trawa was founded in 2022, at a moment when Europe’s energy landscape was shifting fast. As the war in Ukraine triggered an energy crisis, David Budde and his co-founders—Max Lüddemann (CTO) and Robert Quick (COO/CFO)—watched small and medium-sized enterprises absorb the volatility with fewer tools and less leverage than larger companies. Budde says they saw “in real time” how the crisis exposed “structural disadvantages for SMEs regarding professional energy procurement,” and it clarified the problem they wanted to solve.
trawa operates across energy supply, energy management software, and demand-side flexibility for SMEs. On the supply side, trawa provides energy procurement through transparent contracts and 100% certified green electricity, often combining structured power purchase agreements with dynamic pricing. On the software side, its AI-powered energy management platform gives customers visibility into consumption and forecasts costs up to 12 months ahead, bringing clarity to energy spend and usage for teams without specialized in-house expertise. trawa also manages battery storage and “intelligent asset control” designed to reduce peak fees and unlock flexibility value beyond typical pre-installed trading solutions that come with industrial battery systems.
What ties those pieces together is how trawa packages them. Rather than selling supply, software, or storage in isolation, the company combines procurement, forecasting, and asset control into a single digital platform. Budde frames it this way: “we achieve cost and time savings results that are on par with what best-in-class energy procurement teams of large multinational enterprises achieve – without the need to hire or train any internal resources.”
Budde’s path to the company runs through early internships at young technology companies, then Bain & Company, where he advised clients on digitalization and customer experience improvement projects. When the 2022 crisis unfolded, he decided energy, sustainability, and technology were where he wanted to focus his career—and where software could change who gets access to sophisticated tools.
trawa’s team in Berlin brings together data scientists, mathematicians, engineers, energy market specialists, and software developers. Today, the platform is deployed with customers across manufacturing, logistics, retail, and real estate, with a near-term focus on scaling its customer base and expanding forecasting, optimization, and flexibility solutions for assets like batteries. Long term, the aim is to become “the go-to energy partner for SMEs across Europe.”
That’s the bar trawa is setting: give smaller companies the same caliber of energy capabilities that larger ones already take for granted.