Before Philipp Schröder had to think about electric cars, batteries or the price of a kilowatt-hour, his parents changed the setting of his childhood. They left Hamburg, where his father had worked in investment banking, and moved the family to a Demeter farm in northern Germany's Wendland. There were Galloway cattle, fruit trees and beehives. It sounds picturesque from a distance. Schröder remembers the practical lesson: a family can decide to live differently, and then it has to do the work.
As a teenager, he wanted out. The countryside did not look like a launchpad. Years later, it became the opening scene of an energy career that kept returning to the same question: what would it take to change an ordinary household? His answer has shifted with technology. The household has remained stubbornly real, with an old boiler in the basement, an electrician's calendar and a bill arriving every month.
The first wrong turn had a useful address
After leaving school at Internatsgymnasium Marienau in 2003, Schröder tried university without finding a course that held him. He studied law in Hamburg and later described those years as aimless. His first company, started with a friend in 2008, proposed replacing oil boilers with more efficient gas heating. The idea belongs to its time: oil prices were high and cheaper gas seemed a sensible improvement. The venture failed. In retrospect, Schröder has been unusually plain about that result, and about what it gave him. He discovered that he liked building a business even when the business did not survive.
That failed boiler business is a better clue to his later work than a neat founder myth would be. It demanded a customer willing to let someone alter a working home. It demanded installers, financing and confidence that the savings would be worth the disruption. Those frictions cannot be wished away by a better pitch deck. They would return in a much larger form when the technology changed from gas heaters to solar panels, storage and heat pumps.
He moved through solar sales at juwi and into sonnen, the German home-battery company. There he learned that a battery was more interesting when it could do something with the rest of a household's equipment. In 2013 Tesla recruited him to run Germany and Austria. The offer put him in a different kind of machine: a company selling a product that required a new charging network, new showrooms and a new way of talking to drivers.
A call to Elon Musk, then a move to Bavaria
At Tesla, Schröder says he hired 150 people, built out 50 Superchargers and opened six branches in roughly two years. Those are the sort of figures that can make a career seem preordained. His departure was anything but. When he decided to leave, he called Elon Musk personally. Schröder later recalled that Musk took the news calmly; the German team was less pleased. He traded a highly visible electric-car job for another stint at sonnen, then based in Wildpoldsried, a Bavarian village far from the usual technology-company postcard.
The move makes sense if the car is only one part of the problem. A charger gives a household a new appetite for power. Solar panels make some of that power during the day. A battery can hold it. A heat pump can turn electricity into warmth. Schröder had sold pieces of this emerging system from several different desks. Sonnen let him concentrate on the piece that could help join them.
He became sonnen's managing director for sales and marketing, helping expand the brand and its distribution. Former sonnen chief Christoph Ostermann later described their working relationship as close enough that joining the board of Schröder's next energy venture felt natural. Other relationships travelled too. Jannik Schall, whom Schröder knew from Tesla, would become one of his co-founders at 1KOMMA5°. The network behind the company was built in jobs where batteries, cars and customers already overlapped.
The detour through money
In 2018 he left energy for CAPinside, a financial platform in Hamburg. It looked like a sharp turn, and he described the change of industry as refreshing. Yet his complaint about finance echoed the problem he had met in energy: customers were expected to trust a complicated system they could barely compare. CAPinside tried to make investment products easier to examine. Schröder objected to the patronising assumption that ordinary people should simply hand the decision to an expert.
The fintech chapter lasted until 2021. It matters because it complicates the tidy version of a green-energy founder who always followed a single straight line. Schröder has changed direction repeatedly. The early heating business failed; he left Tesla at a moment when its German operation was growing; he left sonnen to build a financial company. His transitions suggest a taste for problems where an old industry has made the customer do too much translation. When he returned to energy, the customer would again be the person facing a stack of unfamiliar choices.
The difficult product is the installation
Schröder and his co-founders launched 1KOMMA5° in Hamburg in 2021. The company offers solar systems, batteries, heat pumps, air conditioning and electric-car chargers, along with software called Heartbeat AI. It has also assembled a network of local installation businesses. This is the less photogenic part of the proposition. A household cannot download a heat pump. Someone has to inspect a building, specify equipment, put it in place and keep it running.
Schröder has described the work as fitting puzzle pieces together: skilled trades, new hardware, technology and software. The order matters. One can design a clever energy service on a screen; a rooftop and a switchboard will each have their own opinion. A company that promises an integrated home has to manage both. It must be able to explain the whole arrangement to a customer who has no reason to become an energy-market specialist.
Heartbeat AI is meant to coordinate the parts after installation. The system can shift the timing of charging, storage and electric heating in response to weather and electricity-market conditions. A home with solar panels might store power when the sun is strong and draw from the grid when prices are low. Across many homes, the coordinated devices form what the industry calls a virtual power plant. The grand name describes a practical act: letting thousands of small decisions add up to a more flexible electricity system.
A single installation cannot prove that plan at scale. Nor does the name Heartbeat AI remove the work of making devices from different manufacturers behave. 1KOMMA5° tests combinations of equipment at its Berlin TechLab, which Schröder has toured on video. It is a revealing detail. The most valuable demonstration may be the unglamorous one where a controller, a battery and a charger cooperate without asking the homeowner to referee.
A fast company in a slow room
The company moved quickly on paper. It raised a large Series A in 2022 and reached a reported valuation of at least €1 billion in 2023. By September 2026 it said it had roughly 3,000 employees, more than 80 locations in seven markets and over 300,000 installed controllable energy systems. For the first nine months of 2026, it reported 30% organic revenue growth compared with the same period a year earlier. It forecast about US$750 million in full-year revenue. Those are company figures, and the forecast remains a forecast.
The contrast is the point: corporate growth can be counted by quarter, while home conversion happens appointment by appointment. A solar array has to meet a particular roof. A heat pump has to fit a particular building. A customer wants to know the price, the disruption and who will answer the phone afterward. The scale of 1KOMMA5° makes these questions more consequential, not less. In each new market it needs installers who can carry the promise through to the final connection.
The company's 2030 ambition is to convert more than 1.5 million buildings to renewable energy. That number is a destination, not a claim of arrival. Schröder's vision is often expressed in the appealing phrase “living on wind and sunlight forever for free.” It is a north star, not a household tariff. What he is building now is a system that tries to use clean electricity when it is abundant, and to make the purchase and installation of the necessary equipment less bewildering.
The lesson from the farm
There is a small irony in the boy who wanted to escape his family's farm growing up to run a company concerned with roofs, basements and everyday routines. He has sold electric cars, helped grow a battery company and tried to simplify finance. The farm supplied an earlier view. His parents changed their lives by changing where and how the family lived. It was a choice with consequences, rather than a slogan on a wall.
Schröder's own choices have been less rustic and much louder. They have also kept circling that practical lesson. The energy transition needs capital, policy and software, but sooner or later it reaches a front door. Someone inside must understand what is being proposed. Someone outside must know how to install it. The equipment must then do its work quietly enough to become ordinary. That is the wager behind 1KOMMA5°, and the reason Schröder's story is ultimately about a house.