Creating Sustainable Cities: Cohort 12 Innovates Across AI, Cybersecurity, and Climate
Looking back on the past year since the launch of our last programme, it’s been quite a journey! We’ve collaborated with some remarkable companies, which are already gaining impressive traction. Our most recent Demo Day was our biggest yet, drawing in over 400 attendees. We were also honoured to be named the UK’s best accelerator for 2023, the fourth year in a row we’ve been awarded this recognition.
Being catalysts for change is ingrained in our culture. We invest in the founders of tomorrow while continually refining our processes, capabilities, and growing our ecosystem. We began actively scouting for opportunities in August and officially opened applications for Cohort 12 in September 2023. During those months, we attended numerous events, reviewed over 1,000 applications, and engaged with hundreds of founders. By the end of February, we selected 5 teams to join our programme and completed our investment in them.
Overview of the teams:
The five companies in Cohort 12 have developed solutions around two key topics that excite us: sustainability and security. We’re focusing on solutions that enable more sustainable and efficient operations in retrofits and material identification, as well as solutions addressing physical, structural, and cyber security challenges in the built environment.
These companies are tackling some of the biggest challenges facing the built environment, and our growth programme will help elevate their solutions to the next stage. We achieve this through a series of strategic workshops and introductions to relevant mentors, customers, and investors.
We’re also continuing our push for diversity and inclusion, with 3 out of 5 teams being led by underrepresented groups. We’re particularly proud of this achievement, as we’ve been actively working to reach and attract more diverse teams over the past 24 months. We’ve exceeded our diversity goals for a second year in a row, a testament to our commitment. You can read more about our efforts on this front here.
Without further adieu, introducing Cohort 12:
Cyb3r Operations
Industry — Cyber Security
Location — London, UK
Founded year — 2021
Problem — Organisations are increasingly facing threats, regulatory fines, and reputational damage due to the challenge of identifying potential risks lurking in the surface, deep, and dark web. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) lack control over the security environment and controls of customers or suppliers, yet they are obligated to safeguard their organisation from attacks originating from third parties.
Solution — Cyb3r Operations monitors, assesses, and investigates a company’s attack surface to mitigate business impact risk. The product is built with Chief Information Security Officers in mind, who are directly responsible for attacks that originate from third parties. Cyb3r Operations can better identify compromised company assets, as they scrape over 2x the information, compared to competing solutions. At the same time, they also provide the unique feature of predicting when a potential ransomware attack would happen, enabling organisations to take proactive measures, as opposed to reactive ones.
Genia
Industry — Construction Tech
Location — Vancouver, BC
Founded year — 2022
Problem — Despite its sheer volume, construction remains characterised by low digitalisation, involving repetitive manual work and fragmentation. This often results in a structural mismatch with market demands. Additionally, there’s a shortage of experienced structural engineers, as recent graduates excel in using software but often lack the experience to validate solutions produced by the software. Existing software still heavily relies on human input.
Solution — Founded by a seasoned ex-Arup civil engineer, with portfolios including Grand Lisboa Palace in Macaw, and ex-Amazon AI
developers, Genia revolutionizes construction engineering with generative design that enables rapid iterations towards optimal
solution. They start off serving structural engineers in North America with their first product, which automatically generates
physically-valid structural drawings of 80+% completion (not just 20% conceptual designs) from architectural design and delivers
60+% efficiency gains.
Kestrix
Industry — Sustainability; Decarbonisation
Location — London, UK
Founded year — 2022
Problem — To achieve the 2050 decarbonization targets, retrofitting is crucial. The inability to retrofit effectively may result in ‘stranded’ or illiquid assets. The scale of this challenge makes retrofitting an immense task. Determining how a building is losing heat, as well as prioritising retrofits among a portfolio of properties, is complex. Current methods rely on either slow and costly surveys conducted by inspectors in properties or on assumptions. However, precise data is essential to validate and plan retrofits, rendering the latter largely insufficient.
Solution — Kestrix pinpoints heat loss in residential buildings, informing retrofit plans, pricing, and priorities. They do so by training an algorithm to analyse thermal images obtained through third-party operated drones. In effect, Kestrix acts as the data layer to the retrofit process at scale.
Initially targeting UK housing providers, where the need to retrofit stock is felt most acutely, Kestrix has identified further customer types. These range from wider residential portfolio owners to energy utilities and mortgage providers. The company has secured five one-off paid pilots from a mix of housing associations, local councils, and a real estate developer & manager.
Pathways
Industry —Sustainability; Materials
Location — New York, US
Founded year — 2022
Problem — Key to determining a building material’s sustainability credentials are Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). EPDs are a 20–40 page summary output of a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). Currently, consultants create these by manually processing unstructured data.
It also takes 6–12 months and costs $20k-$40k per EPD, and is often imprecise. In addition, EPDs are hard to understand –
manufacturers get a c.30-page document but are still unclear on the concrete steps needed to improve.
Solution — Pathways has built an AI-enabled platform to automate the creation of real-time LCAs and EPDs for material manufacturers.
Currently, LCAs and EPDs are still manually created which is costly, complex, imprecise, and slow, taking around 6–12 months.
Pathways is solving these issues, enabling EPDs to be automatically generated by ingesting data from a customer’s IT infrastructure
around raw materials inputs, transportation to site and manufacturing processes. By maintaining data integrations, Pathways makes
it easy to identify emissions hotspots and track reduction progress, furthering Pathways’ wider mission to help decarbonize the
manufacturing process.
Sorair
Industry — Security
Location — London, UK
Founded year — 2021
Problem — Retail and logistics companies worldwide experience issues with losses from theft and inventory shrinking, with losses ranging anywhere from $15 billion to $30 billion in the US alone. Additionally, the cost of physical security is not only high but severely underserved, and according to the British Security Industry Association (BSIA), there is a demand for an additional 63,000 security officers to be recruited if the UK were to maintain the same levels of safety. All of this contributes for an urge in automation technology to maintain physical locations safe and streamline costs.
Solution — Aiming to embed unmanned aerial vehicles (‘UAVs’) into the logistics sector, the team has created an end-to-end physical security
solution, which combines hardware (such as drones, CCTV cameras, alarms) and software (using computer vision and AI) to reduce human dependency. The product has 3 main components of IP: precision landing algorithm; proprietary 4G/5G/Satcom command and control link; security-based computer vision algorithms.
We look forward to work closely with these exciting companies, as we anticipate their innovative solutions will contribute to creating the digitally-enabled, sustainable cities of the future
If you’re interested in engaging with any of them, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at boyan@pilabs.vc.
