Energy analytics firm WegoWise buys Melon Power

Finding tools and software for energy management can be challenging as building owners have to navigate an ever-growing market to track and analyze energy use in commercial buildings.

The latest vendor is WegoWise, which offers aWeb-based platform to analyze water, gas and electricity data, mainly targeting multi-tenant apartment building owners. The Mass.-based company has acquired Melon Power, a startup that leverages Green Button and other utility data to help commercial buildings target Energy Star benchmarking.

The pairing makes sense as Melon Power, a recent winner at theU.S. Department of Energy's contest to build apps for energy efficiency, helps commercial building managers input their energy usage to benchmark against other buildings.

WegoWise CEO Andrew Chen says adding Melon Power's benchmarking analytics brings domain and technical expertise best suited for the commercial and industrial market.

"Our approach is focused on the value of data and capturing a lot of business intelligence from property management," says Chen. "It was a natural decision to combine our collective innovations and target the commercial market."

But making a dent in the ever-growing commercial market for energy software and services will be a challenge. Chen points to key differentiators in WegoWise's more "universal solution" -- the platform tracks water and natural gas data as well as electricity -- and the company's sizable database of 165 million square feet of property from more than 11,000 buildings.

WegoWise, raised $1.9 million in Series A funding round last year, plans to make the commercial building offering available in the first quarter of 2013.