitting on 10 different chairs simultaneously right now. We know that we’re pushing you and we need to try to find someone to to shoulder your responsibilities.”

This helped depersonalize role changes, eliminated the emotional aspect of having their responsibilities taken away, and prevented burnout. As the CEO, John understands the sense of loss they might feel, but also stresses making progress in a quicker, healthier way.

Now, FLOWER is entering a maturity phase, where the focus shifts from headcount to productivity. John’s strategy created clearer processes, improved communication, and made every team member more effective. They now have the right people in the right capacity in the right place.

In the end, they ended up improving productivity, which was the key objective. “Scaling is about moving from one phase to another,” John says. “What worked for the first two years won’t work in the next two. We needed a new set of skills and perspective.”

The Regulatory Gauntlet: Gaining Trust with Data

In addition to commercial challenges, FLOWER also had to face skeptical regulators. Their pitch was using 1000 EV chargers as part of a national energy grid insurance plan.

If the nuclear power plants dropped offline, FLOWER would alleviate the system from the load corresponding to the amount of production that’s been lost. It was unprecedented. The regulators were used to big turbines and hydropower plants, not “stochastic” household behavior.

So FLOWER took an unusual approach: they wrote a 12-page “philosophical room” paper and shared all their charger data to build trust. The gamble paid off since the paper addressed all the concerns.

They were able to convince regulators that having multiple small assets would increase reliability rather than having one larger turbine. John recalls how building the product took them about half a year, but a part of their first two-year journey was just getting the regulatory aspects in place.

“It wasn’t a technical problem,” John recalls. “It was a trust issue. Once we showed them everything, we changed the conversation.”

The Vision: A Resilient, Renewable European Grid

If FLOWER succeeds, Europe will have a sovereign energy system in the European context based on renewables by building out a large amount of energy storage in the form of batteries.

They will also make sure that distributed assets, like heat pumps, EV chargers, or larger industrial processes, are an integrated and active component in the energy system. Today, these components are essentially passive, simply consuming the power available.

The end result? A reliable, stable, low-cost, climate-friendly energy system that doesn’t treat consumers as passive endpoints, but as active players in energy optimization.

Looking back, John reflects on the early startup grind and the temptation to chase every lead: “We said yes to too many things, some we knew wouldn’t scale, but we needed traction. That came at a cost.”

His advice to his younger self? “Be ruthless in your conviction. Say no more. Focus on what will scale and stick to it.”

Final Thoughts

From skeptical regulators to high-stakes battery bids, from Stockholm to shaping Europe’s green energy backbone, John Diklev’s journey with FLOWER is about conviction, adaptability, and practical thinking.

In an industry where capital intensity, regulation, and complexity present significant challenges, FLOWER stands out not just for its technology but also for its vision of a brighter, more resilient energy future.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• John Diklev founded FLOWER to solve renewable energy volatility by integrating flexible assets like batteries and EV chargers into the power grid.
• FLOWER combines technology, infrastructure, and energy trading to deliver stable baseload power from intermittent renewable sources.
• The company has raised over €117M ($133.5M) through a mix of equity and project debt, emphasizing capital efficiency and asset deployment.
• A pivotal moment came when FLOWER secured Sweden’s largest battery farm despite initial rejections and last-minute financing hurdles.
• John attributes fundraising success to radical transparency, a wide investor pipeline, and strong narrative momentum.
• Team scaling required a thoughtful organizational blueprint to manage rapid growth and avoid burnout during key phases of development.
• FLOWER’s regulatory breakthroughs were driven by transparency, data sharing, and a strategic challenge to conventional grid assumptions.

 

SUBSCRIBE ON:

For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here). 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More