L-R: Amplicity co-founders Gabriel Schiano (CTO) and Stéphane Leyo (CEO)
Singapore-based Amplicity has secured US$1 million in a seed investment round from investors, including ENGIE, to commercialise a simple but increasingly compelling idea: the batteries sitting inside data centres and industrial facilities should not be treated as expensive ornaments waiting for a blackout.
The startup builds a control layer that allows sites to use existing or planned battery systems, including UPS infrastructure, to cut electricity costs and earn revenue from energy markets without undermining backup readiness. The timing is perfect as operators across Asia Pacific are currently being squeezed from several directions at once: power prices remain volatile, grids are under pressure, and large energy users are facing sharper scrutiny over Scope 2 emissions.
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According to Amplicity co-founders, most backup batteries sit idle for more than 99 per cent of the time. In a region racing to build more data centres and industrial capacity, that is a lot of underused capital.
“For years, backup energy systems like UPS have been treated as passive insurance: essential but unproductive,” CEO Stéphane Leyo said.
That framing is neat, but the bigger story is not about idle hardware. It is about whether Asia’s next wave of energy infrastructure will be built from scratch or sourced from existing assets.
A regional problem hiding in plain sight
Amplicity is targeting a pain point that is especially visible in Southeast Asia. The region’s electricity demand is still climbing, while its digital infrastructure footprint is expanding fast. Singapore remains one of Asia’s most important data centre hubs even under tighter efficiency rules, while nearby Johor and Batam are benefiting from spillover demand. Indonesia is building out its own data centre and industrial estate capacity.
Australia, meanwhile, has become one of the world’s most active markets for battery economics, thanks to its volatile wholesale power market and mature ancillary services opportunities.
In all these markets, resilience matters. Data centres, semiconductor plants, logistics facilities and large industrial sites cannot afford downtime. That means backup batteries are already widespread. The problem is that they are usually sized for emergencies, then left untouched except for periodic testing.
From an engineering perspective, that has long made sense. From an economic perspective, however, it increasingly looks wasteful.
That is the opening Amplicity wants to exploit. Its software sits on top of those battery assets. It aims to do two things at once:
- Shave costly on-site demand peaks
- Where market rules allow, dispatch battery capacity into energy or grid-service markets to generate recurring income.
The addressable opportunity is not small. Asia Pacific is one of the fastest-growing regions for both stationary storage and data centre construction. The data centre UPS market alone is already worth billions of US dollars globally, with Asia accounting for a meaningful share. Add commercial and industrial battery systems, and the battery hardware footprint that could theoretically be optimised runs into the many billions. The software, services, and revenue-sharing layer built on top of that is easily a large regional opportunity in its own right.
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In Southeast Asia specifically, the total addressable market (TAM) is less about selling more batteries than about monetising batteries that are already being installed for resilience or compliance reasons. That makes the sales motion more attractive in a capital-constrained environment.
Why Singapore and Australia matter
Amplicity’s initial focus on Singapore and Australia is not accidental.
Its home market Singapore offers a dense concentration of exactly the kind of customer the company wants: energy-intensive, uptime-obsessed operators under pressure to improve efficiency and decarbonise. Data centres in the city-state face land constraints, regulatory scrutiny and high expectations around energy performance. If Amplicity can prove that UPS systems can be run as economic assets without compromising mission-critical operations, Singapore becomes a strong reference market.
Australia is different, but arguably even more lucrative in the short term. Its electricity market is far more dynamic, with greater price swings and a deeper set of opportunities for batteries to earn money through arbitrage and grid services. A battery that is economically attractive in Singapore can become materially more valuable in Australia if it is exposed to the right market signals. For a startup trying to show hard returns, this is crucial.
Together, the two markets provide a useful test bed: Singapore for operational credibility with demanding customers, Australia for energy-market monetisation.
ENGIE’s upside goes beyond venture optics
ENGIE’s continued presence on Amplicity’s cap table is also strategically important. For the French energy giant, backing a company like Amplicity is a way to deepen its position in distributed energy, behind-the-meter optimisation and customer-facing decarbonisation services.
ENGIE already operates across energy supply, services and infrastructure. A company like Amplicity gives it another lever: the ability to unlock flexibility from customer-owned battery fleets without having to fund or own all the underlying hardware. If those batteries can be orchestrated safely at scale, ENGIE benefits from a stronger customer proposition, new service revenues and potentially more flexibility to support energy trading or retail operations where regulations permit.
In plain English, Amplicity gives ENGIE a software-led route to value that would otherwise remain trapped in backup systems.
Not a white space market
Amplicity is not entering an empty field. Globally, energy storage optimisation and distributed energy management are already crowded categories. Fluence, Stem, Wärtsilä, Schneider Electric, Eaton, ABB and Vertiv all operate somewhere along the spectrum of battery control, microgrid management, site energy optimisation or resilience infrastructure. Some of them are enormous. Schneider Electric, ABB and Eaton are industrial heavyweights with global reach, while Fluence has built a large listed energy storage platform. Stem became one of the better-known software-led storage players in the United States, even if that segment has had a bruising few years.
In Asia and Australia, the picture is similarly active. Utilities, aggregators, and energy service providers already monetise batteries through virtual power plants, demand response programmes, and ancillary services markets. What makes Amplicity slightly different is the narrowness of its wedge. Rather than leading with new battery deployments, it focuses on extracting value from backup and UPS assets customers already have or were going to buy anyway.
That distinction matters because mission-critical operators are often willing to consider software layers and performance-based commercial models long before they are willing to rip out their energy architecture.
The decarbonisation case is real, but not automatic
Amplicity also pitches a climate angle, and this deserves a more sober reading than startup boilerplate usually gets.
Batteries do not reduce emissions by default. If they charge from a fossil-heavy grid at the wrong time and discharge later without displacing dirtier generation, the decarbonisation benefit can be limited. The value comes from how they are controlled.
Amplicity’s case is that smarter battery dispatch can reduce peak demand, shift consumption away from more carbon-intensive periods, help integrate more renewable power and reduce the need for peaking generation. For companies measured on Scope 2 emissions, that can translate into verifiable improvements, especially if battery operation is tied to auditable reporting. In data centres and industrial sites, where electricity demand is both large and visible, even modest efficiency and load-shifting gains can matter.
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That is why this is more than a niche optimisation play. It sits at the intersection of energy cost management, grid flexibility and corporate decarbonisation.
US$1 million is a modest round by clean-tech standards, and Amplicity still has to prove that site operators will trust a young company with assets designed for worst-case scenarios. But the thesis is hard to dismiss. Asia is adding more batteries, not fewer. The grid is becoming more complex, not less. And businesses are less willing than ever to leave expensive infrastructure idle just because that used to be standard practice.
For Amplicity, the bet is that the next big energy asset in the region is not a shiny new battery farm. It is the one already sitting in the basement, waiting for somebody to give it a job.
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