This article first appeared and was originally published at https://blogs.oracle.com/startup/post/startups-sustainable-utilities.
Analyst Jeremy Cox was watching the United Nations Climate Change Conference news while researching his recent report on startups offering sustainability solutions for the energy and utility sector. The timing was especially fortuitous for another reason: Cox was about to welcome a grandchild.
Sustainability is top of mind when you start thinking about future generations. Cox took notes and quoted environmentalist Sir David Attenborough to lead off the report, “If working apart we are forces powerful enough to destabilize our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it.”
What is more powerful than startups harnessing the cloud and enterprise expertise to bring their novel sustainability ideas to the market?
Here’s a look at the startups featured in the report from CX Create: 4 startups show the way to sustainability.
How an empty garbage truck sparked a company
The idea for Evreka came after the founders noticed empty garbage trucks driving back to the depot. The drivers drove scheduled routes regardless of whether there was garbage to collect, wasting gasoline and staffing. Evreka’s first product was a sensor that attaches to garbage collection carts to show the cart’s position – ready to be emptied or not at the curb. The information helps waste collectors orchestrate efficient pickup schedules.
The founders have since expanded their vision to include tackling inefficiencies in the entire waste management lifecycle, looking to extract materials (other than the obvious recyclables) that could be sold to manufacturers and reused as raw ingredients for different industries. They offer the data as a SaaS solution. The platform runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), a choice the company made because of “(Oracle’s) global reach, second-generation OCI technology, and expansion of highly secure data centers.”
The All-in-One Waste Management Platform from Evreka
Why predictive analytics is vital to powering sustainability
Complete Intelligence joined Oracle for Startups because founder Tony Nash looked to the Oracle cloud to help power his machine learning platform designed for smarter revenue, expense, cost, and investment planning decisions.
Being super agile is critical in today’s global business world, including as it relates to understanding, measuring, forecasting for sustainability. “What I discovered from talking with Tony was that strong predictive analytics helps waste less – whether that’s materials, time or money,” Cox says. “It might not be as intuitive a sustainability play as, say, building solar panels, but it is important nonetheless.”
An AI-powered global intelligence platform for strategic and tactical procurement and investment decisions
Watch our interview with founder Tony Nash and check out Cox’s deep dive on Complete Intelligence:
An AI-Powered Global Intelligence Platform for Strategic and Tactical Procurement and Investment Decisions
Making the cloud greener
Cloud storage opens many opportunities for enterprises and startups to run more efficiently but sending all that data to the cloud and instantly making it available is an energy hog. Danish startup GroenSky is meeting that challenge with an approach that makes less energy-intensive archived storage just as appealing and easy to access as live storage.
Writes Cox, “GroenSky allows customers to choose how they store their files. Those that are only rarely accessed, typically around 80% or more, can be placed in archived storage that doesn’t consume power except when accessed or moved to regular, live storage. A real-time calculator allows customers to see how much CO2 they can save.”
GroenSky founder Pierre Bennorth Cox he chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its security features, global data centers, and commitment to power its cloud with 100% renewable energy by 2025.
A Green Cloud to Massively Reduce the Carbon Footprint
Combing millions of data points to find the energy wasters
The founders of Faradai (also known as Reengen) have turned rooting out energy waste in stores, offices, and other commercial properties into a global business. Their hardware-agnostic IoT platform analyzes sensor data to uncover energy and operational insights.
One of our favorite success stories involves the company’s work with a bank that found that ATMs with high energy usage often had outdated exterior lighting. A simple change in lighting reduced the site’s energy consumption by 59%.
The company joined Oracle for Startups and told Cox how they’ve reaped the benefits. “Apart from the performance and security advantages of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” Cox writes. “Oracle has been instrumental in opening doors to its large enterprise customers throughout the world. Faradai has also benefitted from further exposure by speaking at Oracle conferences in the Middle East. As (the founder) said, ‘we get great leverage in industrial B2B sales and have had a very positive reception from the Oracle sales teams and now work even closer with them.”
AI-powered Energy and Sustainability Intelligence Platform
How startups can build a greener future
We ask Cox to interview startups because he often finds insights that we haven’t discovered. This project was no different. “Each of the startups highlighted in this report is making a significant difference that benefits customers and society, providing real hope that we can all make a difference collectively.”
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