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EcoFactor closes $8M for energy data, analytics

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 17:51:49 +0000

EcoFactor, a startup that uses smart algorithms and connected thermostats to reduce customers’ energy consumption, has raised another round of $8 million. That brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $13.5 million.

EcoFactor, founded in 2006 and launched in late 2009, has developed software that plugs in a lot of data about things like weather and demographics, and combines that data with information about the home owners’ behavior. EcoFactor uses these big data sets to tweak a home’s connected thermostat settings ever so slightly to shave off energy consumption, but also to maintain a comfortable temperature in the home.

Think of EcoFactor’s software a bit like Nest’s learning thermostat, but without the slick hardware. Customers can manually override the EcoFactor settings at any time.

Utilities are partnering with EcoFactor to run demand response programs, which is when utilities collectively reduce customers’ heating and cooling consumption at times of peak demand. Say it’s 4pm and the height of Summer and utilities can use EcoFactor’s software to cool customer’s homes (that have agreed to be in the program) at a slower rate. EcoFactor has sold its services to Reliant Energy. Other companies that sell similar energy analytics products, like Nest, and EnergyHub, are also working with Reliant and other utilities.

Broadband service providers, like cable companies, are also interested in these types of energy management services, and EcoFactor has partnered with Comcast and its Xfinity Home service. Selling energy management is a way that broadband service providers can use their networks to sell more services and attract new customers.

EcoFactor’s new funding comes from Aster Capital, and includes additional funding from existing investors Claremont Creek Ventures and RockPort Capital Partners.

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Tendril buys Recurve for energy analytics

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:47:59 +0000

Energy software company Tendril has snapped up intellectual property, employees and a San Francisco office from Recurve, the startup (formerly called Sustainable Spaces) which develops and sells software to help energy auditors determine the most cost-efficient energy efficiency measures for their customers. Tendril says it will incorporate Recurve’s building analytics into its Tendril Connect software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Tendril has been enhancing its energy analytics throughout 2011, and will use the Recurve software to beef up its residential energy savings recommendations. Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck told me earlier this year that Tendril wants its software platform to act as the sort of Android layer to connect all energy-related (and even non-energy) devices in buildings and homes. And that includes developing an Amazon-style recommendation engine to help residential customers reduce their energy consumption.

Tendril bought GroundedPower for its behavioral analytics in late 2010. Tuck said recently that he thinks 2012 will be the year that energy software companies need to “go big or go home.”

Recurve originally was directly in the energy auditing business, but its core technology was software that enabled its own auditors to help home owners take steps like insulating their roof, sealing their air ducts and installing windows that minimize heat loss. But Recurve got directly out of the energy auditing business about a year ago and focused on selling its software to contractors and auditors.

The residential energy auditing market has been tough because the spending on energy efficiency projects tends to be low, and the returns on investments for service providers can be lengthy. The green building space has been difficult in general, particularly because of the weak housing market in recent years, and it was reported this week that Serious Energy plans to close one of its energy efficient windows factories.

Recurve raised at least $14 million in venture capital from investors like RockPort Capital Partners, Shasta Ventures, and Blueshift Partners. Recurve was founded by Matt Golden in 2004.

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Green building firm Project Frog raises $22M from GE, VCs

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 14:11:52 +0000

Despite the seemingly downward short-term trend for cleantech investing, corporations and investors continue to back the green building sector. On Wednesday San Francisco–based energy-efficient building company Project Frog announced that it has raised $22 million from GE, as well as venture capitalists including RockPort Capital and Claremont Creek Ventures.

GE showed its interest in Project Frog back in June, when it revealed the second group of startups that had won funds from its Smart Grid Challenge program. Over the past year through its Smart Grid Challenge project, GE has identified dozens of startups in the building energy, power grid and energy software space and has made a variety of small investments of several million dollars in these firms.

Project Frog designs and makes buildings that are prefab, and it uses control systems and software to make the buildings far more energy-efficient than a traditional building. Because its designs are manufactured off-site and assembled at the construction zone via a building kit, Project Frog says its buildings can also be built far more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional buildings.

Frog says a typical design and construction project can take 6 months, and on the energy front Frog says its buildings use 25 percent less energy than a standard building. The company targets its building kits and designs for schools, stores, museums, commercial workplaces and health care. GE says it has started building a Frog Design building at its Learning Center in Ossining, New York.

Image courtesy of Project Frog, in San Francisco at Crissy Field

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EcoFactor: Using big data to reduce home energy by 17%

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:29:51 +0000

EcoFactor, a startup that uses big data tools to act as a new brain for connected thermostats, has some stellar results from ten different trials where it automated the process of turning up and down consumer’s thermostats. The company, which launched at the end of 2009, says that on average its services can reduce a person’s home energy use by 17 percent compared to a programmable but non-optimized thermostat.

That’s a 17 percent reduction in a consumer’s energy bill, too, and EcoFactor found it could reduce consumer’s bills by up to $56 per month when its service was used. EcoFactor did many of its trials during demand response events for utilities, which are times (like a really hot day) when a utility wants to turn down the energy consumption of some users to better manage the grid. EcoFactor also found that it delivered better demand response events for utilities, providing a 36 percent increase in yield for utilities during the event.

As I noted back when the company launched: finally a smart way to control thermostats. I’m not sure why every utility, energy service provider and consumer wouldn’t want to use this. The only requirement is a connected thermostat (well, and waiting for the service to be available in your area).

Here’s how it works: EcoFactor collects thousands of data points — from weather to regional building codes to home value — that give a clue about how an individual home might use energy and also respond to a service that promotes energy savings. EcoFactor then combines that service with the consumer’s ability to manually override the system (i.e., press up and down on the thermostat). When a consumer signs up for the service, EcoFactor uses the first couple of weeks to set a baseline for how that individual user prefers the temperature in their home: When a person pushes up or down on the thermostat, the original baseline starts to get set.

Then EcoFactor’s service automatically makes over 1,000 micro adjustments per month to the thermostat, bumping it up and down every so slightly, so that the user doesn’t notice the temperature change but also reduces her energy consumption. During demand response events on a particularly hot day in the summer, EcoFactor can precool some houses, turning on the AC a bit before the demand response event; then it can turn down the power use of the house during the event while the house acts essentially as a thermal battery, and the residents don’t notice the inconvenience of having their energy use curbed.

EcoFactor is first and foremost targeting consumers as its end customers, but it is working via distribution channels like utilities, broadband service providers (cable, DSL) and home security systems companies to reach those customers. The only reason EcoFactor isn’t in more widespread use today is probably because partners like utilities and telcos are notoriously slow-moving when it comes to adopting new services. EcoFactor worked with Oncor in Texas and other unnamed utilities for its trials.

It’s still in the early days for the service. The demand response trials included hundreds of homes, and EcoFactor says by the end of the year (after its summer trials), it will have been tested in “tens of thousands of homes.” In the utility world, that’s still a small footprint.

But EcoFactor is one of the only companies out there in the energy and utility world that is truly leveraging big data tools and the cloud to make energy use smarter. (To learn more about cloud computing, come to our Structure event on June 22 and 23 in San Francisco.) And for those not used to reading energy reduction metrics, 17 percent is actually really high for an energy management service. In comparison, OPower’s smarter energy bills on average reduce consumer energy consumption by 2 percent. EcoFactor is backed by RockPort Capital Partners and Claremont Creek Ventures.

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Smart Thermostat Software Startup EcoFactor Raises $3.5M

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:36:07 +0000

When 4-year-old EcoFactor, which makes software that intelligently manages connected thermostats, officially launched last November, a lot of folks took notice — apparently including investors. On the heels of raising $2.4 million in December, EcoFactor announced this morning that it has raised another $3.5 million from RockPort Capital Partners.

In the company’s funding filing in December EcoFactor said it was in the process of raising $4.5 million, so this total of $5.9 million in funding is slightly more than expected. The company has a strong product, but the funding climate is also better: Greentech venture investments have bounced back in the first quarter of 2010, with $1.9 billion invested in 180 companies globally according to the Cleantech Group — that’s up 83 percent over the same period a year ago.

One of the reasons EcoFactor is so compelling for investors is that its software is relatively low cost to produce. The service is based on its smart algorithms that can continuously manage a home’s connected thermostat throughout the day, tweaking the settings ever so slightly to shave off energy consumption, but maintain a comfortable temperature for residents.

Utilities, like EcoFactor’s first customer, Texas-based Oncor, are buying the service to provide demand response (DR) programs. Unlike traditional demand response programs — where a DR provider would ask a building owner (mostly industrial and commercial right now, but sometimes residential) to turn down their air conditioning, lighting or other appliances during a specific time on a specific day — EcoFactor cuts home energy consumption from heating and cooling (the bulk of a typical energy bill) in tiny increments. As EcoFactor’s CEO John Steinberg explained the concept to us last year the difference is traditional demand response concentrates on five days a year, while EcoFactor focuses on 365 days a year.

The startup’s smart algorithms take into account things like outside weather, the physical characteristics of the home, and manual input from the home owner, and can tweak the thermostat every minute. The service only needs a home Internet connection and a connected thermostat to work. Over a month EcoFactor says it can save 20-30 percent off of the heating and cooling costs on your bill and you won’t even notice.

The potential for savings, without the inconvenience, is largely why the startup has a chance to build a consumer-facing brand. To that aim, EcoFactor is focused on working with third party companies, like broadband service providers, telcos and cable companies, which want to move into energy management and are looking for a partner. Verizon has said it is interested in adding energy management to its fiber service (for more on Broadband Service Providers Are About to Ride the Home Energy Wave, see GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

EcoFactor says it will use these latest funds to execute on the deals it’s made. Steinberg will be on a panel I’m moderating tonight for the Churchill Club on the smart grid down in Mountain View, and I’ll be handing out discount codes for our Green:Net conference on April 29 in San Francisco. Come say hi, grab a code, and learn more about software and innovation for the smart grid.

Wind Turbine Maker Northern Power Picks Up $37M

Craig Rubens — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:05:26 +0000

As wind farm developments have soared in the U.S., turbine makers are finding they can barely keep up. Northern Power Systems said its parent company, Wind Power Holdings, has completed a $37 million round of financing to boost its turbine manufacturing business, led by RockPort Capital Partners and Allen & Company.

Barre, Vt.-based Northern Power says it plans to use the funding to not only scale up manufacturing of its small-scale 100 kilowatt Northwind 100 turbines but also accelerate development of a much larger 2.2 megawatt turbine which it plans to sell to industrial wind farm developers. Currently, the company says its Northwind turbine is available within a six-month lead time, a pretty quick turnaround considering that giants like GE are reporting a $12 mbillion backlog on wind turbine orders.

It’s this large-scale turbine shortage that Northern Power hopes to tap into with its 2.2 MW permanent magnet direct drive wind turbine. The permanent magnet direct drive system is where much of the company’s IP lies. Instead of employing a complicated, heavy and expensive gearbox, Northern Power’s proprietary permanent magnet generator reduces the number of moving parts. The result, the company claims, is a generator that is lighter, more efficient and requires less assembly labor and less maintenance.

Northern Power isn’t alone in trying to scale-up direct drive turbines. Earlier this year Siemens said it would begin testing two 3.6 megawatt direct drive turbines in Denmark. Currently, the gearbox is one of the most problematic components of turbines, and direct drive technology aims to offer turbines that require less maintenance and therefore boast lower operating costs and more up-time per turbine. This will be especially critical as offshore development moves forward.

In August, Wind Power Holdings reportedly acquired Northern Power’s assets. This was after Northern Power’s original parent, Distributed Energy Systems, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June. Distributed Energy sold turbines through Northern Power and hydrogen production systems through it’s other subsidiary, Proton Energy Systems. (Both were former Nth Power portfolio companies.) Since filing for bankruptcy and reorganizing the companies, the two now independent subsidiaries have been ramping up, Northern having raised $56 million in total funding and Proton Energy raising $10.2 million in August from F9 Investments.

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Sustainable Spaces Scores $6M

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:47:36 +0000

It’s not that hard to make new buildings greener; it’s the ones already built that are a big problem. That’s where a startup like Sustainable Spaces comes in — the company founded by Matt Golden in 2004 will analyze your home and sell various green retrofits, like better insulation and more-efficient heating and cooling systems. This morning the company said it had raised $6 million in its first round of venture funds from RockPort Capital Partners and Shasta Ventures.

Golden previously told us that the company had been scaling up and had been working on this first round for the past few months. The team has now grown to several dozen employees, and earlier this year took seed capital from angel investors Blueshift Partners. Also unusual for a cleantech startup: Sustainable Spaces says it’s already profitable.

Home retrofits are exactly the kind of low-tech solution that get less attention but will make real differences in climate change. Golden says with houses responsible for a little under a quarter of U.S. emissions, leaky heating and cooling ducts could account for as much as 2 to 3 percent of electricity used in the U.S. Sustainable Spaces can reduce an existing home’s energy expenditure by 10 to 50 percent, Golden says; the startup has done around 400 retrofits in the Bay Area.

For now, though, there are a few hurdles to the green home retrofit market. First it can be seen as a luxury for higher-end home owners. Sure your energy bill will go down, but it could be hard to convince a family with a variety of bills to pay to invest in leaky air ducts first. Then there’s the regulatory market, which hasn’t really stepped up to encourage retrofits. Golden would like to see more incentives for energy efficiency remakes.

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Enphase Energy Raises $15M for Distributed Solar Inverters

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:00:39 +0000

The solar industry is just starting to understand the benefits of distributed solar inverters — the devices that convert direct current (DC) to grid-usable alternating current (AC). While most solar panels use a centralized inverter, inverter-maker Enphase Energy says slapping a cell phone-sized distributed inverter on the back of every solar panel can help harvest 5 to 25 percent more energy. Investors are getting it too, and this morning Enphase says it has raised $15 million in new funding led by RockPort Capital Partners, and including Third Point Ventures and Applied Ventures (VC arm of Applied Materials).

Enphase CEO Paul Nahi says the company plans to use the money to keep growing to meet what it says is “tremendous demand.” Nahi says the company has sold about 1,000 inverter systems, half for residential systems and half to commercial installations; Enphase sells its systems through the traditional inverter channel of solar installers.

Beyond the micro-inverter system, the company also uses an integrated solar monitoring service, which stems from the IT world — not a surprise given the company boasts several “20-year veterans” from infotech. The monitoring system checks the solar setup every five minutes and reports back if certain panels aren’t producing adequately or are in too much shade or need to be cleaned. We’re not entirely clear on the setup of how it’s networked and what pipes send what data; the company says it is proprietary. But Dan Kammen, director of UC Berkeley’s Renewable Energy Labs, recently attested to the company’s innovative use of broadband technology to deliver solar services. So they must be doing something right.

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XCalibre To Bring Utility Computing To Euro Web Startups

Om Malik — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 23:06:33 +0000

Amazon (AMZN), I have often pointed out, is a harbinger of technology trends that eventually gain mainstream acceptance. Contextual matching of information and community-powered feedback and ratings systems are two such examples.

Their recent foray into infraweb-services such as EC2 (processing on demand) and S3 (storage on demand) is helping to kick-start interest in “utility computing.” Entrepreneurs, in particular, are finding inspiration in the early success of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Over the past month we saw the emergence of Nirvanix, a San Diego-based on-demand storage service provider that recently raised $12 million from Mission Ventures and Valhalla Partners, along with previous investors Windward Ventures. Rackspace is pushing its own version of a computing utility, Mosso.

Today, I got a chance to meet with executives from XCalibre Communications, a 10-year-old hosting provider based in Scotland that is going to launch its utility computing service at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

I spoke with Philipp Huber, chief operating officer of the company, at length today, and he explained that XCalibre is going to focus on European web startups that are looking for affordable utility computing-type solutions. The company has built a management console on top of an infrastructure that is a blend of F5 load balancers, Dell servers, Virtual Iron f~~rom Xensource (now a Citrix subsidiary)~~ and NetApp storage. (A Virtual Iron spokesperson points out that Xcalibre is using Virtual Iron’s server virtualization and management platform. While this includes the Xen open source hypervisor, there is no connection between Virtual Iron and XenSource or Citrix.)

The company counts Huddle and Bamboo as its early clients, and the utility computing foray has been funded entirely by its hosting business. XCalibre claims that it can support many more clients per server than Amazon, and that gives them a significant advantage. My big concern for startups buying into services from other startups is the issue of longevity and reliability of the service.

Amazon, on the other hand, is likely to stick around and is going to keep investing resources in their web services efforts. Their recent marketing push, as reported by Liz earlier this summer, indicates that they are pretty serious about the web services business. Huber is not worried — he thinks that there’s room for a European-focused utility computing provider that can offers web startups affordable infrastructure that scales with their aspirations.

What do you think?

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Did Club Penguin Sell-Up or Sell-Out?

Guest Column — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 15:28:35 +0000

By Carleen Hawn

I’m just as impressed as everyone else by Disney’s announcement Wednesday that it will pay as much as $700 million for the “tween” social networking site, Club Penguin. Impressed, because it’s a huge amount of money – $200 million more than what Sony and News Corp. were rumored to be bidding for the barely two-year-old Canadian company back in May.

Impressed, but not surprised. We’ve written previously about the market value of Club Penguin, and for an earlier story in Business2.0, I got to hear from a ton of kids about why they are addicted to the game. I even picked out my own waddling avatar and played the game myself for a while.

While the notion of a virtual world based on a bunch of costumed, flightless birds and their sculpting feats with snow might sound silly (‘how long will Penguins be hip, anyway?’ critics have asked), beneath Club Penguin’s hokey animation are some wildly creative and surprisingly dynamic narratives, stimulating enough even for adults despite being so juvenile (not unlike Harry Potter).

Moreover, Club Penguin’s G-rated charm has been a nice alternative to the death-and-destruction universe of other MMOs. It turns out parents were only too happy to pony up $60 a year in subscription fees to know their kids could be online and protected from smut, violence, and commercial hucksterism.

Which raises the first of two reasons why I’m worried about this acquisition, sorry, “partnership,” with Disney.

One: In the first of two conference calls with reporters Wednesday, Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield (he is one of three) insisted that Club Penguin would remain ad-free, in keeping with the site’s “integrity.”

I happened to check out Disney.com during the break. Not surprisingly, Club Penguin was all over the home page – but so were ads, including one for a Disney-branded “introductory 0% interest rate” credit card from Visa.

Now, as the 28-year-old Merrifield explained, one big reason for “partnering” with Disney is to scale Club Penguin’s user base. Speaking about “new revenue streams” and “subscriber growth” Merrifield said: “We’ve not done marketing … and still won’t … so the Disney.com home page will bring awareness.”

But given that Disney.com does shill for third parties, when my turn came, I asked Lane how it is that kids who find their way to Club Penguin through Disney.com won’t be beset with ads. There was an awkward moment before the president of Disney’s Internet Group, Steve Wadsworth, (Merrifield’s new boss) jumped in to explain:

“Disney com is a place where people go to be entertained for sure, with a broad range of media, in a range of environments, as well as to be informed. So there is advertising on Disney.com — I see a Disney visa credit card ad [there]. But in virtual world environments—having watched Club Penguin carefully and learning from them—in those immersive environments that are clearly targeted at a younger kids, like Club Penguin, Disney Fairies or Toontown, those will be ad-free … so once kids get immersed, they’re pretty clean.”

Once kids get “immersed” in Club Penguin, they’ll be protected by the same quality controls that distinguished the site from the beginning. That is nice – and I don’t doubt that Club Penguin’s three founders worked hard to make this a sticking point in the deal that could likely make them each centi-millionaires. (Club Penguin took no venture capital. Cofounder Dave Krysko primarily funded it, with smaller stakes from Merrifield and a third founder, Lance Priebe, who invented the game.) But I’m not sure it matters that Club Penguin’s site will stay “clean” if, en route from Disney.com 9-yr-olds get hawked cheap credit.

Two: I think it’s admirable that Disney, the supposed “#1 site for kids and families” (despite having botched Toontown) is now “learning from Club Penguin,” but this rather confirms my suspicion that the House of Walt is no longer a house of creativity.

Having invented animation, the company had to buy Pixar to stay competitive in it for goodness sake. The single exception might be the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise – but that’s a derivative product line anyway, and we all know it will be remembered for its box office records, not its wan contribution to artistic invention.

So I’m not sure who wins here. Disney is revved by the acquisition for sure, but looks slow just the same. Club Penguin’s founders are rich, but look a bit like sell-outs. It remains to be seen if the kids benefit, at all.

Carleen Hawn is the editor of FoundRead.com. Prior to editing Found|READ, she was an Associate Editor with Forbes, and a Senior Writer and West Coast Bureau Chief for Fast Company.

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