Meet Daylight Energy: Turning homes into mini power plants
Daylight Energy turns homes into distributed power plants. Its energy subscription model combines solar, storage, and tokenized incentives to give homeowners energy independence while creating a scalable, decentralized energy network.
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Why we invested in Daylight Energy
We’re excited to welcome Daylight Energy to M13. The company was co-founded by Jason Badeaux, Udit Patel and Evan Caron to give homeowners control of their energy meter, future-proof their homes against grid instability, and create market-based incentives for distributed infrastructure. Daylight is accelerating the shift from centralized utilities to distributed, crypto-coordinated energy systems.
Daylight raised $75 million, including $15M in equity financing led by Framework Ventures with participation from a16z crypto, Lerer Hippeau, M13, Room40 Ventures, EV3, Crucible Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Not Boring Capital, and a $60 million project development facility led by Turtle Hill Capital. This blend of venture and specialty credit lets Daylight scale subscriptions now while building a repeatable project finance engine.
Why now: grid pressure, surging costs, better incentives
Market context: Exploding demand, slow centralized build-outs, and broken soft-cost economics create the opening. Electricity prices are increasing faster than inflation, and outages are becoming more common as our grid infrastructure ages and as energy demand increases.
Traditional solar remains burdened by customer acquisition and financing costs: over 60% of total system costs are sales and marketing. Homeowners wait years to see savings while installers juggle expensive financing.
Daylight Energy co-founder and CEO Jason Badeaux says homeowners are seeking energy independence. Daylight’s first-of-its-kind solar and storage subscription product combines affordable battery systems not dependent on Chinese supply chains with fully integrated smart energy software. Its energy subscription model helps homeowners generate, store, and earn from the power their homes produce using token-based incentives instead of traditional tax credits.
Macro tailwinds:
- The One Big Beautiful Bill is sunsetting traditional tax credits, paving the way for tokenized energy rebates.
- The pending CLARITY Act aims to establish a legal framework for digital commodity models and give crypto-native physical infrastructure companies like Daylight; M13 portco Hivemapper, a decentralized mapping network; and wireless system Helium a clearer path to operate and scale.
- Energy grids are falling behind: just ask the millions of Texans who lost power for weeks during Winter Storm Uri in 2021. As weather events expose infrastructure fragility, resilience is now a core energy value proposition.
"This is good for a company like Daylight and bad for incumbents whose business models can’t adapt fast enough,” said M13 principal Mark Grace. “Anyone trying to build distributed energy systems at scale to increase supply and match rising demand is in the right place."
Daylight Energy’s flywheel
- Acquire homeowners with no-money-down, backup-first offer
- Aggregate batteries into a dispatchable network
- Monetize via subscriptions and peak power markets
- Reinvest grid revenues to drop customer rates and expand
The dawn of decentralized energy
Founded by energy and finance veterans, Daylight wants to provide consumers with reliable power for homeowners and increase grid capacity to keep up with future demand.
“It was pretty evident that we needed to build energy capacity to meet the coming energy demands,” Badeaux, a former Houston based oil and gas investment banker, said. “If you were building energy in the traditional, centralized fashion, you saw it was just too slow-moving.”
Daylight’s energy subscription makes this possible, giving homeowners no-money-down access to solar and storage and network-native tokens, not tax credits, to incentivize adoption and unlock capital.
“Crypto is a practical technology that allows us to do two things: incentivize behavior change at the homeowner level and unlock capital efficiently to lower costs and scale decentralized systems faster,” said Badeaux.
How Daylight’s incentive model works
The Daylight Network earns from two sources:
- Predictable monthly payments from subscribers who get solar and storage with no upfront cost and a lower, more stable rate than their utility
- Market-based compensation when aggregated home batteries are dispatched to the grid during peak demand events.
Grid revenue further lowers costs for families, creating a flywheel where scale improves affordability.
“Homeowners want independence from inflation and outages,” he added. “I don't think it's a sustainability story. It's a story of resilience, independence, savings and taking back control of something that's just been viewed as a tax — an increase in price for a deteriorating service.”
Homeowners earn Sun Points for participating in the network. Over time, Daylight envisions a network token assuming this role, creating long-term ownership across homeowners, investors and partners.
Can DayFi’s decentralized finance model transform renewable energy funding?
To unlock capital efficiently, Daylight is introducing DayFi, a stablecoin protocol where yield is tied directly to electricity revenues from Daylight Network’s distributed portfolio.
Why it matters:
- Converts electricity into an investable, transparent cash flow stream
- Opens distributed energy assets to DeFi participation alongside traditional project finance
- Aligns capital providers with rapid ecosystem growth
- Daylight subscribers get immediate savings compared to utility rates and locking in rates over time
Batteries are the real disruptor
Badeaux is clear: The real breakthrough isn’t just in rooftop solar, but in batteries themselves. While standalone solar offers utility bill savings and a hedge against inflation, it doesn’t help in a blackout, a reality many homeowners learn too late.
“Without a battery, your solar doesn’t provide any backup power during an outage,” Badeaux said. “You get access to an inflation hedge against your utility bill but that's all you get. It's purely a financial product. A battery provides resilience and creates network value.”
Daylight combines these systems into a distributed virtual power plant, enabling faster capacity for both homeowners and utilities.
The tech: AI-powered audits and consumer-grade UX
Homeowners start their Daylight experience with an AI-powered home energy audit and participate in the growing energy ecosystem even if outside Daylight Energy’s initial markets.
“Energy is one of the most massive markets in the world, and we're building the first consumer-grade brand in distributed energy,” Badeaux said.
M13’s POV: crypto meets energy infrastructure
Mark Grace, Principal at M13, sees Daylight at the critical intersection of distributed energy systems and the maturation of crypto incentives for real-world infrastructure.
Grace first reached out to Badeaux by email in 2024 while researching the future of grid tech. Along with M13 partner Anna Barber, he published a thesis and was seeking founders transitioning grid technology into the decentralized market.
Grace believes that real breakthroughs in energy won’t come top-down from utilities but distributed energy systems that can increase supply and meet energy demand. “We’ve invested in crypto businesses with real-world use cases but with Daylight Energy, it was a confluence of grid technology and crypto,” he said. “I don't think a lot of people were thinking about the world that way but Daylight was early and clear.”
Meanwhile, Badeaux sees M13’s platform approach as “super valuable to any company in the early stage of scaling. Something that always impressed me about Mark and M13 is that in late 2023, when it was thought that crypto was dead, generalist VCs pulled out of the market,” Badeaux said. “Funny enough, here they are all back again – but M13 never left. They understand crypto and its use in real-world businesses and are a very successful generalist VC that stays active and understands the value in what we’re trying to build.”
Market opportunity: the first consumer-grade distributed utility
Daylight is funding subscriptions in Illinois and Massachusetts via direct origination and by embedding financing with local installers and is working with other states as policy and partner pipelines mature.
“We have multiple paths for monetization,” Badeaux said. “Individual utility contracts, participating in the wholesale markets and yield-based project finance create scalable revenue models.”
Summary
Daylight Energy is building a network where everyone wins: consumers, communities, capital providers, and the climate.
- Decentralized utilities are coming. The future of energy is distributed.
- Incentives drive adoption. Crypto enables a better incentive than tax credits.
- Resilience is the new ROI. Backup power and cost stability are value drivers for homeowners.
- Global scalability. Tokenized incentives and hybrid financing scale faster than legacy subsidy models.
Read more about Daylight
Akash Accelerate 2025 - Jason Badeaux from Daylight on Decentralized Energy
Follow Daylight Energy
Why we invested in Daylight Energy
We’re excited to welcome Daylight Energy to M13. The company was co-founded by Jason Badeaux, Udit Patel and Evan Caron to give homeowners control of their energy meter, future-proof their homes against grid instability, and create market-based incentives for distributed infrastructure. Daylight is accelerating the shift from centralized utilities to distributed, crypto-coordinated energy systems.
Daylight raised $75 million, including $15M in equity financing led by Framework Ventures with participation from a16z crypto, Lerer Hippeau, M13, Room40 Ventures, EV3, Crucible Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Not Boring Capital, and a $60 million project development facility led by Turtle Hill Capital. This blend of venture and specialty credit lets Daylight scale subscriptions now while building a repeatable project finance engine.
Why now: grid pressure, surging costs, better incentives
Market context: Exploding demand, slow centralized build-outs, and broken soft-cost economics create the opening. Electricity prices are increasing faster than inflation, and outages are becoming more common as our grid infrastructure ages and as energy demand increases.
Traditional solar remains burdened by customer acquisition and financing costs: over 60% of total system costs are sales and marketing. Homeowners wait years to see savings while installers juggle expensive financing.
Daylight Energy co-founder and CEO Jason Badeaux says homeowners are seeking energy independence. Daylight’s first-of-its-kind solar and storage subscription product combines affordable battery systems not dependent on Chinese supply chains with fully integrated smart energy software. Its energy subscription model helps homeowners generate, store, and earn from the power their homes produce using token-based incentives instead of traditional tax credits.
Macro tailwinds:
- The One Big Beautiful Bill is sunsetting traditional tax credits, paving the way for tokenized energy rebates.
- The pending CLARITY Act aims to establish a legal framework for digital commodity models and give crypto-native physical infrastructure companies like Daylight; M13 portco Hivemapper, a decentralized mapping network; and wireless system Helium a clearer path to operate and scale.
- Energy grids are falling behind: just ask the millions of Texans who lost power for weeks during Winter Storm Uri in 2021. As weather events expose infrastructure fragility, resilience is now a core energy value proposition.
"This is good for a company like Daylight and bad for incumbents whose business models can’t adapt fast enough,” said M13 principal Mark Grace. “Anyone trying to build distributed energy systems at scale to increase supply and match rising demand is in the right place."
Daylight Energy’s flywheel
- Acquire homeowners with no-money-down, backup-first offer
- Aggregate batteries into a dispatchable network
- Monetize via subscriptions and peak power markets
- Reinvest grid revenues to drop customer rates and expand
The dawn of decentralized energy
Founded by energy and finance veterans, Daylight wants to provide consumers with reliable power for homeowners and increase grid capacity to keep up with future demand.
“It was pretty evident that we needed to build energy capacity to meet the coming energy demands,” Badeaux, a former Houston based oil and gas investment banker, said. “If you were building energy in the traditional, centralized fashion, you saw it was just too slow-moving.”
Daylight’s energy subscription makes this possible, giving homeowners no-money-down access to solar and storage and network-native tokens, not tax credits, to incentivize adoption and unlock capital.
“Crypto is a practical technology that allows us to do two things: incentivize behavior change at the homeowner level and unlock capital efficiently to lower costs and scale decentralized systems faster,” said Badeaux.
How Daylight’s incentive model works
The Daylight Network earns from two sources:
- Predictable monthly payments from subscribers who get solar and storage with no upfront cost and a lower, more stable rate than their utility
- Market-based compensation when aggregated home batteries are dispatched to the grid during peak demand events.
Grid revenue further lowers costs for families, creating a flywheel where scale improves affordability.
“Homeowners want independence from inflation and outages,” he added. “I don't think it's a sustainability story. It's a story of resilience, independence, savings and taking back control of something that's just been viewed as a tax — an increase in price for a deteriorating service.”
Homeowners earn Sun Points for participating in the network. Over time, Daylight envisions a network token assuming this role, creating long-term ownership across homeowners, investors and partners.
Can DayFi’s decentralized finance model transform renewable energy funding?
To unlock capital efficiently, Daylight is introducing DayFi, a stablecoin protocol where yield is tied directly to electricity revenues from Daylight Network’s distributed portfolio.
Why it matters:
- Converts electricity into an investable, transparent cash flow stream
- Opens distributed energy assets to DeFi participation alongside traditional project finance
- Aligns capital providers with rapid ecosystem growth
- Daylight subscribers get immediate savings compared to utility rates and locking in rates over time
Batteries are the real disruptor
Badeaux is clear: The real breakthrough isn’t just in rooftop solar, but in batteries themselves. While standalone solar offers utility bill savings and a hedge against inflation, it doesn’t help in a blackout, a reality many homeowners learn too late.
“Without a battery, your solar doesn’t provide any backup power during an outage,” Badeaux said. “You get access to an inflation hedge against your utility bill but that's all you get. It's purely a financial product. A battery provides resilience and creates network value.”
Daylight combines these systems into a distributed virtual power plant, enabling faster capacity for both homeowners and utilities.
The tech: AI-powered audits and consumer-grade UX
Homeowners start their Daylight experience with an AI-powered home energy audit and participate in the growing energy ecosystem even if outside Daylight Energy’s initial markets.
“Energy is one of the most massive markets in the world, and we're building the first consumer-grade brand in distributed energy,” Badeaux said.
M13’s POV: crypto meets energy infrastructure
Mark Grace, Principal at M13, sees Daylight at the critical intersection of distributed energy systems and the maturation of crypto incentives for real-world infrastructure.
Grace first reached out to Badeaux by email in 2024 while researching the future of grid tech. Along with M13 partner Anna Barber, he published a thesis and was seeking founders transitioning grid technology into the decentralized market.
Grace believes that real breakthroughs in energy won’t come top-down from utilities but distributed energy systems that can increase supply and meet energy demand. “We’ve invested in crypto businesses with real-world use cases but with Daylight Energy, it was a confluence of grid technology and crypto,” he said. “I don't think a lot of people were thinking about the world that way but Daylight was early and clear.”
Meanwhile, Badeaux sees M13’s platform approach as “super valuable to any company in the early stage of scaling. Something that always impressed me about Mark and M13 is that in late 2023, when it was thought that crypto was dead, generalist VCs pulled out of the market,” Badeaux said. “Funny enough, here they are all back again – but M13 never left. They understand crypto and its use in real-world businesses and are a very successful generalist VC that stays active and understands the value in what we’re trying to build.”
Market opportunity: the first consumer-grade distributed utility
Daylight is funding subscriptions in Illinois and Massachusetts via direct origination and by embedding financing with local installers and is working with other states as policy and partner pipelines mature.
“We have multiple paths for monetization,” Badeaux said. “Individual utility contracts, participating in the wholesale markets and yield-based project finance create scalable revenue models.”
Summary
Daylight Energy is building a network where everyone wins: consumers, communities, capital providers, and the climate.
- Decentralized utilities are coming. The future of energy is distributed.
- Incentives drive adoption. Crypto enables a better incentive than tax credits.
- Resilience is the new ROI. Backup power and cost stability are value drivers for homeowners.
- Global scalability. Tokenized incentives and hybrid financing scale faster than legacy subsidy models.
Read more about Daylight
Akash Accelerate 2025 - Jason Badeaux from Daylight on Decentralized Energy
Follow Daylight Energy
Read more
The views expressed here are those of the individual M13 personnel quoted and are not the views of M13 Holdings Company, LLC (“M13”) or its affiliates. This content is for general informational purposes only and does not and is not intended to constitute legal, business, investment, tax or other advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters and should not act or refrain from acting on the basis of this content. This content is not directed to any investors or potential investors, is not an offer or solicitation and may not be used or relied upon in connection with any offer or solicitation with respect to any current or future M13 investment partnership. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Unless otherwise noted, this content is intended to be current only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in funds managed by M13, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by M13 is available at m13.co/portfolio.