I think many people often wonder, "How do startups actually start?" So I wanted to share a little bit about how Float came about - where it all started and on what foundation. Here's the brief version of that story:
In the summer of 2022, Victor and I rented a container in Nordhavn (part of Copenhagen) and set out to totally change how we think about our homes.
For me, it was a full-circle moment. I'd spent nearly a decade in the U.S., starting at the Clinton Global Initiative (Clinton Foundation) where I first learned what "sustainable buildings" really meant - and how even Google was trying to make offices more resource-efficient before it was trendy.
Later, I helped launch a UN-affiliated sustainable investment forum under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark to explore what sustainable investment could actually look like. It was a first-of-its-kind and exciting times. Somewhere along the way, I got tired of the talking and became more hooked on turning big climate ideas into something real - which led me to start OwnCity, a climate-tech startup combining tokenised crowdlending, IoT data and machine learning to underwrite retrofitting loans for buildings. Eventually, I ended up working for a hardware startup reinventing how we cool and refrigerate buildings. The keyword for the last decade seems to have been energy and buildings.
Victor's path was equally about energy and the physical world - just in a much more mathematical and heavy-engineering way. With a background in electronics engineering, machine learning and automation, he had through working at IBM and Accenture been part of projects building digital twins, pioneering virtual power plants and designing advanced automation flows that made industrial giants look futuristic. He had also helped a few startups with POCs and technical due diligence, but hadn't yet found the one thing that truly sparked something even bigger.
We actually met while working on another startup tackling something completely unrelated. But our shared belief - that the right combination of AI and hardware could help solve the fundamental problems with buildings, especially homes - kept us talking.
The "aha" moment
The "aha" moment came one late night when Victor, having just built his own house, was decoding a Modbus data extract from his heat pump (because that's what you do for fun when you're a true engineer who can also build real homes). He found a small anomaly that turned out to be a misconfigured return valve in the floor heating system - something that could've led to serious water damage over time. It was a lightbulb moment for us: if you could detect something like that with a bit of data and curiosity, imagine what you could do with real-time insights across an entire home.
That's when we went all in on the idea for Float - a way to make homes digitally self-aware like never before.
And then, almost on cue, the energy crisis hit. Suddenly, everyone was talking about kilowatt-hours, consumption dashboards, price graphs and how LED lights were ruining their Christmas budget :) It felt like the world needed a bit of help - and was catching up to the idea we'd been obsessing over.
Building the foundation
We quickly raised our first round from an early-stage VC and a group of strategic angels who had deep industry expertise or previously built companies acquired by Meta, Bain and EQT. Together, we started building the foundation of what we now call the agentic home - a home that can ultimately run itself with the help of specialised AI agents, saving you money and worries, and quietly fixing inefficiencies before you even notice them. We call it "realigning homeownership".
Three and a half years later, Float is still driven by that same mix of curiosity, caffeine and conviction. What started as big conceptual ideas about the future of homes - and turned into a late-night debug session - has now become a full-stack AI and IoT platform for your home.
A reminder that sometimes, the best startups don't start with a business plan set in stone… but with a heat pump that's just slightly off.
— Jens Brandt Nellegaard, Co-founder