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Moving Forward
Talks about Climate Change, Environment and Utilities
YL
Yoav Lurie
Member at South Park Commons
Boulder, Colorado
Overview
Yoav Lurie is a successful SaaS entrepreneur and investor known for founding Simple Energy and serving as President of Uplight. He has a strong track record of scaling impact companies, with notable achievements including leading successful mergers and acquisitions and investing in companies like WeaveGrid and WattBuy.
Currently based in Boulder, Colorado, Yoav Lurie is an EHF Fellow and actively invests in Series B and Series A companies, particularly in the EnergyTech and SaaS sectors in Colorado and Utah.
Work Experience
Board Member
2020 - Current
WattBuy partners with leading brands to enable them to provide cleaner, cheaper energy options to their customers. OpenDoor, TrueBill, Updater, and CreditKarma rely on WattBuy to power their energy experience. I’ve served on the WattBuy board of directors since 2020.
WattBuy is a clean energy platform that empowers enterprises to help their customers choose affordable, clean energy options for their home.
Raised $16,585,000.00 from SE Ventures, MCJ, Techstars, Amazon Alexa Fund, Updater, John Sherman, Updater, Avesta Fund, Bill Gautreaux and Evergy Ventures.
Member
2024
South Park Commons is a fund and community of technologists dedicated to helping each other explore, learn, and go from -1 to 0.
EHF Fellow
2020
The Edmund Hillary Fellowship is focused on creating positive global impact. It brings world-class entrepreneurs, investors, and startup teams, to encourage more innovation and investment capital towards developing new transformative solutions for global challenges, from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Mentor
2015
Founder of Simple Energy (Techstars Boulder, 2011) and mentor to companies in the Techstars Boulder Accelerator, the Techstars Energy Accelerator, and the Techstars Anywhere Accelerator programs.
Techstars is an accelerator that provides pre-seed investment and mentoring for various early stage startups.
Raised $108,919,999.00 from SVB Financial Group and Foundry Group.
President
2019 - 2019
Simple Energy merged with Tendril to form Uplight, the leader in delivering a modern customer energy experience, in order to accelerate the clean energy ecosystem. Uplight is a certified B Corporation. Exited to Schneider Electric, AES, and Huck Capital for $1.5 billion.
Uplight provides end-to-end customer-centric technology solutions.
CEO and Founder
2010 - 2019
Simple Energy was the leader in customer engagement software and branded Ecommerce marketplaces for electric and gas utilities. Simple Energy was twice named among the Top 20 Impact Companies. In July 2019, Simple Energy merged with Tendril to form Uplight.
Mentor
2015 - 2019
MergeLane discovers, accelerates and invests in exceptional women and the companies they run.
MergeLane invests in high-potential startups and venture capital funds with at least one female leader.
Director and Practice Manager
2008 - 2010
Synteractive, a strategy and technology services firm, worked with large government, non-profit, and private sector organizations to leverage their data to better engage their stakeholders. At Synteractive, Yoav served as Director of Strategy and New Business Development and the Practice Manager for the Communities Practice. In this capacity, Yoav led the firm's successful bid to redevelop Recovery.gov, the website to track waste, fraud, and abuse in the 2009 Stimulus Act. The site was the first large-scale government website to provide citizens, journalists, and developers with unfettered access to machine-readable data and to enable the creation of a wide variety of third-party applications. Following the relaunch of Recovery.gov, Newsweek remarked, “The result is the current incarnation of Recovery.gov—which, as anyone who has spent significant amounts of time scouring government websites for information will tell you—is perhaps the clearest, richest interactive database ever produced by the American bureaucracy." Following Yoav's departure, Synteractive was purchased by its long-time strategic partner, Smartronix.
Managing Director, Development
2007 - 2008
Yoav served as the Managing Director for Development in Teach For America's Metro D.C. region. During his tenure, Yoav and his team achieved successive triple-digit year-over-year growth. In the 2008 fiscal year, his team raised over $8.5M in cash and pledges—over 50% of the region’s total 17 year fundraising total.
is a nonprofit whose mission is to engage our nation's most promising future leaders to strengthen the movement for educational equity.
Raised $4,235,000.00 from Appalachian Regional Commission, Martha Holden Jennings Foundation and U.S. Department of Education.
Team Leader - Program for Jewish Community Organizations
2004 - 2007
Started and ran a business unit within a socially responsible, specialty insurance provider. Focused on improving overall safety for Jewish Community Centers and Jewish Federations around the country.
Education
BA
2001 - 2005