In Their Own Words: The 7 Startups Leading the Energy Transformation to a More Sustainable Future
Seven global companies with innovative SaaS solutions are helping SAP’s utilities customers thrive as industry leaders in the energy transition.
With forty five of the fifty top utilities companies in the world running SAP solutions, SAP is a leading force in helping utilities light the way as the world transitions to a more sustainable, renewable, and digital energy reality. Through SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv’s latest accelerator program, SAP.iO along with SAP Utilities business unit has been working closely with seven selected startups to create new integrations and joint offerings for our utilities clients.
Here is your chance to meet the seven startups and learn about their customer successes, how they stand out from the competition, and the value they bring to SAP’s utilities clients.
Listen to the full energenius mini-series here https://sap.io/energenius/
The Lineup:
Emek Sadot, CEO of FSIGHT. FSIGHT offers state-of-the-art artificial intelligence software solutions that allow the end user to predict, optimize and trade energy.
Chris Law, Founder & CEO of Future Grid. Future Grid enables the renewable grid of the future to deliver safe and reliable electricity.
Bert Lutje Berenbroek, Founder & CEO of NET2GRID. NET2GRID delivers a platform for utilities to gain powerful energy insights and run value-added services using machine learning algorithms on smart meter data.
Oliver van der Mond, Co-Founder & CEO of Lemonbeat. Lemonbeat offers a scalable end-to-end Internet of Things–enabling solution, building a seamless experience journey from device to cloud.
Florian Kaiser, Co-Founder & CTO of OXYGEN TECHNOLOGIES. OXYGEN TECHNOLOGIES provides digital value-added services to private and commercial “prosumers” with an operating system to monitor and control distributed energy devices.
Michael Waldner, Co-Founder & CEO of Pexapark. Pexapark provides the operating system for post-subsidy renewable energy sales.
Mike Goldstein, Co-Founder and Chairman of Raycatch. Raycatch’s AI-driven digital asset management system automates and optimizes solar photovoltaic plants.
On Customer Successes:
FSIGHT: “We just ran a successful pilot with a very large European utilities company, and we improved their forecasting efficiency and results by 2x. We are in the process of closing a deal with them, and will actively pursue other utilities based on this success story.”
Future Grid: “One client had incidents on their network where customers were shocked and injured by faults with electricity in their homes. They worked with Future Grid to improve reliability and safety for customers, proactively detecting these incidents using smart meter data, often before the customer was aware that the issue was happening.”
Lemonbeat: “With the example of managing a smart boiler room in one’s home, Lemonbeat can help you easily save 20–30% of the primary energy, whether it be gas, oil, etc., without the loss of any convenience.”
OXYGEN TECHNOLOGIES: “The energy provider of today is changing to a future energy service provider. It is about selling added value services to their prosumer customers. We offer a solution where energy providers can change their business model for the future.”
NET2GRID: “In the last two years through NET2GRID’s roll-out in Germany with E.ON, the time that customers are engaging with their utilities increased by over 3,000%.”
Pexapark: “Transitioning from subsidised to post subsidised markets opens up new risks. Companies now need to access new capabilities for energy risk management. We helped a large company and major investor in renewable energy with 2,000 MW installed capacity across different European markets. First we educated them on these new risks, structured and closed PPA agreements for them and followed up with our software solutions to help transform their organization to build up their risk management capabilities.”
Raycatch: “Today, solar project owners and operators look with their own eyes on screens and graphs in order to analyze data and detect issues, which is very laborious, intensive and time consuming. Using Raycatch, without installing any new sensors or hardware, customers simply rely on existing data to quickly get clear insights and better prioritize their focus.”
The X-Factor:
FSIGHT: “We realized that one crucial component is missing in the energy transition: how to manage these distributed energy resources in order to make the grid sustainable and allow the energy reseller and the end-user to save money and be greener. FSIGHT addresses the void of how you manage and optimize these resources across the board for the benefit of the end-user, the benefit of the utility, and the benefit for all stakeholders.”
Future Grid: “We realized that there is a lot of talk about the customer generating their own electricity, but there was little acknowledgement or understanding of the adverse impact it was having on the energy ecosystem, particularly in terms of polls and wires. Future Grid uses data so that utilities can install more renewable energy into the grid and manage these new technologies and ecosystem players in a sustainable way.”
Lemonbeat: “We have built Lemonbeat in a way that it can really grow from a very small system to a very large system in a seamless way. IoT makes it possible to uncover inefficiencies. But to uncover them, you need to make those solutions cost-efficient and scalable. With Lemonbeat, you can uncover the inefficiencies and remotely adjust them.”
OXYGEN TECHNOLOGIES: “We developed an Android for energy; a middleware where we speak to all of the energy devices in the building, we connect them to a control box of ours, and then we enable any application to run on top of that and make use of the millions of distributed energy devices.”
NET2GRID: “We are able to provide energy consumption disaggregation on activity level using standard AMI smart meter data and when using real-time consumption data, with our in-house developed SmartBridge hardware, we deliver this disaggregation on appliance level that still fits in the existing retention and acquisition business case of utilities. We deliver high-quality, AMI and real-time disaggregation at a fraction of the cost- a factor of 10 versus the competition.”
Pexapark: “The big difference is you no longer need to rely on an RFQ methodology where the price can become out of date by the time you are able to close. With our product, you can stay up-to-date every day with what the price should be for PPAs. You can follow pricing during your negotiations and spot deviations in pricing methodologies You get the same market pricing intelligence as utilities.”
Raycatch: “While the cost of building solar assets is going down, operational costs such as hiring and renting as well as labor-based logistic costs are not. Raycatch democratizes this process and makes it financially sustainable with a software that helps operators and managers better manage their assets, automatically detect issues, and improve decision-making.”
Working with SAP:
FSIGHT: “FSIGHT brings innovation, creates value, and quickly seizes new market opportunities through our technologies in artificial intelligence and machine learning. In order to scale and replicate our solution, we need the right partners. SAP brings a global presence and large customer base, and we find a spark in SAP’s people, its agenda, and in the music.”
Future Grid: “What SAP does for our customers is help specifically with asset management and ERP. Future Grid is using a new kind of data to enrich that, so utilities can better manage the renewable transition and its safety. The outputs of what we produce goes into SAP systems, so we can leverage solutions to create better outcomes for customers on a global scale.”
Lemonbeat: “What we are offering is quite complementary to what SAP is offering. It’s a very good fit- we have almost no overlap, so technically speaking, there is an interface where we are meeting. We are taking care of whatever happens in the field so that we get the data, and SAP can take care of what is actually done with the data.”
NET2GRID: “Many of our customers are using SAP today. In terms of the billing service, time-of-use tariffs are becoming translated into monthly bills, and maybe in the future likely to be translated into daily bills. The tight integration between NET2GRID and SAP to make sure everything is rationally lean and cost-effective is extremely important.”
OXYGEN TECHNOLOGIES: “SAP and OXYGEN TECHNOLOGIES both see the prosumer in the middle, and we both know that the future energy supply will be focused around those prosumers and added-value services. We can connect our ELEMENTS platform to SAP and exchange information and sell those added-value services, and it seamlessly integrates into the SAP system that utilities already have today.”
Pexapark: “We are 100% focused on renewable energy, we are very passionate about it. We had been trading renewable energy in the past and were able to build a lot of expertise, and we also know what could go wrong since we worked on the utility trading side, the data side, on the integration of assets, so we translated these learnings and the innovation into insights for SAP’s utilities customers to stay on top of renewals.”
Raycatch: “Being focused on a specific vertical niche allows us to be the experts, so once our software and capabilities are merged with SAP capabilities, our joint clients with solar asset portfolios can enjoy the full solution A-Z; they can get software support in ERP and management, plus the deep, thorough, and sophisticated automatic diagnostics tool through Raycatch.”
Want to learn more about SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv’s utilities cohort? Make sure you listen to “energenius,” a podcast mini-series featuring each of the seven startups on Apple, Google, Spotify and Anchor.
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