The Camus Energy Method: Converting Technical Debt into Go-to-Market Advantage

Technical debt isn’t always a liability. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Camus Energy co-founder Astrid Atkinson revealed how her company turned the utility industry’s technological limitations into a powerful go-to-market advantage.

Understanding the Technical Landscape

The utility software market is dominated by established players like Siemens, Schneider Electric, and ABB Hitachi. But their very dominance created an opportunity. As Astrid explains, “almost all utility software is on prem today. So there’s really not a lot of maturity around like cloud scale technologies or really big data approaches or cloud scale machine learning or AI type approaches.”

This technological gap meant that when it came to building next-generation solutions, even industry giants were “starting from nearly as much of a blank slate as we are.”

Positioning Around Future Needs

Instead of competing head-on with incumbents’ current offerings, Camus Energy positioned itself around emerging challenges. As Astrid notes, “while they may have been able to more or less, kind of keep tabs on and even control the growth of things like rooftop solar and its impacts on the grid, the more we see consumer sided technologies becoming part of our everyday energy landscape, particularly electric vehicles… The more the change that’s happening on the grid sort of outpaces their ability to manage the rate of its growth.”

This insight shaped their entire go-to-market strategy. When talking with investors, they emphasize that they’re “really looking to build the software capabilities that will empower and enable the utility of the future, not necessarily the utility as it stands today.”

Avoiding the ‘Bloody Ocean’

Early advice proved crucial for their positioning strategy: “You don’t want to build software that you’re selling to utilities. That’s a bloody ocean… go find a blue ocean space, find a way to do this that doesn’t involve fighting tooth and nail with incumbent vendors.”

Rather than trying to beat established players at their own game, Camus Energy focused on creating an entirely new category: software for managing what Astrid calls “the two-way, heavily customer involved decarbonized grid of the future.”

Building Credibility Through Early Adopters

To validate their approach, Camus Energy targeted utilities already pushing for transformation. These early customers proved to be “so creative and so dedicated to demonstrating models of dramatic change in some of the areas we need it most around decarbonizing our energy supply.”

These relationships were crucial because these customers were “willing to put their money where their mouth is in terms of adopting new technologies and really pushing the envelope.”

Creating an Ecosystem

Perhaps most counterintuitively, Camus Energy took a collaborative approach to market development. “Success for us isn’t whether we beat out another fledgling software company,” Astrid emphasizes. “It’s whether we can grow the market enough for all of us to be successful together.”

This ecosystem mindset shapes their partnership strategy: “I pretty much always say yes, I would like to have a conversation about that because in my mind, success for us isn’t whether we beat out another fledgling software company, it’s whether we can grow the market enough for all of us to be successful together.”

Results and Market Validation

This positioning strategy has yielded seven utility-scale customers – significant in an industry where sales cycles are measured in years and individual contracts are substantial.

The lesson for founders? When entering markets dominated by legacy players, don’t just look at their current strengths – look at their technical limitations and how they might constrain their ability to serve future market needs. Sometimes, the biggest opportunity lies not in competing with existing solutions, but in building for the future that legacy systems can’t easily adapt to serve.