Here are some of the startups we met through the Startupbootcamp Energy Accelerator program selection process who are expanding the frontiers in decarbonisation, digitisation and decentralisation.
Decarbonisation (Cleaner Energy)
These folks really impressed us.
- Liquidstar (USA/Hong Kong) are the “Deliveroo of Power” – they replace liquid fuel with portable battery storage for the 1.1 billion people who have little access to power. This is of great relevance to disadvantaged areas around the world, including in outback communities where the economics of power supply preclude many solutions. My personal favourite!
- BIA (Spain) focuses on helping utilities and EV charging station owners improve the integration of electric vehicles into the grid. This will be of huge relevance to Australia and the world as more people swap their current gas-guzzlers with electric vehicles.
- Mycroft Mind (Czech Republic) cleverly uses AI and visualisation techniques to help utility distributors understand how the grid is changing and ensuring its stability.
Digitisation (Deeper Insights)
These new energy start-ups are disrupting markets and responding to evolving customer needs with innovative, data-driven business models.
- DroneNation (India), Intelfuse (Australia) and Aerospace Systems (Australia) use aerial drone photography and satellite imagery to determine to improve the uptime of electricity infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, this was of interest to distribution utility companies.
- Renbloc (Sweden) allows customers see where their energy is coming from, so they can place more pressure on their retailers and thus the generators to go green. Energy consumers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your carbon!
- Gengame (UK) and Rvolt (Germany) focus on improving customer engagement so they can save money and reduce their carbon footprint – play, save and earn!
- Eldo Meterstack (South Africa) normalise utility meter data and put it into an open-access marketplace that enables value-added services – such as delinquency management to upsell of secondary services (such as solar)
- Energy Master (Colombia) identify leakage points (e.g. theft, excess usage) to help customers lower their bills.
- BEAD (Germany) measures occupancy data to optimise operations in buildings.
- Machine Dreams (Australia) generates super high resolution (synthetic) pictures of assets. automates labelling, and simulates defects at a fraction of the cost of conventional machine learning approaches. A winning hustler-hacker combination!
- Anyone who uses emojis would relate to Piqify (Australia). They use a visual communication platform to allow brands to better engage with Gen Z and millennial customers, across industries. Strong relevance to improving engagement in the energy industry.
Decentralisation (Greater Choice)
- Enerlytics (India) has a cloud platform to help solar asset owners maintain high performance.
- Energos (India) help use energy data coupled with AI to determine equipment failures in industrial environments and to manage distributed energy assets – such as batteries and solar plants.
- 17TeraWatts (USA) focus on improving the ROI on solar investments by engaging homeowners and solar installers generate more referrals and follow-on sales.
- AG Energy (Australia) and Starling Energy (Australia) were boosting solar adoption through financially innovative business models (entailing customised power purchase agreements) for commercial customers and residential communities.
To read how we’re helping energy startups scale, click here.