Are you bringing electricity to those who need it?
We know it’s a tough task. And we know it’s so important — for a billion people whose lives are stunted. So we commit ourselves to helping you. That’s why we’ve built VIDA.
Over the last years, by learning from all of you electrification experts, we discovered how difficult it is to find, plan and electrify sites by just using Google maps, Slack, QGIS, lots of excel sheets, WhatsApp messages and documents in multiple Dropbox folders. This manual, piecemeal process works when building a handful of sites per year. But, to achieve universal energy access by 2030, we need to build around 50 new mini-grids — every day! That’s 50x more than we currently build.
With VIDA we want to help you get to scale, by automating and standardising the process from finding to building sites. We went live in February after years of development. We’ve brought over 5,000 viable minigrid sites onto VIDA (that’s 30 a day), catalysing over $1.5bn of investment into rural development. We can now evaluate off-grid sites very quickly, anywhere in the world.
If you want to know more, just send us an email to contact@villagedata.io.
And this is how it works
First, find and select your sites…
VIDA allows you to identify viable villages for electrification anywhere in the world. Yes, anywhere. It is based on our analytics and global data-layers. We can help you find villages that are unelectrified, large enough, dense enough, accessible, etc.
…then, prepare your sites for investment
Through VIDA, you can then work on your sites: upload and integrate survey data and pictures, add your notes, change design parameters, integrate your QGIS files, generate your financial model, communicate within the team and other stakeholders.
Partnerships fuel our growth
We are excited that VIDA is now used by the World Bank in Pakistan to support country-wide least cost electrification and in Sudan to evaluate how to displace diesel with solar in city-grids, by the government of Sierra Leone for their energy access planning, by KfW to assess the investment potential and risk of mini-grid sites, and by BBOXX to identify viable mini-grid sites.
These are just some examples of VIDA users. In this video, Tobias explains how our work could transform development by making it more data-based and transparent.
We also deepened our collaboration with the Technical University of Munich on earth observation and AI, and with Carnegie Mellon University Africa in Rwanda on software development (welcome to the team, Iffanice and Germann!). And… we were selected for the Microsoft Startup Program, which gives us access to more cloud computing, software architecture expertise and strengthens our link with the Planetary Computer.
By the way, we just underwent another, in-depth (!) assessment of our software functionality by the European Space Agency.
Another recent highlight is that we joined the BMW Foundation’s accelerator program RESPOND, together with a small group of outstanding, impact driven startups from around the world. And we were selected for the Spacefounders accelerator (run by the French space agency CNES). It will start in fall and focus on our earth observation technology.
Lastly, do have a look at this video which our partner appliedAI produced with IBM, showcasing VIDA.
Join us on this exciting journey
We are always looking for talented software engineers to join our team. If you are fluent in Python and passionate about making your life impactful, please consider applying! We especially encourage women to apply. You can work from our offices in Munich or Cape Town, or remotely, if you have an EU work permit. For details, have a look at our current opportunities.
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