In recent years, the climate solutions landscape has shifted from emerging commercialization to full-fledged industrial deployment. Software and services companies once seen as early-stage enablers are now operating at enterprise scale and serving mission-critical customers across electrification, transportation, heavy industry, and more. Along the way, they have established product-market fit, capital efficient balance sheets, and steady growth. But with historic tailwinds across the energy and industrial spaces, these companies are looking to their next chapter of market leadership.
Through our Endurance strategy, we partner with executive teams of companies like these to explore strategic levers to capture new markets, improve operations, and continue to build scale. This edition of Scaling for Endurance focuses on how we approach commercial expansion, supporting companies to grow their addressable market through vertical integration, customer-driven product development, and well-selected adjacencies.
In this industry, a company’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) is often underestimated; however, a disciplined commercial strategy can reveal how much opportunity exists within and around a company’s current customer base. As more end markets intersect with energy and industrial infrastructure, new layers of demand emerge, each shaped by operational pain points that energy, climate and industrial companies are uniquely equipped to solve. A strong commercial engine identifies those opportunities, builds trust across decision-makers, and translates technical credibility into durable, repeatable growth.
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As companies reach the Endurance stage, commercial expansion becomes less about proving commercial viability and more about earning the right to grow. Across our work with software and services companies in energy, climate, and industrials, we have seen that most successful expansions rely on deep customer trust and build on real operational pain points. With that foundation in place, a disciplined commercial strategy can unlock new verticals, products, and adjacencies.
As a climate company matures, expansion often means selling deeper into large, complex customers, such as utilities, EPCs, or industrial operators. These are not typical software buyers; they are zero-fault operators with procurement cycles that can span from months to years. Their purchase decisions often involve layers of technical, operational, and financial stakeholders, many of whom are not fluent in software. But it is key to remember that energy and industrial buyers move slowly by design, with processes built to protect critical infrastructure and public trust. Companies that align their strategies with the sensitivities and incentives of this sector can earn credibility faster than those who try to force an expansion effort that is misaligned to customer goals.
The Energize Angle: When land-and-expand strategies operate as a quota rather than a partnership, product utilization breaks down, perceived value erodes, and accounts churn. For effective vertical integration, build models to intentionally drive trust within your target organization. Establish regular touchpoints with operations, finance, IT, and the field, and consider each perspective when pursuing a new sale or an expansion. Make sure each stakeholder group understands your product, its applications, and its opportunities, then listen closely to how each defines success and risk and align your product narrative to those priorities. For example, Energize Endurance company 5, a tech-enabled energy advisory firm, intentionally invests in educating its commercial and industrial clients about the broad scope of the energy ecosystem, positioning 5 advisors as the trusted partners a customer calls first when a problem surfaces or a new initiative launches. Even as these structures may impact gross margins in the short term, they result in lasting customer relationships that compound in value.
In these sectors, new technology adoption is typically much more measured than other industries. Many utilities, for example, are still in early days of migrating to cloud-based technologies, let alone AI-enabled ones. As such, a product roadmap should be tailored to the pace and scope of your customers’ tech journey, rather than expecting the alternative.
The Energize Angle: Build your product roadmap shoulder-to-shoulder with your customers, intentionally structuring frameworks that address customers’ core pain points. Formalize this process by establishing strong customer advisory boards, and measure both breadth and scope of engagement on each stage of development. As you identify your lighthouse customers, map your product releases to their next use cases and key asks, developing solutions that match the organization’s level of software literacy and likelihood of utilization. This calls customers into the conversation, builds internal ownership, and improves product traction. The more you improve ROI for the customer, the more a company will trust you for the next phase of product adoption. Likewise, you will save wasted expenditure on development for non-critical products.
Once a company hits sustainable growth within one sector, the next step is to look for adjacencies. For companies in energy and industrials, this can be challenging. However, highly horizontal software tends to lack the customization and trust necessary to meet the highly complex asks or bespoke processes of climate and industrial customers. As we discuss in our M&A piece, it can be tempting to move into spaces with shared labels (e.g. moving from commercial to residential construction customers), but the key to vertical expansion is not simply finding the customer that appears logical on paper; it’s about making a clear match between a real, consistent pain point and your solution.
The Energize Angle: Define your core value proposition independent of any single industry. Is your platform, for example, designed for distributed assets, mission critical operations, or field-based compliance? Once this operational DNA is clear, look for adjacent sectors that exhibit the same characteristics. For example, renewable developers and data center operators both manage complex permitting and interconnection processes, and fiber optic networks and electric vehicle charging systems both dispatch crews to maintain geographically dispersed assets. Test these adjacencies organically: Look at your customer list and identify which customers already span industries and may serve as reference accounts in the new sector. Validate that your sales and support models translate and confirm that your product delivers value. Disciplined pattern recognition makes these transitions easier to execute and reiterates value proposition across end industries.
Energize portfolio company Sitetracker is a leading Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform for planning, building, and maintaining high-volume, distributed infrastructure. While the company now supports deployment across diverse sectors like digital infrastructure, renewables, utilities, and EV charging, its broad market success began with an initial focus on telecom.
The key to Sitetracker’s successful scale was a rigorous approach to adjacency selection. Instead of being lured by markets with surface-level similarities, the team defined its operational DNA based on the fundamental operational pain points it solved: coordinating thousands of geographically dispersed, mission-critical assets with precision. This led them to seek out these common operational challenges across adjacent sectors. Leveraging Energize's deep experience in the energy and industrial markets, Sitetracker realized that the operational constraints faced by its original telecom tower builders (tight schedules, complex permitting, high volume of repeatable field tasks) were identical to those faced by solar developers and EV charging network operators. By testing and validating these shared pain points with the support of lighthouse customers, Sitetracker efficiently translated its platform from managing cell towers to managing the deployment of renewable and electric vehicle infrastructure, proving that durable expansion can result from addressing a consistent operational problem.
In climate solutions, a company’s TAM is not a fixed number, but a function of how well a company finds and serves real pain points. Enduring companies deepen trust with critical customers, co-build the roadmap to value, and enter adjacencies where the operational DNA matches. The result of this work is a larger, more resilient market than an industry outsider might expect. At Energize, this is exactly where our Endurance strategy is focused. We partner with established, capital-efficient companies ready to scale responsibly, drawing on our specialist research, commercialization support, and energy and industrials playbook to support sustainable scale.
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