Decarbonizing the key greenhouse-gas-emitting sectors will require collaboration across the climatetech ecosystem, with climate finance, policy, and justice leaders working in concert with technology entrepreneurs to scale solutions.
That’s why we convene our startups, partners, and investor network four times a year for our Sector Pitch Day series, each time exploring innovation areas and opportunities present in a particular sector. For the first edition of 2022, we turned our attention to decarbonizing existing buildings—a focus critical to climate action, given that about two-thirds of today’s total building area will still exist in 2040.
The event explored three dimensions of this topic and featured pitches from Greentown startups working in each:
Planning and financing retrofit projects:
- Zero develops automation software that enables hassle-free home retrofits to improve comfort and eliminate emissions.
- IncentiFind offers a database to coalesce green building incentives from all levels of U.S. government and make them searchable to residential and commercial sectors using a property’s address.
Equipping existing buildings for high-sustainability performance:
- MicroEra Power is a developer and emerging manufacturer of THERMAplus, a hardware and software solution for smart thermal energy storage for buildings.
- Altus Thermal rethinks energy use in the home to deliver higher efficiency, greater comfort, an improved user experience, and increased benefits to the electrical grid.
- Enviro Power replaces aging heating equipment with its breakthrough SmartWatt heat and power technology, providing energy solutions to lower utility bills and increase resiliency and reliability.
- TORO WATT’s air conditioning technology leverages the outside environment to offer comfort with improved control of temperature, humidity, and ventilation in a safe, climate-friendly, and efficient way.
Managing the ongoing environmental footprint of buildings
- Enerbrain develops a plug-and-play IoT solution ready for the market that monitors and controls heating, cooling, and ventilation systems in buildings to make them smarter, healthier, and more sustainable thanks to AI and IoT technologies.
- InfiSense captures, decodes, and analyzes critical data on building operations to help customers reduce carbon emissions and increase energy efficiency.
- Canetia Analytics provides AI-enabled structural survey solutions.
In addition to sessions focused on these three topic areas, we were proud to kick the day off with a keynote speaking program featuring Thomas O’Brien, managing director of the HYM Investment Group, and Jackie Jenkins-Scott, interim president of Roxbury Community College.
While reflecting on Black History Month and climate progress in the buildings space, Jenkins-Scott invoked an African proverb: “‘If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together,’” she quoted. “When I think about movement building and I think about all of these big goals that have been set, we can’t reach them if each sector of our society tries to go alone. We need to go together. This proverb has been around for centuries and centuries, but they had something right.”
Check out all of our building tech members here!
Upcoming Sector Pitch Days will focus on manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation. Interested in attending? Reach out to us at hello@greentownlabs.com.