Built to Deploy Fast. Designed to Go Anywhere.

There is a story that comes up often in conversations with energy businesses about software. A company signs a contract for a new platform. Months pass. The renewal comes around. The software still has not been deployed.

Jessica Venning-Bryan and Simon Pohlen had heard those stories too. They decided Factor was going to be different.

Over a cup of coffee

Simon's benchmark for Factor deployment is not weeks or months. It is the time it takes to drink a coffee.

The technical foundation that makes that possible was a deliberate decision made from day one. Factor is multi-tenanted, meaning adding a new customer is a five to ten minute job rather than a ninety day project. It runs on AWS and can be deployed into whichever AWS region a customer needs, handling local data sovereignty requirements without friction. And when a new tenant is set up, it comes pre-configured with sample data relevant to the problems that customer is trying to solve, so pricing teams can get started immediately rather than waiting for a lengthy setup process.

The inspiration came from outside the energy industry. If signing up to Netflix takes thirty seconds, Simon asked, why should getting access to a pricing and forecasting platform take three months? The answer was that it did not have to. Once you start thinking that way, he says, it just becomes the way you build software.

Doing one thing really well

The decision to build a specialised pricing and forecasting platform, rather than a broader system that tries to handle everything, was equally deliberate.

Jessica talks about a clear shift she has observed across software purchasing more broadly. Teams are moving away from large transformation projects and toward best-of-breed solutions that integrate cleanly with everything else they are running. The appeal of that model is obvious. The risk is that best-of-breed only works when the integration is genuinely good, otherwise you end up with a collection of disconnected tools that creates more work than it solves.

Factor's answer to that was to treat the integration layer as a core part of the product, not an afterthought. Building the API layer received as much attention as building the pricing and forecasting functionality itself. The result is a platform that does one thing at a very high level and connects cleanly to the CRMs, billing systems, and data platforms that energy businesses are already running.

That focus also meant Factor could go deep on the problem rather than spreading across many. The energy pricing challenge is getting harder as the transition accelerates, Jessica says, and the work is too critical to approach with a generic tool. Specialising was not a constraint. It was the point.

Built for any market in the world

The same flexibility that makes Factor easy to deploy also makes it adaptable across very different energy markets.

Simon is clear that the key is not being too opinionated about how a particular problem should be solved. Every market approaches pricing differently, but every market is grappling with the same underlying challenge: how do you price energy quickly and accurately in the face of a changing system? Solar is being installed everywhere. Batteries are going in everywhere. The problem exists whether a market is deregulated or government-run, large or small.

That range extends further than most people might expect. Factor can operate for a mining company in Western Australia that is completely disconnected from the grid and effectively runs its own energy supply, right through to a multi-million connection retailer in Europe or the UK. The platform adapts to the operating context rather than requiring the customer to adapt to it.

As Jessica puts it: we really could go anywhere in the world.