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Dec 2025
Reducing energy waste doesn’t always require new hardware, sometimes it just requires seeing what’s already there. The company Ento is using AI and existing smart-meter data to uncover hidden inefficiencies in buildings, cutting energy use at scale before a single sensor is installed.
Across Europe, the green transition depends not only on building new renewable energy but on using the energy we already have far more efficiently. Buildings, public, commercial, and industrial, remain one of the continent’s biggest blind spots. Most still rely on outdated monitoring, manual processes, and expensive sensor installations to understand where waste happens.
“We realised we could unlock huge energy savings using data that already exists, without installing anything new. The potential is enormous and scaling it requires the right digital foundations,” says Henrik Brink, CEO and founder of Ento and a physicist by training.
Brink’s career spans applied machine learning in the U.S., startup exits, and a stint inside General Electric, working with everything from medical devices to wind turbines and energy grids. It was there that he saw the power of combining industrial data with AI to optimise operational performance. When he returned to Denmark, he saw a unique opportunity to apply the same principles to buildings’ energy footprint.
Ento’s breakthrough stems from a crucial observation: every building already has a data source that can reveal its energy inefficiencies, the smart meter.
“We wanted a standard, scalable data source across thousands of buildings. Denmark had already built it: the national energy data hub,” Brink explains and elaborates:
“With a simple MitID login, any company or public building can give us access to their consumption data, and we can start analysing immediately.”
This approach allows Ento to bypass the time-consuming, hardware-heavy methods traditionally used in energy management. Instead of installing sub-meters and waiting months to collect data, Ento can begin generating insights within hours.
Five years after launching, Ento now supports 35–40 Danish municipalities, numerous universities, regions, retailers, and commercial property owners, with a total of 50,000 buildings across 10 countries using its platform.
“We wanted to prove that you can operate at scale and with speed,” Brink says. “And that’s exactly what we’ve achieved.”
Denmark’s data infrastructure, particularly in the electricity sector, provided Ento with a springboard. But customers also want heat, gas, and water data, which historically has been stored across hundreds of utilities.
“It took more work,” Brink admits, “but we’ve now built a very efficient process to access heat and water data directly from utilities, often through widely used systems like Kamstrup. Today we can retrieve full energy data for virtually any customer in Denmark.”
International expansion reveals a varied landscape: France offers access to electricity and gas data that is nearly on par with Denmark. At the same time, the UK also consolidates energy data, but typically through more commercialised channels. In contrast, countries like Germany and Poland remain highly fragmented, often requiring building-by-building integrations or close cooperation with individual utilities.
Yet Brink remains optimistic. “Many countries now have data hubs similar to Denmark’s, and EU regulation is pushing them in that direction. The direction of travel is clear.”
Ento’s platform relies on hourly and, increasingly, quarter-hour data resolution, a level of granularity that is essential both for AI-based optimisation and for enabling the flexible energy markets that depend on precise, real-time consumption patterns.
“If you want batteries or flexible consumption to respond to price signals, you need high-resolution data. Monthly meter readings won’t cut it,” Brink explains.
Electricity data is generally high quality because it is used for billing. Heat and water can be more inconsistent, but Ento’s system is designed to flag anomalies, detect missing measurements, and ensure reporting accuracy. Their recommendations remain robust even when data varies.
On security and compliance, Brink is clear: Ento works exclusively with commercial customers, and consumption data is not personal. Still, the company adheres to strict GDPR standards and is pursuing ISO 27001 certification as it expands into larger enterprises.
Brink sees a strong political and technological case for Europe to adopt more of the Danish model.
“We’ve been involved in EU working groups looking at how to expand the idea of shared energy data access. The value goes far beyond billing. It supports flexible markets, grid optimisation, and helps companies make smarter investment decisions,” he notes.
Countries with increasing renewable energy capacity will need high-frequency data to balance their grids. Quarter-hour energy markets are becoming the new norm. And buildings represent vast untapped potential.
Brink gives a simple example: Historically, energy management meant installing sensors and waiting a year to collect data. Ento flips that: the data is already there.
“You can start with zero investment and immediately see the potential. Then you can decide where it actually makes sense to invest. We have a lot to accomplish in the green transition, so let’s invest efficiently.”
Ento represents a new generation of climate-tech companies built on the premise that data, not additional hardware, will unlock Europe’s next wave of energy efficiency. Denmark’s digital foundations enabled its birth; now Europe’s accelerating energy transformation demands its growth. The company’s approach challenges a long-held assumption in the energy sector: that meaningful optimisation requires complex installations and manual work. Brink argues the opposite.
“We already have the data we need to make much better decisions. The challenge isn’t collecting it, it’s using it properly, at scale, across thousands of buildings. If we do that, we can save enormous amounts of energy long before new infrastructure is even built,” he says.
With tens of thousands of buildings already onboard, an expanding European footprint, and AI models tuned for immediate insights, Ento is demonstrating that impactful climate action can be both rapid and cost-efficient. The company’s success suggests that one of the fastest ways to reduce emissions is not through new construction, but through better intelligence about the systems we already operate.
Sometimes, the biggest leap forward comes not from installing something new, but from finally seeing clearly what is already there.
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