The digital toolkit behind energy, industrial, and climate sectors is growing up. Even five years ago, there was only a handful of software companies that had achieved durable scale within the broader climate and industrial technology landscape. Today, hundreds of mature, digitally enabled businesses (and counting) are helping these critical sectors transition toward a more connected, efficient, and decarbonized future. Some companies have followed traditional growth capital routes, while other have built themselves from the ground up, bootstrapping their operations and achieving steady, efficient growth in parallel with the market. So far, what they’ve done has worked: they have strong product-market fit, loyal customers, expert teams, and profitable (or near-profitable) balance sheets. But as energy and industrial markets accelerate toward a new phase of transformation, what got these companies here won’t always necessarily get them there.Sharing
At Energize, we’ve seen this evolution firsthand through our Endurance strategy, which focuses on helping scaled, durable businesses in complex industries reach their next stage of growth. In our Scaling for Endurance series, we explore the growth levers that can help successful companies go further faster, and the lessons we’ve learned from partnering with leaders across this dynamic, specialized landscape.
Read Scaling for Endurance: How Mature Climate Companies Can Tailor Growth Strategies to Energy and Industrial Markets
Read Scaling for Endurance: Scaling for Endurance: Commercial Expansion for Mature Climate Solutions
One of the most powerful levers for companies looking to drive scale is inorganic growth through mergers and acquisitions. Done right, M&A can accelerate value creation, expand a company’s addressable market, and deepen relationships with existing customers. Done poorly, it can erode value and distract a team from what made the company successful to begin with. And in energy and climate, the dynamics of M&A can be uniquely challenging – complicated by long sales cycles, highly specialized markets, and critical infrastructure customers that demand high standards for trust and integration. In this sector, successful M&A depends on understanding the specific challenges—and opportunities—that energy and industrial markets create.
Energize has helped our portfolio companies conduct hundreds of millions of dollars of acquisitions in aggregate, ranging from product roll-ups to strategic geographic expansions. Here are a few lessons we’ve picked up along the way:
In complex industries, a single customer rarely means a single buyer or decision-maker. Each segment of the value chain brings its own priorities, risks, and processes, and often requires different products to solve distinct problems. Budget ownership may sit with a field engineer, a design lead, or the CFO’s office, and each stakeholder has a separate timeline and decision criteria. For companies pursuing M&A, it’s easy to overestimate potential synergies when two businesses sell into the same end customer. In reality, every function within that organization has its own procurement hurdles, technical standards, and buying cycles.
The Energize Angle: Be cautious of initiating a transaction simply because you share the same customer logo. Before underwriting cross-sell opportunities, map out which internal buyer each product serves and how their purchasing process works. In your model, remember that you may need to retain parts of your sales organization to speak to a new budget, maintain separate customer success teams, or even operate distinct product roadmaps to serve different buyers. These decisions directly shape the future state of the P&L. Enduring acquirers treat every buyer segment as its own market and build go-to-market and support plans accordingly.
As companies look to expand their footprint, inorganic growth into adjacent industries often promises new customer sets, use cases, and growth trajectories. But in highly specialized sectors like energy and industrial technology, horizontal movement is rarely that straightforward. Within energy, each segment—from utilities to oil and gas to manufacturing—operates with its own procurement structures, technical standards, and definitions of risk. A company’s right-to-win in solar, for example, will not automatically transfer to wind, even if the industries seem similar to an outside observer. Likewise, a company that has sold into middle-market or SMB customers successfully may have challenges moving upmarket to sell into enterprise customers (and vice versa).
The Energize Angle: Before acquiring beyond your core vertical, make sure you’ve earned the right to expand. Test the waters organically: win a few reference customers, validate that your product delivers value in the new domain, and confirm that your sales and support model translates to the target industry. Once you’ve proven that fit, strategic M&A can be a powerful catalyst, helping you “buy logos” and relationships where others never saw the transferability.
Many mature climate companies operate in markets where customer decisions move slowly. Utilities and infrastructure operators can take 18–24 months to approve a new vendor, which can be very taxing for a company looking to gain commercial momentum. But once a company has secured a contract, this sales cycle creates a moat, deterring other entrants and driving resilient revenue. For some later-stage businesses, doubling down through M&A can be a strong way to expand product breadth, consolidate customer relationships, and accelerate growth without resetting the pilot cycle.
The Energize Angle: In energy, million-dollar deals rarely start that way; instead, they are built through a diligent land-and-expand strategy. Acquiring new products is a great way to grow wallet share without jumping through new hoops of sales, diligence, and compliance. Strong acquirers let customer needs lead the way, ensuring every acquisition drives stickiness and value by solving a validated problem. A great customer success team should constantly mine existing accounts for new use cases and confirm both the product need and the right buyer profile before pursuing a transaction. Don’t move forward until you’ve confirmed that your acquisition target serves the use case you expect and can capture the synergies you need to make the transaction accretive.
Climate and industrial customers operate in environments where downtime is unacceptable. Whether it’s a utility control system or a large-scale manufacturing process, disruption can cause major financial loss and threaten core infrastructure. This makes integration the most critical phase of any merger or acquisition.
The Energize Angle: The best integrations start before the deal closes. Establish clear alignment on the purpose of the transaction and define your top priorities for the first month and the first 90 days; these early wins make later execution possible. Avoid jumping too far ahead and focus first on building stability and trust with your customers. Create a clear reporting structure for the combined entity, set measurable KPIs for success, and communicate them consistently across teams. In high-stakes markets, disciplined integration is what turns a good acquisition into an enduring one.
These elements are certainly not the only considerations for a climate company looking to scale; however, missing these zones can be costly, harming customer relationships and weakening core operations.
Energize portfolio company DroneDeploy offers a strong example of a company that leveraged customer-led M&A to expand wallet share without disrupting the customer experience. A global leader in reality capture software, the company began with a focus on aerial data, delivering digital twin solutions to construction, energy, and agricultural clients. As it grew within its construction vertical, DroneDeploy saw that many customers were also using StructionSite for ground-level capture, reconciling data from both platforms to gain a complete project view. Recognizing the natural fit, DroneDeploy acquired StructionSite in 2022, unifying aerial and ground capture into one integrated platform. The combination met clear industry demand for a single platform that could inspect and document buildings from all angles, opening up powerful automation and analytical technology for the world’s largest construction and energy firms. The overwhelmingly positive customer response underscored the power of customer-driven inorganic growth grounded in strategic expansion, seamless integration, and deep understanding of user workflows and pain points.
M&A can be one of the most effective ways for climate software and services companies to scale, but it’s not a shortcut. It requires a deep understanding of the nuances of the energy and industrial markets, from slow sales cycles to integrating in zero-fault environments, as well as real strategic rationale between the acquiror and the target. In this space, inorganic growth must be pursued with discipline, close customer relationships, and the right strategic advisors.
At Energize, that’s what our Endurance strategy is built to support. We partner with established, capital-efficient companies ready to scale durably, providing the resources, network, and insight needed to navigate this next stage of growth. Stay tuned for the rest of our Scaling for Endurance series, where we’ll explore the strategies shaping later-stage climate and energy companies, from expanding into new geographies to building the systems that sustain operational excellence.
