The Lede
The man behind the numbers Britain's battery owners open every morning
Quentin Scrimshire runs Modo Energy from a converted terrace on Stephenson Way, a block that mostly houses architects and dental training colleges, and about eighty people who, collectively, have opinions about how much a megawatt-hour of stored electricity in Great Britain should be worth on a Thursday afternoon in April. Modo publishes those opinions as benchmarks. Roughly four out of five owners of grid-scale batteries in Britain pay for them. That is, in a quiet British way, a monopoly - the kind you get by naming a category before anyone else notices there was one.
Scrimshire, who goes by Q, is thirty-something, wears the mild affect of an engineer who has learned to sell software, and describes himself on his personal site as "CEO @ Modo Energy. Short attention span." This is not the usual founder self-description. Usually founders describe themselves as visionaries, or, at minimum, as builders. Scrimshire has picked the trait most founders spend money on executive coaching to hide. He runs a company approaching a hundred people. Draw your own conclusions.
What Modo actually does, stripped of the LinkedIn language about "operating systems for global electrification," is this: it collects vast amounts of dispatch data from battery energy storage systems on the British grid, models what the batteries earned versus what an optimally-run battery could have earned, and publishes the delta. If you own a battery, this tells you whether your operator is any good. If you finance a battery, this tells you whether the pitch deck lied. If you build batteries, this tells you what to build next. Modo also forecasts the numbers forward, which is where the interesting money is. In December 2025 the company raised twenty-five million pounds - about thirty-three million dollars - from Molten Ventures, ETF Partners, MMC Ventures, and Fred. Olsen Limited, the Norwegian-British conglomerate whose interests span shipping, offshore wind, and, apparently, the software that will value the batteries their offshore wind farms will one day be paired with. Total funding is now around fifty-four million dollars.
None of this would surprise anyone who traced Scrimshire's arc backward. He did his MEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Manchester, joined Centrica's graduate scheme, and rotated through what turned out to be a decade-long tour of everything the British power system was worried about at once: offshore wind, oil and gas, thermal plants, peaking plants, and, at the tail end, batteries. One of his last Centrica projects was Roocoat, then the largest battery site in Europe at fifty megawatts. Fifty megawatts, for reference, is now the sort of number a developer would blush at. Britain has since installed several gigawatts. Scrimshire watched the market inflate from the inside.
Then he did the sensible thing for someone who has watched a market inflate: he left the big utility. He went to Kiwi Power, a venture-backed London company doing demand-side flexibility, and ran their European storage business. Kiwi Power eventually got acquired by ENGIE, which is the sort of exit that teaches you that utilities buy software companies once the software companies have already priced them out of building the software themselves. Scrimshire filed that lesson away and, in 2019, co-founded Modo.
The insight, if there is one, is that the energy transition is going to be won on numbers rather than megawatts. There will be more batteries. Everyone knows there will be more batteries. Fewer people know how to price them, and fewer still have five years of clean, methodologically consistent data on what identical batteries earn under different management. Modo does. That is the moat. The AI narrative laid over the top of it, which Scrimshire articulated in December's press release - "because we own our entire modelling stack, we can deliver AI-powered, explainable valuation workflows that replace static analysis with dynamic intelligence systems" - reads like every other 2026 fundraising release, but the "we own our entire modelling stack" clause is the load-bearing one. Most incumbents do not.