A platform, live across 15 pilot sites, that turns electrical events at the insured site into data. I want your read on our channel and go-to-market.
Dmitri Ramzaitsev · Co-founder, Enerthon
For Pommie Lutchman · Founder & CEO, Ocular Technologies · FI Mentor & Angel Investor
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
Who's Talking
Oxford-trained. Operated and sold across 3 continents.
Operated, rescued, sold – now building.
Dmitri Ramzaitsev
Co-founder · Enerthon
Top 0.25% globally with IBO Diploma (45/45). Oxford Maths, then MSc Financial Economics at Saïd (Distinction).
First job: Morgan Stanley (London). Then Finance Director on a $1B metals & mining project – $350M+ invested; arranged Chinese bank funding and a $700M EPC contract (witnessed by Putin and Xi).
Rescued and sold 2 distressed companies (Russia and South Africa) in 2025 for €4M. It took grit, patience and perseverance over >7 years. Restructured and liquidated 25 legal entities in 7 countries.
Today
Co-founded Enerthon and built Tena.
We built Tena: insurer-grade evidence platform, live across 15 pilot sites with a top-tier insurance administrator engaged. I run strategy, commercial and partnerships – which is exactly where I'd value your channel experience.
🇷🇺 Born in Moscow · 🇪🇺 Educated in Europe · 🇨🇾 Based in Cyprus · 🌍 Operate globally
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
The Problem We Saw
Insurers pay electrical claims they cannot see.
Short-term insurers settle electrical-damage claims on a one-time inspection and a Certificate of Compliance – a snapshot that says nothing about what actually happened at the moment of failure. The cause is invisible, so the verdict is a guess.
🔍
No causality. Grid surge or internal fault? Today nobody can prove it, so the claim is paid, declined or disputed on assumption.
💸
Leakage on both sides. Valid claims declined hurt retention; invalid claims paid hurt the loss ratio. The insurer loses either way.
⚖️
No subrogation lever. When the grid is genuinely at fault, there is no time-stamped evidence to recover against.
⚡
A standing tail risk. When load-shedding returns, switching events, inverter and generator damage and disputed claims spike with it – the evidence layer needs to be in place before it does.
The gap
A Certificate of Compliance certifies a moment. The claim is about a different moment – the one nobody was watching.
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
The Market
Where the risk lives – and where the channel runs.
SA non-life is a concentrated ~R150B market. Capacity sits at the top; the risk flows down through underwriting managers and brokers to millions of insured sites. Our buyers are the administrators & underwriters; the brokers are how the product reaches the end customer.
Underwriters / Insurers
~30 insurers · our paying client · want it in the policy
SantamHollardOld MutualGuardriskOUTsuranceBryte
UMAs / Administrators
~200 UMAs · the wedge – bundle Tena into the product
Channel
Brokers / Intermediaries
~10,000+ licensed advisers – the route to the end customer
Insured properties
~6M sites with short-term cover – every one a place for a device
Second customerGrid & industrial
The same device monitors generation and grid assets – exactly the SCADA / heavy-fuel-oil-generator visibility you built for miners. Eskom loses ~R200M+ a year to theft and vandalism, with ~2,500 transformers overloaded and at risk; SA has hundreds of thousands of distribution transformers – and large rural miners run the same diesel/HFO gensets.
Figures rounded. ~R150B 2024 revenue and top-10-carry-80% from KPMG SA Insurance Industry Survey 2025. UMA figures from SAUMA (~60 members, ~R20B+ premium); ~200 total UMAs is a founder estimate. Broker figure from FIA (~10,000+ licensed advisers). Eskom ~R200M+ annual theft/vandalism loss and ~2,500 at-risk transformers from Eskom (2024–2025). ~6M insured-site and transformer-fleet device counts are founder estimates; ~60%+ surge-claim growth from Santam / Dialdirect load-shedding reporting (2022–2023).
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
How Big
A R30B SA market – and SA is the small one.
Every monitorable insured site in SA is a device we can place at R400 / month. The same problem is far larger abroad.
R30B ARR · TAM
Every monitorable insured site in SA – ~6M devices × R4,800 / year.
R3B ARR · SAM
SA high-risk segment: commercial 3-phase + repeat-claim residential.
~R90M ARR · SOM
3 administrators × 100 brokers × 5 customers / broker / month → ~18k devices within 3 years.
The same problem, far bigger markets
🇮🇳 India ~10× · 🇧🇷 Brazil ~10× · 🇲🇽 Mexico ~2× the size of 🇿🇦 South Africa.
Device counts are founder estimates · revenue basis is the R400 / month subscription, not claims value · multipliers based on relative non-life insurance market size. The SOM model is built on the administrator → broker → end-customer channel – the exact path we want your read on. Pilot figures are aggregate fleet data (March–May 2026); site-level identifiers and administrator names held under NDA.
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
Why You
Why I wanted your hour specifically.
You've built a channel-only business, taken an industrial data product into mining, and you mentor and invest across SA tech. That's a rare three-way overlap with exactly where Tena is right now.
20+ yrs Ocular Technologies
Founder & CEO. Built a specialist enterprise / CX business – Genesys VAR, RPA, conversational AI – sold entirely through partners.
SCADA for miners
Built a product to extract SCADA data for large & rural miners (Barrick-type), monitoring heavy-fuel-oil gensets. Direct overlap with Tena's grid/industrial layer.
Channel-only conviction
Never sell direct – only via brokers & agents. The exact principle behind Tena's broker-day → administrator strategy.
Mentor & angel
FI global mentor, IoDSA Fellow, angel investor. Deep SA network across tech, channel and industrial.
Where you can move the needle
Channel design· pressure-test our administrator → broker → customer model against how you actually built Ocular's partner machine
Industrial intros· miners / grid operators running gensets, where the second-customer story lives
Insurance & channel intros· UMAs, administrators or broker networks in your network
What I'll ask you to react to
Is broker-day → administrator the right sequencing, or do we win the administrator first?
How did you structure partner economics so brokers actually sold?
Who in your network should I be talking to in the next month?
Sources: Ocular Technologies founder/CEO, Genesys VAR and CX/RPA/conversational-AI positioning per pommielutchman.com, ITWeb and Ocular public profiles; SCADA-for-mining / heavy-fuel-oil-generator product and channel-only stance per Pommie's remarks at the FI session on 19 May 2026. Please correct anything I've misremembered – this slide is my read of your background, not a fact sheet.
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
What Tena Is
A certified device that watches continuously and reports like an assessor.
Tena sits on the site and records every voltage, frequency and earth event at sub-second resolution – then produces a formal Power Quality Incident Report in a structure a claims desk already understands. The same telemetry stack reads grid and generator assets – your SCADA-extraction territory.
Continuous
Sub-second voltage, frequency, SPD and earth-impedance monitoring – not a one-time snapshot.
Certified
NRCS Letter of Authority (to 2029) and ICASA Type Approval. A regulated, insurer-ready device.
3-phase
Built for commercial & industrial sites – where the large, repeat claims and the gensets sit.
Report-ready
Executive summary → root cause → insurance relevance → final position. A claims-desk voice.
🇿🇦 Proudly built in SA
The shift
From "we think the grid did it" to a time-stamped, causality-attributed verdict on every event – before the claim is even filed.
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
The Data Is Real
15 devices. 2 months. 900 events.
This is not a demo. It is the raw output of a live fleet, analysed end-to-end. Five things continuous monitoring revealed that a one-time inspection never could:
1
Phase Imbalance
One phase was carrying nearly half the load.
2
Earthing & SPD
Valid CoC. Earthing had degraded anyway.
3
Generator Health
Grid blamed. Generator was the real problem.
4
Solar Inverter Damage
The backup was the source of the damage.
KEY
5
Multi-Site Cluster
Repeated clusters, then a regional event.
~1 event / device / day
Well above anything a site owner would notice. The loudest device runs ~6/day, the quietest near zero – a wide range that identifies high-risk policyholders inside a book.
~50 cluster events
Cross-site correlations in 2 months – roughly one per working day. Peak: 10 devices within a tenth of a second, an unambiguous transmission-level disturbance.
~20 / 40% external / internal
Every event classified by archetype: external (cluster-validated) or internal, with a small dual-source tail. A defensible verdict, not an assumption.
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
The Model Is Proven
Insurers already fund devices that produce evidence.
The insurer-distributed monitoring device is not a new idea – it is a proven playbook, internationally and right here in South Africa. Each was distributed through an insurance channel, not sold direct. Tena applies it to the one risk nobody has covered yet.
🇺🇸 United States · Fire risk
Ting
Whisker Labs · 30+ insurers
1M+ homes
Insurers fund and distribute the device for free to policyholders. Working with 30+ insurers – State Farm placed 1M+ sensors, Nationwide adding 500K. A 2025 study showed $81/home/year in reduced fire claims.
Proves: insurers will fund device distribution at million-unit scale when the loss case is clear.
🇿🇦 South Africa · Geyser risk
Sensor Networks
SA insurance-IoT leader
Live with SA insurers
The smart geyser is the SA insurance industry's accepted IoT device for the geyser risk – bundled through insurer partners and developers.
Proves: SA insurers already fund monitoring devices – on one risk. The electrical risk is open.
🇿🇦 South Africa · Vehicle risk
Tracker
Insurance-channel at scale
~1M subscribers
SA insurers discount premiums when a Tracker unit is installed, because it produces an insurer-grade evidence trail. R150–R350/month, bundled into cover – sold through the insurance channel.
Proves: SA insurers will alter pricing for a third-party device that delivers evidence. The exact architecture Tena replicates.
The whitespace: Ting (fire), Sensor Networks (geyser) and Tracker (theft) each own a risk – and each is distributed through an insurance channel, never sold direct. None measures sub-second electrical events. Tena is the only one built for the electrical risk – and it gets stronger with every device added.
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
Why Us
The right depth for this specific problem.
Insurer-grade evidence needs three things at once: someone who can build the hardware, someone who understands the energy physics, and someone who speaks the claims desk's language. We have all three – and we're actively looking for the channel wisdom you carry.
The founding team & mentor
Reece Doig
Co-founder
Red Seal electrician & systems architect. Built Tena hardware and firmware from the ground up.
Kirill Popov
Co-founder
25+ years in energy & chemicals. Former division head at one of the world's largest energy companies.
Grearson Gifford
Project Mentor
37+ years as an insurance building assessor in KZN. The bridge between device data and the claims desk.
Cash-flow first
Enerthon is funded by its co-founders and its renewable-energy projects – the energy-as-a-service work in Cyprus generates revenue today that covers Tena's running costs. We are building this to last, not to chase the next round.
Mentor Session · Pommie Lutchman
The Ask
Pommie – pressure-test our channel model from someone who's actually run one, and open the doors only you can.
"Never sell the product directly – only through brokers and agents."
Pommie Lutchman · FI session, 19 May 2026
1 · Channel pressure-test
Administrator-first or broker-first? And how do we structure broker economics so they actually sell the device?
2 · Your honest read
Where is this weakest? What would you fix before taking it to your network?
3 · Intros
The doors only you can open: parties running gensets, and insurance industry players in your reach.
I'm not asking for capital today. I'm asking for your network and your judgment – the two things a channel veteran has that I can't buy.
