Energize Capital is proud to participate in GreenLite’s $50 million Series B round, joining lead investor Insight Partners and other existing backers Craft Ventures, Live Oak Ventures, and Chicago Ventures. This investment underscores our conviction in the role that digitization and AI can play in accelerating the construction and infrastructure upgrades critical to the energy transition. Energize Partner Juan Muldoon will join the board as an observer.
At Energize, we like to say that if you’re bullish on climate, you’re bullish on construction. Electrification, clean mobility, and industrial modernization rely on a new physical landscape, and that landscape hinges on one thing: permitting. Permitting remains one of the most stubborn pain points within the energy transition, where every new commercial build-out, energy retrofit, or EV charging hub requires navigating a fragmented and often opaque regulatory landscape. The process spans thousands of jurisdictions—each with its own requirements, forms, and review procedures—and is still largely handled by understaffed public building departments working with outdated tools.
These inefficiencies have real economic consequences. In the U.S., municipal delays cost developers an estimated $50 billion each year in lost time and revenue. With construction activity accelerating—particularly in energy-adjacent segments like building electrification, HVAC retrofits, and renewable integration—permitting departments face growing backlogs. On top of that, stricter energy efficiency and safety standards are adding layers of complexity, even for routine upgrades.
Historically, only municipalities had the authority to conduct plan reviews and approve permits. But in recent years, more jurisdictions have adopted policies enabling private plan review—allowing certified third-party providers to perform code compliance checks and issue approvals on the city’s behalf. This shift opens the door for a new class of solutions that combine regulatory expertise with technology to deliver speed, consistency, and scalability.
GreenLite is a tech-enabled permitting partner that blends expert services with proprietary software to facilitate faster, more predictable approvals. The company’s offering spans digital permit management, AI-assisted code compliance checks, and—in jurisdictions that allow it—private plan review (PPR), where GreenLite’s licensed experts can review and approve plans directly. This capability can reduce approval timelines by up to 75%, helping projects move from design to construction in weeks instead of months.
Today, GreenLite is the only Private Provider combining regulatory expertise with AI to deliver PPR at a national scale, and it now serves a broad customer base of nearly 100 national brands, ranging from Walgreens to O’Reilly Auto Parts to TD Bank. By combining human expertise with software, GreenLite delivers both the accuracy of seasoned architects, engineers, and permit specialists and the efficiency of AI-enabled tools. Their digital plan review tool, LiteTable, flags potential issues before submission, automates documentation preparation, and incorporates jurisdiction-specific code intelligence to reduce revision cycles.
This “software plus services” approach is particularly valuable in an industry where unstructured data—PDFs of local building codes, historical plan sets, jurisdictional quirks—has historically defied automation. GreenLite’s human-in-the-loop workflows ensure accuracy and compliance, while its AI tools streamline repetitive, manual steps. The result is a permitting experience that is faster, more reliable, and far less resource-intensive for customers—whether they’re retrofitting a portfolio of bank branches or building a nationwide EV charging network.
At Energize, we invest in digital solutions that enable and accelerate the energy transition. Many of the infrastructure projects that will define the next decade—EV charging networks, grid upgrades, solar and storage deployments—will face permitting challenges. Faster, more predictable approvals directly translate to faster, more cost-effective buildouts.
We’ve been monitoring permitting software and services for years, recognizing the permit process as a primary cross-sector bottleneck. In our view, the most effective solutions in this space will combine measurable time savings with the ability to navigate complex regulatory environments and scale into high-growth verticals like energy infrastructure. Private plan review capabilities, when paired with software enablement, represent a particularly powerful model to bring speed, consistency, and scalability to a still-fragmented market.
GreenLite was founded in 2022 by James Gallagher (CEO) and Ben Allen (CCO), both U.S. military veterans and former GoPuff executives. Their experience building out hundreds of GoPuff sites exposed them firsthand to the cost and complexity of permitting—and inspired them to design a more efficient, tech-enabled solution. The company now has 50 full-time employees across the country and continues to grow: The team is actively hiring in engineering, product, sales, marketing, operations, and executive roles.
With this new capital, GreenLite will expand its go-to-market efforts and enter new verticals—including lodging, industrial and logistics, clean energy infrastructure, and residential development—while continuing to advance its AI-powered permitting platform. The company will also broaden its Private Plan Review capabilities into more jurisdictions and further automate workflows. We are proud to partner with the GreenLite team as they help accelerate the build-out of a cleaner, more efficient economy.
