After operating as a research and development lab since 2015, Carbon Relay has finally emerged from stealth mode to wow enterprises with its energy-saving products — and the Boston-based startup has secured $5 million in funding to bolster its launch.
Founded and led by Matt Provo, a Harvard Business School grad and serial entrepreneur, Carbon Relay offers “breakthrough” AI technology to help companies overcome a persistent pain point: energy efficiency.
We’ve taken on data center energy use because we have an opportunity ... to make a near-immediate and massive impact on power use.”
“The Carbon Relay team has been together since 2015, driven to apply AI to one of the most pressing energy management challenges today,” Provo said in a statement. “We’ve taken on data center energy use because we have an opportunity, working alongside our partners, to make a near-immediate and massive impact on power use.”
According to Carbon Relay, massive data centers across the U.S. spend between 40 to 60 percent of their total operational costs on energy — think heating, ventilation and air conditioning, which current energy management tools cannot track or control to yield substantial efficiencies.
To tackle this business and environmental challenge, Carbon Relay gathered top-notch data scientists and software engineers to find a better solution.
Enter, Carbon Relay. The startup uses AI-powered algorithms used by companies like Facebook and Google to curb carbon emissions at data centers — particularly in the enterprise, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency industries. Currently, the company offers two products: “Optimize” and “Predict.”
Optimize can simulate a customer’s environment in just under 48 hours in order to make hundreds of decisions across 40 variables to regulate data centers’ HVAC and cooling systems, resulting in near-instantaneous energy savings. Meanwhile, Predict makes use of each customer’s historical data, like temperature readings, collected by thousands of IoT sensors to train its predictive module, thus infusing its data visualization tools with immediate efficiency opportunities and a roadmap for future operational optimization.
The funding, which brought Carbon Relay's total funding to $6 million, was led by a series of strategic investors, including Foxconn Technology Group. The funding will be used to build out the company's sales and marketing organizations, as well as increase client capacity.
Carbon Relay currently employs 20 people (10 in Boston), and they're looking to double their team in the next quarter or two.
“[We’re] looking to support data centers in their drive to reduce carbon emissions,” Provo said in a statement. “We’re excited to formally launch the company today and to bring our products to more businesses.”
