Nate Richards Put the Messy Middle of Energy Sales on Speaking Terms

Houston, Texas

The useful clue was not on the customer-facing website. It was behind it, where a retail energy deal had to pass through accounting records, trade data, customer systems, billing tools and commission files without losing its meaning. Nate Richards encountered that machinery in the early 2000s, when his young consulting company took on work for the wholesale side of an energy broker. The assignment sounded narrow: connect an accounting system with trade-capture data and help with commissions. Then the client pointed toward a small retail group and asked whether Richards could look at its problems too.

He could. More importantly, he recognized that the problems were shared. Retail electricity markets were opening to competition, but the software underneath many transactions was still manual and fragmented. A broker might receive prices from several suppliers, shepherd a contract, track renewals and later reconcile commissions. Every handoff created another opportunity to copy a value incorrectly, lose a document or disagree about what had happened.

Richards had started programming as a child. He has described growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, looking at clumsy software and seeing the possibility for something kinder: programs that handled repetitive work so people could spend more time thinking. Competitive energy gave that early instinct a grown-up address. The work was technical, commercial and pleasingly specific. It also came with enough spreadsheets to make a database designer feel summoned.

“I started that as a kid and I have always had a passion for making software better.”Nate Richards, 2016

The project that refused to stay a project

Richards founded Entrance Software in Houston in 2003, two years after finishing Computer Science and Economics programs at Rice University. He says he had worked in software and energy throughout college, a pairing that became the grammar of his career: understand the system, then understand the incentive. The broker engagement offered both.

His team built the initial retail solution as a client project while retaining ownership of the work. That detail changed the future. Instead of leaving behind a useful one-off system and moving to the next contract, Entrance could keep learning from the pattern. The product became CORE, short for Collaborative Operations for Retail Energy, introduced in 2006. Its name was almost a miniature operating plan. The job was to make the participants in an energy deal collaborate through software, even when their own systems spoke different dialects.

The unglamorous workflows were the opportunity. Pricing arrives. Offers are compared. Contracts move. Enrollment data is exchanged. A customer is billed. The broker eventually gets paid. Richards found that even large suppliers often depended on manual entry, batch exports and copy-and-paste routines across disconnected applications. The polished shopping experience was merely the front room. CORE was built for the corridor behind it.

A company grows around the workflow

By 2014, Entrance was turning ten and CORE's client base had grown by more than half in the previous year. Richards separated the product into a new company called Energy Frameworks. The move gave the platform its own team and identity while Entrance continued as a software consultancy. Richards led Energy Frameworks as president and remained president of Entrance. One founder now had two businesses connected by a single belief: software gets better when the builder understands the industry well enough to hear what a generic requirements document misses.

That belief earned recognition beyond the product. Richards was named to the Houston Business Journal's 40 Under 40 class in 2015. He served as the Houston president of Entrepreneurs' Organization in 2015-16 and had already accumulated several Inc. 5000 appearances through Entrance. He also presented work on data visualization and data trust in oil and gas, extending the same concern from transactions to decisions: people act with more confidence when the data is timely, legible and shared.

The merger, with nerves included

Energy Frameworks was not the only company building for this market. Powermatrix, founded by electrical engineer Deepinder Singh, had developed its own broker software and customer network. Richards first met Singh briefly at a New York meeting of The Energy Professionals Association, where Richards was a keynote speaker. Powermatrix was a business Energy Frameworks already respected. As the founders learned more about each other, the complementary pieces became hard to ignore.

The companies merged in 2019 and adopted the name Enerex. Richards later told the story with the candor of someone who knew a corporate union could not be undone with an apologetic calendar invite. Before closing, he compared the uncertainty to the nerves before marriage: would the decision feel dreadful one week later? It did not. His retrospective question was why they had not done it sooner.

With the stroke of a pen, Richards said, the combined company served more than 100 brokers and represented more than 75 terawatt-hours. Scale mattered because a network product becomes more useful as more counterparties can connect. The merger also paired teams and founders with different strengths. At Enerex, Richards took responsibility for strategy and finance along with U.S. human resources, legal and IT. Singh concentrated on technology and team building. The product line expanded across broker tools, supplier workflows, data exchange and market information.

Those categories sound tidy only after somebody has done the tidying. A broker platform has to help agents manage customers, procurement events, contracts and commissions. A supplier platform needs to receive clean deal information and return pricing or payment data without producing another reconciliation puzzle. The data layer has to translate between systems that were not designed together. Enerex's wager was that each participant could keep its own operating language if the platform became a reliable interpreter in the middle.

By 2023, Richards said the company's Sparkplug broker platform supported 70 terawatt-hours of procurement annually, while its CRAFT supplier commissions platform had processed a quarter-billion dollars in channel-partner payments during 2022. Those figures are less a monument than a map of where complexity accumulates. Every unit of energy bought represents a trail of offers and records. Every commission dollar must find the correct partner under the correct agreement. Volume makes automation valuable, but it also makes a small error wonderfully ambitious.

Trust is part of the product

Connecting companies also concentrates responsibility. Pricing, contracts, customer information and payments are not decorative data. In a 2020 interview, Richards reduced the security argument to one sharp consequence: one fumble could be game over for a software company. Enerex pursued ISO 27001 certification and made secure communication a product concern, not a badge waiting at the end of a sales deck.

His other recurring theme is process. Richards observed that suppliers have more appetite to work with brokers who present a consistent experience. Good software cannot manufacture judgment, but it can make preparation visible. A clean record, a repeatable workflow and a reliable exchange tell the other side that the broker has its act together. This is enterprise software doing social work: reducing the small doubts that slow a deal.

AI enters through the side door

When generative AI reached the conference circuit, Richards discussed it in characteristically workmanlike terms. At a 2023 TEPA event in Ohio, his examples included customer-support chatbots, compliance communications, boilerplate code and test datasets. Enerex even used ChatGPT to draft the announcement of its ISO 27001 milestone. The company's recap of the talk ended with a wink: that post, too, had been written by ChatGPT from Richards's prompt.

The joke worked because the applications were concrete. There was no promise that a chatbot would repeal market complexity by Tuesday. The question was where software could remove another mundane task without weakening the human decisions around it. In 2026, Richards joined an industry panel on how energy leaders should choose among buying software, building it and adding AI. The old binary had become more complicated, but his career offers a stable test: technology earns its place when it makes the transaction easier to understand and operate.

The quiet appeal of the middle

Richards's public career is unusual for its consistency. He has stayed close to Houston, software and energy while the company names changed around him. Entrance continues to build and integrate software. Enerex continues to connect participants in competitive markets. He has remained involved with TEPA since 2010, earned its Energy Management Professional credential in 2026 and serves on the board of Houston nonprofit The Riverside Project.

The durable business was never the spectacle of energy itself. It was the middle: the place where one organization's clean process meets another organization's eccentric system, where a contract becomes a customer record, and where a promised commission becomes an actual payment. Most people prefer the front room. Richards has spent more than two decades improving the corridor, which may explain why the original client request still feels current.

There will always be another interface, another format and another supposedly temporary spreadsheet. The founder's advantage is not pretending those irritations will disappear. It is noticing when enough people share the irritation to deserve a product. Richards noticed early. Then he kept the intellectual property.