What Does an ERP for Energy Retailers Actually Do?
When Ramón asks Omar to explain what Quixotic does, Omar reaches for the most relatable image he can find: that electricity bill you open, don't understand, and throw in a drawer. The five lines of charges, the impenetrably named concepts, the four decimal places. "That invoice — all those calculations — is what we do," he says.
Quixotic is a cloud SaaS ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) built specifically for energy retailers: the companies that buy electricity on wholesale markets and sell it to households and businesses. Where a general-purpose ERP like SAP manages warehouses, purchase orders and logistics, Quixotic manages everything specific to the energy retail business — ingesting hourly consumption readings from distribution networks, calculating tariffs according to Spain's regulatory framework, generating compliant invoices, creating the accounting entries, and producing the payment files for the bank. It replaces what, before Quixotic, many smaller retailers were doing in Excel.
The product is fully modular. A new retailer can start with data integration alone — the minimum viable foothold — and add billing, accounting, smart metering management, and AI-powered search as they grow. Pricing is based on portfolio size: either the number of supply points (individual meters) under management or the volume of energy traded. Some industrial-focused retailers have just 1,000 customers but generate €100M in revenue; others have hundreds of thousands of residential accounts. The pricing model accommodates both.
How Spain's energy market works — in 90 seconds
Europe liberalised electricity retail in the late 1990s. In Spain this meant separating two functions that used to sit inside the same company:
- Distributors own and operate the physical cables, substations, and smart meters. They charge all retailers an access fee (a "peaje") to use the grid. Endesa, Iberdrola, and Naturgy still own these networks. You cannot compete here — it's a regulated natural monopoly.
- Retailers (comercializadoras) buy electricity on wholesale markets — day-ahead, intraday, futures, or through PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements) with renewable producers — and sell it to end customers. This segment is fully open: anyone can register a retailer with Spain's CNMC. Over 500 companies currently do so, making Spain the country with the most active energy retailers in Europe.
Big players like Iberdrola and Endesa have production assets (wind farms, nuclear plants) that give them a cost advantage. Smaller retailers buy everything on the open market but compete on price, service quality, bundled products, and experience.
Why Build an ERP — and Why for This Sector?
Omar and his co-founder Ernesto came to Quixotic sideways. They had been running a Salesforce and CRM consultancy for several years — first in London, then in Spain — and had accumulated clients across multiple sectors: education, NGOs, real estate, and energy. The consultancy work was profitable but, as Omar puts it plainly, it was boring. Services don't scale. And once you have done something for five or six years, the intellectual challenge evaporates.
The decision to productise was clear. The question was which vertical to target. They spent roughly six months evaluating real estate against energy, and chose energy — counterintuitively — precisely because the product was so heavily regulated.
That regulation, which at first looks like a constraint, is actually the competitive moat. Every billing calculation in Spain must comply with the CNMC's rules. Get it wrong and the regulator issues a fine. This means a retailer cannot build their own billing engine and casually maintain it — every regulatory change requires a software update, legal review, and testing cycle. "I've never seen a client leave us and decide to build something custom," Omar says. "It always goes the other way. They start with a custom build or a competitor, they hit the regulatory wall, and they come to us."
The other reason to choose ERP over CRM was product-market fit precision. A CRM for energy retailers would require heavy customisation for every client — each one runs slightly different commercial processes — and the business drifts back towards services. An ERP, anchored in the regulated billing logic that every retailer must follow identically, can be standardised across the whole market.
"You can do it yourself in SAP, custom-build the whole thing — but then why do you have 35 developers? You're an energy company. Make your beer taste better."
— Omar Sequera, co-founder & co-CEO, Quixotic
The Funding Journey: TAM, Dilution, and the Portuguese Investor Who Got It
Quixotic was founded in April 2021. Within months the team entered Lanzadera, the Valencia-based startup accelerator backed by Juan Roig. The Lanzadera period taught Omar something he hadn't expected: raising money is a completely different skill from building a company. He had thirty employees and several years of operating experience; he had never pitched a cap table structure to a VC.
The first challenge was structural. Building an ERP requires enough modules to actually complete a workflow — you can't release a product that generates a calculation but can't produce an invoice, or invoices but can't push a payment file to the bank. The minimum viable product for Quixotic was expensive. Omar estimated needing €500–600K for the first real MVP. In Spain's early-stage market in 2021, that was almost impossible to raise in a single pre-seed round on a PowerPoint alone.
The solution was to split the raise into two tranches and launch a narrower initial product: a data integration and aggregation module that pulled consumption data from Spain's dozens of distribution networks and normalised it — useful on its own, even before the billing engine was ready. On a €1M pre-money valuation, they raised €260K. Six months of traction (€100K ARR in year one) justified a second tranche at €2M post-money, raising another €250K. The dilution across both was steeper than ideal, and it created a constraint for the third round.
2021
Pre-seed tranche 1 — €260K at €1M pre-money
Led by business angels including an early Wallapop investor. Entered Lanzadera (Sep 2021). Product: data integration module only.
2022
Pre-seed tranche 2 — ~€250K at €2M post-money
Raised on the back of €100K ARR in year one. Enabled completion of the core billing engine.
2024
Seed round — €1.3M · Led by Bynd VC + Demium + Akka
8–9 months to close. ARR grown to ~€300K. Bynd (Portugal) and Demium (Valencia) co-lead. Akka co-invests. First hires in marketing, operations, and sales made post-close. Used to fund international expansion preparation and product development.
The hardest single question from every fund was the same: what is your TAM? Omar's candid answer: in Spain alone, roughly €50M ARR if you capture 100% of the market — not investable for a typical VC fund expecting a portfolio company to return the fund. The thesis only holds if Quixotic internationalises. Portugal is the first step. France and Italy — larger markets with similar regulatory structures — are the longer-term targets.
The investor who closed the round and articulated this most clearly was Bynd, a Portuguese fund. They pointed out that Portuguese startups almost always launch with internationalisation as a day-one assumption, because Portugal is too small to justify a venture-scale ambition on its own. Many Spanish startups, by contrast, default to the domestic market — which is large enough to build a profitable SME but not a fund-returner. Bynd's willingness to back Quixotic reflected their comfort with this dynamic and their belief that the Spanish regulatory model maps closely enough to neighbouring markets to make expansion practical.
The Product: From Excel to AI-Powered Configuration
Before Quixotic existed, a small retailer's billing process might look like this: an employee logs into each of Spain's distribution network portals, manually downloads asynchronous data files containing new customer registrations and meter readings, uploads them into a spreadsheet, runs macros, checks the outputs, and then uploads the corrected files back to the portal. This process — repeated across dozens of portals, for every billing cycle — occupies entire teams at mid-sized retailers.
Quixotic's first automation attack on this was a set of bots, built as early as 2021, that mimicked human browser behaviour: logging in, finding the right buttons, downloading the files, and feeding them into the platform automatically. This was not AI in any modern sense — it was browser automation — but it eliminated significant manual labour.
The platform has since grown to eight to ten modules covering the full operational lifecycle: data ingestion, tariff calculation, invoice generation, accounting integration, CRM connectors, collections, smart metering management, and analytics. The current average contract value is €75,000 per year, up from €3–4K at launch — a reflection of the module breadth now on offer.
The newest layer is AI. Quixotic uses Claude (Anthropic) as its underlying model, hosted on their own AWS infrastructure rather than through a public API — partly for data security and partly because it allowed them to work with a model that could be precisely contextualised with Quixotic's own data schemas. The approach is not fine-tuning but context injection: Omar's team tagged every database field with natural-language descriptions, explaining what each field contains, what regulations govern it, and what kinds of queries it typically answers. The LLM then enables natural-language search across years of billing history — a query that previously required an engineer writing a custom database query can now be issued in plain language by a billing operations manager.
The next phase, expected within a few months of recording, extends this to product configuration: an energy retailer's operations team will be able to define a new tariff product — its pricing structure, bundle conditions, special cases — through a conversational interface rather than a technical configuration screen.
"We're not training a model. We give it our tables, tag every field, explain the regulatory context — and then it answers in natural language what used to take a developer two hours to query."
— Omar Sequera
Why Vertical SaaS Has Near-Zero Churn — and Very Long Sales Cycles
One of the counterintuitive dynamics of high-ticket vertical B2B SaaS is the relationship between acquisition difficulty and retention. Quixotic's sales cycles run six to eight months. Implementing the platform involves integrating with the client's existing accounting system, CRM, bank payment infrastructure, and multiple external data feeds. By the time a client is live, they are deeply embedded.
In three years of operation, Quixotic has lost two clients. Both had only one module deployed and were small enough that manual workarounds remained viable. No client that had reached multi-module integration has ever left. The stickiness is structural: migrating away from an ERP means re-implementing every data integration, re-training the billing team, rebuilding all regulatory compliance logic, and accepting months of operational risk. The switching cost is not just money — it is organisational disruption and regulatory exposure.
This dynamic also informs Quixotic's partnership strategy. Large IT consultancies (Omar references one major regional player) bring Quixotic into energy client engagements because the consultancy covers the full implementation lifecycle — CRM, core systems, transformation — and Quixotic provides the deep billing and regulatory layer the consultancy doesn't build itself. The consultancy earns a one-time implementation fee; Quixotic earns recurring SaaS revenue. Neither displaces the other.
The bundle thesis: why energy retailers are becoming telecoms companies
The single biggest product differentiation opportunity for a commoditised energy retailer is bundling. Omar has been tracking this for four years. The playbook follows telecoms — where mobile operators long ago learned that a customer with phone + broadband + TV churns far less than a customer with phone alone, because leaving means losing all three services at once.
- Energy + telecoms: MasOrange (the Orange/MásMóvil merger) already does this — customers get a discount on energy for holding their mobile contract. Quixotic can produce a unified bill for both services.
- Energy + EV charging: Bundling a subsidised home charger with an energy tariff locks customers into a hardware-dependent relationship.
- Energy + solar + battery: If a retailer finances your solar panels, you're unlikely to switch — you'd lose the financing arrangement and potentially the maintenance contract.
- Energy + streaming: Some retailers have experimented with including Netflix or Spotify. The idea: if leaving your energy provider means losing your streaming subscription, churn drops sharply.
All of these bundles require the ability to combine service types, service-specific taxes, and cross-product discounts on a single invoice. That's exactly what Quixotic's complex billing engine is designed for — and where simpler competitors cannot follow.
Salary Transparency: A First Principle, Not a Policy
One of the sharpest observations in the conversation is not about energy markets at all — it's about pay. Quixotic publishes every employee's salary in a shared spreadsheet accessible to the whole team. This is not unusual in Scandinavian companies; it is rare in Spain.
Omar's framing is philosophical rather than HR-managerial: if you cannot explain why one person earns more than another by reference to objective differences in output or responsibility, they shouldn't be earning more. The alternative — confidential, negotiated salaries — creates a system where the most aggressive negotiators earn the most, regardless of performance. Statistically, women tend to ask for smaller raises and smaller initial salaries than men in otherwise equivalent situations. Salary transparency eliminates the information asymmetry that enables this gap.
The practical effect at Quixotic is that any employee can see exactly what they would need to achieve to earn more, and can ask Omar directly what separates their current output from that of a higher-paid colleague. The conversation becomes about contribution rather than negotiation. Ramón confirms Nova operates the same policy, and notes that the main benefit he has experienced is not fairness per se but the elimination of the corrosive back-channel speculation — the coffee-machine conversations about who earns what — that erodes culture in companies where pay is opaque.
From Bacardi to Bootstrapped Founder: The Non-Linear Path
Omar's career trajectory is a deliberate counterpoint to the typical Nova guest. He grew up in Madrid in a working-class household where professional aspiration defaulted to stable public-sector employment. He was a poor student — he suspects undiagnosed ADHD — and found the structure of the Spanish school system actively hostile to the way his brain worked. At sixteen he moved to Scotland, where he completed the equivalent of a two-year computing diploma. He enjoyed programming but recognised early that he was too sociable to spend his career facing a screen, and consciously pivoted towards roles where technology was the context but people were the product.
A chance encounter while bartending led to a recruiter from Bacardi. He spent four years in Spain in trade marketing — managing brand relationships with bars, restaurants, and hotels — and then moved to London, where a Bacardi contact recommended him to a Salesforce consultancy just launching. The jump from brand marketing to B2B software sales was his first deliberate career pivot, taken at a significant salary cut (from approximately £75K to around £30K) because he saw it as the best vehicle for learning a new skill set.
The consultancy work was formative in two ways. It taught him to sell enterprise software — a skill he had zero exposure to at Bacardi — and it introduced him to Ernesto, his future co-founder. When the consultancy closed its Spanish operation because hourly rates in Spain couldn't compete with those in Germany or Switzerland, Omar and Ernesto launched their own firm rather than accept being reduced to a nearshore delivery centre. That consultancy was later acquired in an acqui-hire by a larger tech company — the team of thirty Salesforce developers was the asset, not the revenue — and Omar used his exit proceeds and equity exchange as the seed capital for Quixotic.
"I didn't know what a consultancy was until I was 25. I had no reference points in my family for that kind of career. The best thing that happened to me was not fitting into the structure of school."
— Omar Sequera
On Entrepreneurship, Parenthood, and the 5am Habit
Omar is about to become a father when the episode records. He is clear-eyed about the tension between startup intensity and new parenthood: he doesn't pretend the balance is easy, but he has structured his life around a natural rhythm that creates protected time before the day's demands begin.
He wakes naturally between 5 and 6am — not from a disciplined alarm, he emphasises, but because his body simply doesn't stay asleep. He uses those pre-dawn hours for deep work, and because of them he can close the laptop at a reasonable hour in the evening without guilt. The hours are already banked.
He also tracks his time using Clockify, an old habit from consulting where every hour billed to a client had to be logged and justified. As a founder wearing multiple hats — sales, product, strategy, operations — he finds the retrospective view revealing: it regularly shows that he has been over-investing time in one function (often product) at the expense of another (often commercial development), and prompts a deliberate rebalancing. He recommends the practice to any founder who feels busy but isn't sure where the hours are actually going.
Omar's advice for first-time founders
- Don't found without a problem to solve. "Don't start because you want to be an entrepreneur. Start because you have found something that needs fixing. If you don't have that yet, wait — even if it takes five or ten years."
- Get a startup-specialist lawyer on day one. Quixotic's most expensive early mistake was constituting with a generalist tax accountant. The cap table, share classes and shareholders' agreement were structured incorrectly, requiring a full legal restructuring before investors would proceed. The cost — in time, money, and credibility — far exceeded any saving on legal fees.
- Shareholders' agreements must plan for the worst. Most founding teams write friendly, optimistic pacts because they are excited and trust each other. The document should instead ask: what happens if one founder becomes impossible to work with? What happens if one founder is incapacitated? What happens if someone receives an external acquisition offer only they want to take? A good startup lawyer will force these uncomfortable conversations so you don't have them later under hostile conditions.
- Separate MRR from services revenue clearly from day one. Investors can spot when a SaaS ARR number is inflated by development work billed as subscription revenue. Keep the invoices separate and the reporting clean, even when you need every euro of cash to extend runway.
- Track your time as a founder. Use Clockify or any equivalent. Review where your hours went each week. The distribution will surprise you and will tell you your next hire before any spreadsheet does.
Key Takeaways
- Regulatory complexity is a moat, not a risk. Quixotic chose the most regulated part of the energy stack deliberately. Every CNMC rule change becomes a switching cost for clients considering a rebuild, and a competitive barrier for new entrants who lack Quixotic's compliance history.
- Vertical SaaS produces near-zero churn at the cost of long sales cycles. Once a client has multi-module integration and their data embedded in the platform, leaving is an operational and regulatory project in itself. Quixotic has lost two clients in three years — both single-module, small-portfolio accounts.
- TAM is only a problem if you stay in Spain. ~500 retailers × €75K ACV = a profitable niche business, not a VC-fundable one. The growth story requires France, Italy, Portugal — and potentially adjacent complex-billing verticals like telecoms.
- The bundle thesis will reshape energy retail. As retailers like MasOrange combine telecoms, energy, EV charging, solar, and content services on one bill, the complexity of billing becomes the product differentiator. General-purpose competitors cannot follow Quixotic there.
- Salary transparency removes negotiation bias. Making all salaries visible to the whole team doesn't just improve fairness — it eliminates the information asymmetry that lets the most aggressive negotiators (disproportionately men) earn more than equivalent contributors. It replaces negotiation with a clear performance ladder.
- Non-linear careers compound differently. Omar's path — computing diploma, hospitality, brand marketing, software sales, consultancy, founder — equipped him with commercial instincts, people skills, and customer empathy that a direct technical route often doesn't develop. The "wrong" background for an ERP founder may have been exactly right for this one.
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