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Following the IPCC’s report, we need more technology to respond to more disasters
This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its major sixth assessment report on the physical science of climate change. The details are grim, if getting more precise, as better and more comprehensive data becomes available. As my colleague Mike Butcher summarized yesterday, it’s “stern and blunt in its conclusions.”
While many of the themes of the report will be familiar to any person not living under (an ever increasingly hot) rock, one part jumped out at me as I was perusing the documents. The working group assessed that regardless of mitigation and adaptation strategies, many of the negative changes happening to Earth will continue unabated in all future scenarios. From the summary report:
Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level. […] Mountain and polar glaciers are committed to continue melting for decades or centuries (very high confidence). Loss of permafrost carbon following permafrost thaw is irreversible at centennial timescales (high confidence) …
In short, there is already momentum toward a warmer and more chaotic world, and we have limited tools to stop many of these trends.
There has been a rush of initiatives, investments and startups bubbling around the theme of climate tech, with projects focused on everything from improving the yields and decreasing the emissions of agriculture and food production, to improving the power grid, and to reducing the emissions from air conditioning in buildings. Those initiatives are fine and important, but they don’t get at one of the toughest challenges facing us this century: that disasters are here, they are coming and they are going to continue to get more intense as the century rolls on.
Just this past week, we have seen the second-largest fire in California’s state history with the Dixie Fire, currently blazing across hundreds of thousands of acres in the northern reaches of the state. Meanwhile in Greece, hundreds of wildfires are causing an unprecedented crisis in that country. Droughts, floods, hurricanes, typhoons and more are intensifying and ravaging ever more billions of people across every continent.
One response to solving this problem is improving resilience — building up cities and structures as well as food and water systems that are fortified against these natural calamities. Many of those projects though are costly and also time-consuming, measured over the course of decades rather than months.
Instead, we need a more immediate push to develop better disaster response technology today. I’ve covered a wide segment of these companies over the past few months. There’s RapidSOS, which is adding more data into emergency calls to make responses faster and more efficient. There’s Qwake, which raised $5.5 million to build hardware and cloud services to allow firefighters to visualize their environments in smoky conditions. Meanwhile, YC-backed Gridware has also raised more than $5 million to create sensors to identify failures in the power grid faster.
In short, there are a growing crop of disaster tech startups — but more are going to be needed to fight the panoply of disasters that will strike in the years ahead.
There’s so much to do: better mental health resources for victims and first responders, easier access to recovery funds to heal lives, higher-quality sensors and data analyses to identify disasters earlier, faster logistics to evacuate people out of harm’s way. In fact, there are quite literally dozens of fields that need more investment and founder attention.
It’s not an easy market, as I pointed out in an analysis of sales cycles. Budgets are tight, disasters are random, and technology is often an afterthought. In some ways though, that friction is a font of creativity — how to build these next-generation of services and how to sell them is the risk that leads to the potential high return.
As the IPCC’s report made clear this week, the chaotic weather and intense disasters we’ve seen the past few decades aren’t going to abate any time soon. But with ingenuity, we can respond better to the disasters that are already on their way, and save lives and treasure in the process.
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In a YC ‘power’ play, Gridware girds $5.3M to save humanity from weather
You might have thought that with more than 300 companies joining this year’s winter batch of Y Combinator, the investor interest might have thinned. Well, it’s 2021 and investors are hopping around like crazy to invest in ideas that push the boundaries in fields far-flung from enterprise SaaS.
Case in point today: Gridware. It’s a startup I profiled earlier this year when it had just started up in its YC batch. As I wrote, it wants to save our power grids from the ravages of climate change:
Its approach is to use a small, sensor-laden box that can be installed to a power pole with just four screws. Gridware’s package contains microphones and other sensors to sense the ambient environment around a power pole, and it uses on-board AI/ML processing to listen for anomalies and report them to the relevant managers as appropriate.
Hardware, IoT, infrastructure, utilities and government are five keywords you probably most would have wanted to avoid when pitching investors even a few years ago. But with power disappearing in states like California and Texas for stretches of time, investors have perhaps finally realized there is an opportunity to save the planet and make a bit of money here.
Gridware today announced that it has raised $5.3 million in a seed round led by Priscilla Tyler of True Ventures and Seth Bannon and Shuo Yang of Fifty Years. CEO and co-founder Tim Barat said fundraising was quite fierce. “We had 130 investors reach out to us, and I wasn’t even able to get back to some of them yet … [I’m] still going back through the emails,” he said. “Even before Demo Day, we had raised a significant portion of our round.”
Barat and the Gridware team were looking for investors who were mission-driven and really understood the timeline it would take to build the company. “You see a lot of investors say they are mission-driven … but when it comes time to put their money where their mouth is, it often goes to consumer technology where it is safer,” he said. Tyler at True leads climate investing for the firm, and True has made a variety of bets in the space. Fifty Years focuses on startups tackling the UN’s list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Gridware co-founders Abdulrahman Bin Omar, Tim Barat, and Hall Chen. Image Credits: Gridware
You can read more about the company’s product and market in my profile from three months ago, but with the new funding, Gridware wants to double down on building a very intentional team capable of tackling this tough market. “Dealing with this multi-stakeholder business model is very challenging, so bringing on people with the experience, knowledge and wits to deal with this kind of environment is key,” Barat said.
As I explored recently, the disaster response space is probably one of the toughest markets in the world to sell into. Barat acknowledged the intrinsic difficulty, but sees huge potential in the long run. “One of the things that I have observed with the companies being successful — they really spend the time to meet as many stakeholders as possible,” he said. “With consumer, you can stand in front of a shopping mall and talk to 100 customers in a day [but] in govtech, getting 100 meetings even within a year is a huge accomplishment.”
The company will be re-opening its Bay Area office in Walnut Creek on June 1.
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Gridware is building early-detection sensors for power grid failures and wildfires
Like corporate financial accounting, the power grid never draws headlines when things are going well. No journalist writes “The power remains on,” or discusses the extensive work it takes to maintain the grid. Instead, it takes a record-breaking ice wave to knock out power to one of the largest states in America for it to start garnering front-page coverage, or perhaps massive wildfires in America’s most populous state like the Camp Fire in California in 2018.
Power grids are going to be in the news more and more in the coming years as global climate change intensifies storm activity and grids come under increasingly harsh strain. As my colleague Jon Shieber wrote yesterday, “Whether it’s heavily regulated markets like California or a free market like Texas, current policy can’t stop the weather from wreaking havoc and putting people’s lives at risk.” The grid is at the center of one of the toughest challenges facing us this century.
What’s needed are better sensors and tech for identifying the source of outages — and also preventing them in the first place. With millions of power poles and hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission wires scattered across the United States, how can utilities reliably verify the quality of their systems? How can they do that in an efficient way to avoid rate increases on users?
Gridware, which is in the current batch of Y Combinator, is one company taking a shot at this critical need. Its approach is to use a small, sensor-laden box that can be installed to a power pole with just four screws. Gridware’s package contains microphones and other sensors to sense the ambient environment around a power pole, and it uses on-board AI/ML processing to listen for anomalies and report them to the relevant managers as appropriate.
It’s like “a guard standing next to the pole, listening to it, watching over it,” Tim Barat, CEO and co-founder, said, likening the box to a Fitbit for a power pole. When a tree branch breaks and cuts through a line, there’s “no way to detect them unless you are right next to the fault.” With Gridware, it’s “not the right place at the right time but the right place all the time,” he said.
What makes the founding team compelling here is the backgrounds of some of the company’s founders. Barat worked as a power pole worker himself in the field, evaluating equipment and searching for problems. “Every time we go up a pole, we hit it with a hammer, which tells us whether there is termite damage, etc. [ … and] that is still how inspectors investigate a pole,” he noted.
Barat eventually migrated to University of California, Berkeley, where he was mentored by Prabal Dutta, an electrical engineering professor who also joined the company early on as a co-founder. Dutta’s worked has focused on “industrial cyber-physical systems,” and he continues to research industrial control systems through digital interfaces via the iCyPhy center.
Gridware’s team clockwise from top left: Tim Barat, Abdulrahman Bin Omar, Dr. Prabal Dutta, Addison Chan, Riley Lyman, and Hall Chen. Image Credits: Gridware
Barat also met Abdulrahman Bin Omar, who had worked for a number of years in the energy sector, in a class that eventually had a one-week hiatus due to California wildfires. The two began working together in 2019, joining Berkeley’s startup incubator Citrus Foundry in 2020. The trio eventually linked up with co-founders Hall Chen and Riley Lyman as well, and snagged a $150,000 state grant from the California Energy Commission via the CalSEED program.
Today, the startup has seven employees, and it’s currently in talks with utility grids of all sizes about deploying its product. Grids can be very slow to adopt new technology with very long testing and sales cycles, but there might just be an opportunity for the company to accelerate those normal timelines given the extensive and visible power outages we have witnessed the past few years. We need to “transition our grid to face the challenges of the new century,” Barat said.
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