Gatby’s founder saw a business in skyrocketing energy bills

As power prices skyrocket, people may feel like they have no choice but to fork over more and more cash for their ever-increasing utility bills. That’s where Gatby, an energy marketplace platform that empowers consumers to compare power prices across multiple providers, comes into play.

Founded by Ben Thomas, Gatby informs ratepayers of potentially lower-cost utilities that they can switch to, without any termination fees. Thomas told Morning Brew that he was inspired to start the company after working in energy investment banking and discovering substantial literacy and affordability gaps in the power industry.

“The idea is we’re trying to take a confusing, unsexy category of people’s monthly bills and demystify it,” Thomas said, “and then find them better rates.”

But as many founders know, explaining to consumers how your product can save them money can feel like a Herculean task, especially with power providers; consumers often go with a default and can be unaware that other options are available to them. Gatby has been able to do so through prioritizing consumer education, embracing new technologies, and partnering with large property management companies.

Gatby’s approach

When explaining what Gatby can offer, Thomas said he tries to take customers “on a guided tour of energy,” while breaking up the deluge of information with different pieces of context. In Texas, the first state Gatby served when the company was founded in 2023, residents have a plethora of options for their power provider, but Gatby had to earn public trust by partnering with verified power providers. When the company expanded to serve states in the Northeast and Midwest, Thomas said the biggest challenge was communicating to the public that their utility isn’t their only option.

“How do you educate a consumer that’s only known one thing for so long?” Thomas said. “It’s really trying to show them the light.”

To make that process more accessible, Gatby Head of Engineering Nicolas Perlick launched AI-supported features for customers: They upload their energy bill, which is then analyzed by artificial intelligence, and receive an email summarizing its findings and their options.

“We really are trying to be at the cutting edge of leveraging the tools we have access to right now to break this complicated industry down into layman terms,” Perlick told Morning Brew.

Strategic distribution

Perlick attributes Gatby’s success to Thomas’s distribution plan, which relies on working with multi-family and single-family property developers, who use Gatby to help power their residences.

“There’s this whole fallacy whenever you’re building a company, or whenever you’re working on a product, that once you ship it, [customers will] come. And that’s just not true. Ben had the foresight to see we really needed to have a distribution [plan] from the very beginning,” Perlick said. “We’re working with over 300,000 multi-family units…That pace of growth is just unbelievable.”

Getting in touch with developers and players in the energy landscape was critical to that growth, and Gatby leaned on networking with the help of trusted advisors like Shannon McGriff, executive director of The Energy Professionals Association. McGriff said that Gatby is a product that the utility industry “was lacking,” and presents a huge opportunity for growth.

“The [markets] where retail choice is an option, it’s different state by state, how the billing works, who the utility is, who owns things—it’s a little complicated. It’s not just one-size-fits-all for each market. You have to narrow it down,” she told Morning Brew. “And I think that’s where the technology really hasn’t grown to scale in our space, because it isn’t such an easy fix.”

And Gatby’s ability to bring fresh eyes (and fresh tech) to a long-standing issue has been impactful, she said.

“They’re a unique group in our space,” McGriff said. “They aren’t antiquated, they are moving fast.”