Powerit Solutions has completed a Series C financing round, raising $5.5 million. The industrial demand response company will use the funds to expand its work with strategic partners, launch its cloud product and integrate its Spara EMS into industrial automation and smart grid platforms.

The round includes $3 million raised in April and another $2.5 million investment from November. The Seattle-based company has raised about $23.6 million to-date. The company’s latest round of funding, which was led by Black Coral Capital, will also allow it to make a move into Europe.

Powerit announced its cloud platform earlier this year, SparaHub, which provides companies with a web-based dashboard that can connect different buildings’ energy use with utility rate schedules and demand response programs.

The company works with about 150 facilities, mostly large industrial sites like factories and steel furnaces. Powerit initially focused on the food and beverage manufacturing business and last year expanded into the metals market with an agreement with Inductotherm Corp., the market leader in equipment for the melting of metals and materials.

“Our investors are excited about Powerit’s expansion of strategic partnerships as well as the upcoming launch of Spara into the cloud,” Kevin Klustner, CEO of Powerit, said in statement. “We are pioneers in our field, and our hundreds of existing installations and active collaborations with utilities, OEMs, and system integrators are enabling us to help industrial facilities worldwide effortlessly control energy use for savings and sustainability.”

Powerit has been building channel partners to sell Spara and now works with four automation distributors:  Border States Electric, French Gerleman, McNaughton-McKay Electric Company and Schaedler Yesco Distribution. 

Not only is Powerit looking to expand channel partners, but Klustner also told Greentech Media that it could use SparaHub to embed controls in industrial devices themselves. The moves comes at a time when California’s three big investor-owned utilities are putting their weight behind OpenADR 2.0, the open standard to connect assets to the grid for demand response. Powerit’s platform is based on OpenADR standards.

"Powerit is uniquely positioned in the industrial automation market as the last mile linking facilities to the smart grid, so they can tap into savings and ever-more sophisticated demand management strategies,” Rob Day of Black Coral Capital said in a statement.

There are many other companies using increasingly automated and sophisticated software for building energy management, such as EnerNOC, SCIenergy, Serious Energy, General Electric, Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson Controls, Constellation Energy and Viridity Energy. But few companies are squarely focused on the heavy industrial market for automated demand response and energy markets the way Powerit is.

“The potential energy savings in the industrial market are still largely untapped,” added Day. “Spara is on track to be a key technology in this huge sector as energy prices continue to rise.”