Furo, founded by Lena Sophia Voß, Leonie Wagner and Simon Wittner, has raised $4 million, primarily from U.S. investors, while operating from Munich as a Delaware C Corp. The company develops software for industrial battery storage systems and secured Deutsche Bahn as an enterprise customer within a year of its founding. Its funding round was led by U.S.-based TQ Ventures, with participation from Neo, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners and Munich’s Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM). The founders studied at Stanford and UC Berkeley through CDTM, which is tied to their alma mater TU Munich, before returning to Germany. Voß said Europe, and particularly Germany after five years of successive energy crises, offered a more urgent market for reducing industrial electricity costs. Furo briefly pursued the U.S. market through Neo’s accelerator under its former name, Lumera Energy, but the founders found that distance from German customers and networks made the work harder. Voß said the move home was deliberate rather than driven by visa constraints, despite broader concerns about immigration restrictions affecting technology workers. She cited customer referrals, operational expertise, mentorship, university links and lower engineering salaries as advantages of building in Germany, while the company continues visiting the United States three or four times a year to handle administrative matters and meet existing and prospective investors. The story reflects a broader venture-capital view, recently expressed by a16z, that startups can benefit from having one foot in their home country and another in Silicon Valley.