Press

P R E S S B I O G R A P H Y
René Pruijssers
CEO & Co-Investor · Covolt

René Pruijssers is CEO and co-investor at Covolt, the independent energy aggregator and optimizer based in Veghel. Under his leadership, Covolt uses the Horizon AI platform to manage over 800 megawatts of solar, battery, and flexible consumption capacity—a fully-fledged virtual power plant for the Dutch and Belgian power grids. Previously, Pruijssers founded Fudura and built it into a market leader in energy infrastructure for business customers; after its sale to a private equity firm, it grew into a unicorn. His conviction: grid congestion is not a problem, but a revenue model.

P R E S S BIOGRAPHY

David Rijsman, CTO & Co-Investor at Covolt

David Rijsman is the CTO and co-investor of Covolt, the independent energy aggregator and optimizer based in Veghel. He is responsible for Horizon, the AI platform that Covolt uses to manage and trade more than 800 megawatts of solar, battery, and flexible demand capacity in real time on the Dutch and Belgian energy markets.

Throughout his career, Rijsman has been developing software that enables complex systems to make their own decisions: at NASA, he conducted research on autonomous systems; at Oracle, he worked on decision-support applications; and later, he served as Head of Optimization at Quintiq and led the engineering team for the American optimization platform Nextmv. He traded the Silicon Valley of Oracle and NASA for Silicon Veghel, where he is building an AI-first engineering organization at Covolt that adjusts the power grid around the clock. His conviction: flexibility doesn’t lie in the battery, but in the algorithm that controls it.