Blackhorn Ventures is thrilled to announce our latest investment in Formic, a business set to revolutionize manufacturing with their industrial Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform. Leading the $27.4 million Series A+ round alongside co-investors Mitsubishi HC Capital America, NEC, Translink Capital, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, Lux Capital, Initialized Capital and Lorimer Ventures, we are excited to support Formic in their mission to revolutionize manufacturing by making automation accessible to the 90% of US manufacturers not currently leveraging automation – especially to small and medium-sized manufacturers.

Led by serial entrepreneur Saman Farid, Formic is democratizing access to the latest robotic systems, offering a scalable, flexible solution that aligns with the diverse needs of manufacturers.  What the PPA did for solar, Formic is doing for industrial robots; offering Robots-as-a-Service to make automation simple, affordable, and fast – ensuring businesses of all sizes can thrive in the global marketplace. Formic handles all scoping, design, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance for a robot for one low hourly rate, saving manufacturing and industrial companies time and money from their first day of service.

Formic has deployed its fleet of robotic automation equipment in 60+ facilities, generating $20M+ in total contract value, wth a 97% renewal rate, and strong upselling of the expanding customer base. Formic delivers a 50% reduction in industry standard implementation time, delivering value faster than traditional robotics vendors.  They are OEM agnostic, and boast a 99.43%+ uptime over the last 12 months with over 100k production hours achieved this year.  Most importantly, they allow for cost-competitive robotics in areas where labor shortages are a major limiting factor for manufacturing output.

The adoption of robotics and automation on the factory floor are being accelerated by rising labor costs, growing production demands, advancements in technology, geopolitical pressures, and supply chain disruptions necessitating reshoring​​. The U.S. is currently facing a severe labor shortage, particularly in the manufacturing sector: compared to pre-pandemic levels this critical pillar on economic competitiveness has 1.9 million fewer workers. This shortage is exacerbated by an aging workforce;10,000 baby boomers retire every day, which will result in 2-2.5 million manufacturing jobs unfilled by 2030. The traditional labor market is struggling to keep up, driving the need for solutions to boost industrial productivity amidst an unprecedented boom in American manufacturing.

Introducing automation into a manufacturing production process for the first time using the traditional playbook is a daunting task. There is only 1 robotic programming engineer for every 11 manufacturing facilities in the US. Existing engineering and maintenance teams inside these facilities don’t have the skill sets to operate and maintain automation equipment after it is deployed. This leads to a continued degradation in system performance over time, resulting in abandonment of automation and a return to “the way we’ve always done it”. These failures are the hallmark of traditional automation projects and the entire reason Formic was founded. The team developed Robots-as-a-Service to eliminate financial and operational barriers and deliver a guaranteed way for US manufacturers to have continued operational success resulting in increased productivity, quality, and safety.

A Brighter Future Through Automation in Manufacturing

Formic provides fully managed automation with no upfront capital expenditure. Their service includes 24/7 monitoring, maintenance, and performance guarantees. By leasing robots to industrial customers on a short-term basis, Formic allows businesses to reduce operating expenses by 40%, double production capacity, and start making payments only after the system is operational. Formic offers flexible contracts and the ability to scale automation as needed, making it easier for manufacturers to adopt and benefit from off-the-shelf robotic technology.

Formic’s vertically integrated RaaS platform de-risks the process of scoping, deploying, maintaining, supporting, and repurposing of robots for its customers. Key components of Formic’s technology stack include:

• Ant (Edge Device): An embedded IoT product that interfaces with Formic’s robotic fleet, enabling real-time data gathering for advanced analytics and diagnostics.
• Core (Operating System): An equipment agnostic operating system accessed through a simple touch screen interface, making deployment and operation faster and easier than ever before.
• Colony (Fleet Management): A SaaS product that integrates maintenance, billing, asset management, and performance data, automating fleet management decisions with machine learning.
• Portal (Customer UI): A mobile and web-enabled application providing customers with comprehensive data on their robots, from billing to usage specifics.
• Swarm (Engineering Tools for Integrators): Augmented reality and workflow automation tools for scoping, designing, simulating, and generating blueprints for robotic deployments​​​​.

Enhancing Competitiveness and Sustainability Through Automation and Reshoring

Formic’s approach enhances manufacturing competitiveness by unlocking capacity to enable streamlined reshoring and reduction of transportation-related emissions. Domestic supply chains, estimated to emit 25% less than their global counterparts, will benefit from increased production efficiency and reduced workplace injuries. Robots are expected to create more high-quality jobs than they displace, transforming the manufacturing landscape and improving working conditions. By enabling a significant reduction in long-distance transportation by strengthening domestic production capabilities, Formic is having a meaningful impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Formic Team: Domain Expertise Across Robotics and Fintech

Formic is led by a seasoned team of experts in robotics, finance, and automation:

• Saman Farid, Co-Founder and CEO: An experienced operator and investor, Saman previously founded an e-commerce company and Comet Labs, a venture capital firm focused on robotic automation. He also served as Head of US Investing for Baidu Ventures.
• Jack Wagler, CFO: Promoted to CFO in June 2022, Jack was previously Treasurer and VP of Finance at Formic. He has extensive experience in specialty finance, having worked at Tyr Partners and EY.
• Steve Olszewski, COO: Prior to joining Formic, Steve was General Manager at Financeit and President and CEO of Spruce Finance, where he managed residential distributed energy resources​​.
• Shawn Fitzgerald, VP of Marketing & Sales: In his previous roles as President of Thomasnet and CMO at Xometry, Shawn managed manufacturing marketplaces providing supply chain solutions for US manufacturers.

At Blackhorn Ventures, we believe in the transformative power of automation to revitalize our industrial base.  We’re proud to support Formic in their mission to revolutionize the manufacturing industry. For a limited time Formic is allowing select US manufacturers to try robotic palletizing in their facility for just $4,750 / month, shipped in 24 hours, fully installed and with 100% maintenance included – for more info click here. For more information on open roles at Formic, visit their job board here.

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in ThinkLabs, which is accelerating the energy transition with an AI-powered co-pilot for grid operators. We’re proud to co-invest in their Series Seed alongside GE Vernova, PowerHouse Ventures, Active Impact Capital, Mercuria Energy, and Amplify Ventures. Blackhorn Partner Micah Kotch will join the company’s board of directors.

Our focus at Blackhorn Ventures is on founders who are transforming how we build, power, and move our world.  As part of that focus, we’re thrilled to support ThinkLabs efforts to empower grid operators to leverage the power of AI to decarbonize the grid and make it more resilient.

Utilities around the world are struggling with a combination of growing loads, decarbonization commitments, a tidal wave of intermittent generation coming online, public pressure to limit rate increases, and workforce shortages. ThinkLabs solution has the potential to simplify grid operations, reduce outages, and shorten the interconnection queue for renewables and energy storage, which aligns with our mission, vision and values. We’re confident the support from our corporate strategic Limited Partners will help accelerate new deployments, and contribute to ThinkLabs emergence as a leader in the energy industry.

Grids Under Historic Pressures

Workforce Empowerment

The backbone of the energy transition is the electric grid, and arguably, the most critical individuals who operate our most critical infrastructure are grid operators. After more than a century of advancements, the grid is evolving to connect to a surge in data volume via a jump in renewable energy generation, data center growth driven by AI adoption, distributed energy resource expansion ( including via solar, EVs and energy storage), and new data inputs including smart meters. At the same time, utilities are staring down the ‘Silver Tsunami’; the average age in the utility industry is 50 and more than 50% of the utility workforce is set to retire over the next five years. New grid operators are in short-supply, and those that do exist are being asked to manage today’s grid with yesterday’s tools.

Shortening the Interconnection Queue

The shift from centralized to distributed generators requires accommodating unpredictable bi-directional electricity flows, while the integration of grid-connected devices, like EV charging stations and distributed solar and storage, add complexity. Delayed and inadequate investments in transmission and distribution infrastructure and grid upgrades have resulted in a total capacity of energy projects in U.S. interconnection queues that grew 40% year-over-year in 2022, with more than 1,350 GW of generation and 680 GW of storage waiting for approval to connect, according to a recent report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Permitting reform, infrastructure investments, and software upgrades are required to move the needle: the typical energy project completed in 2022 spent five years in queue for interconnection approval compared to three years in 2015 and fewer than two years in 2008. Queue lengths are expected to grow as the Inflation Reduction Act spurs even greater interest in renewable energy among developers.

The Double-Edged Sword of Artificial Intelligence

Power systems are rapidly evolving due to increasing electricity demand and decarbonization efforts (Grid Strategies recently predicted an 81% jump in US load growth forecasts primarily due to demand from data centers, and the manufacturing boom). While artificial intelligence (AI) advancements are creating new power demands, they’re also part of the solution to meet this demand: AI models, doubling in computational power every five to six months since 2010, now excel in task automation. The energy sector recognizes this potential and is just beginning to use AI to boost efficiency amid the growth of smart grids and the surge in data generation. Across the global workforce, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning specialists are the profession experiencing the fastest growth in demand, creating a recruitment bottleneck. In June 2022, there were only 22 000 AI specialists globally across all industries, and 61% of large firms surveyed in the United Kingdom and United States reported lacking staff with sufficient AI experience. The energy industry will need to compete to recruit the best data scientists and programmers. ThinkLabs helps address this gap by productizing the data science and machine learning the industry needs.

A Solution Grid Operators Love

ThinkLabs is building AI native software for the energy industry; digital infrastructure that takes an AI-first perspective to improve electric grid performance. Their autonomous energy system (AES) will enable and accelerate the grid’s role as the electron and intelligence platform of the energy transition. Like autonomous driving for vehicles, autonomous energy systems provide successive levels of autonomy, from operator assistance, to ‘human in the loop’ copilots in the near term, and eventually full autonomy of grid and energy operations from the network to the edge.

At the heart of AES is an AI-augmented digital twin of the grid. This digital twin leverages the up-and-coming field of physics-informed AI, which overcomes data quality and computation constraints of traditional physics-only digital twins, as well as sparse data and “black box” effects of AI models. The result is transparent, trusted, robust, and high-performance operational analytics that are pre-trained and prepared for real-life conditions, while continuously learning and improving with field experience. ThinkLabs has a unique ability to yield actionable insights with imperfect data quality, rather than spending millions of dollars and countless hours to clean static data sets that will never be perfect enough for mathematical optimization (i.e. garbage-in-garbage-out).  The deep diligence we’ve conducted with our network of grid operators and utility customers suggests ThinkLabs is building a solution that has real market pull.

Partnering with GE Vernova

The genesis of ThinkLabs comes from within GE Vernova; the new GE spinout on a mission to electrify the planet while simultaneously working to decarbonize it. GE’s significant utility relationships and access to grid data from utilities around the world provided fertile ground for the ThinkLabs team to design highly scalable grid power flow analytics in operational real-time, capable of managing fast-changing and flexible grid dynamics. The ThinkLabs platform has been trained with 50K+ scenarios and pretrained solutions to handle various generation, load, storage, and switching combinations, rather than relying on a handful of week/day ahead worst-case planning studies.

Initially, GE Vernova will serve as a primary channel for go-to-market, with GE Digital sales teams upselling the ThinkLabs solutions to existing GE Vernova utility customers (40% of global grid operators run GE systems). Given the challenge of the traditionally slow utility sales cycle, we see this as a massive competitive advantage, and a way to get to scale quickly. With average contract sizes that could range from $1-10M annually, ThinkLabs is partenring with Tier 1 Investor-Owned Utilities that have the ability to scale and grow over time (unlike some of their competitors, which are primarily focused on smaller electrical co-ops and municipally owned-utilities). The team already has 70+ utilities it has qualified and is pursuing channel relationships with cloud providers, consultants, and systems integrators who serve the utility sector, as GE Vernova does not have an exclusive on the ThinkLabs product.

Founders with domain expertise, exits, and experience scaling product

ThinkLabs CEO and Founder Josh Wong has spent his career in energy innovation. He was the former Head of Smart Grid at electric utility Toronto Hydro, and founded and exited Opus One (which built a enterprise-grade Distributed Energy Resource Management Solutions) to GE. Josh has over 15 years experience building hardware and software for smart grids and most recently led the Grid Orchestration team at GE. Neal Vali, Head of Engineering, has 15+ years of experience leading software engineering teams at Sirius XM Connected Vehicles and Omnitracs where he built products for heavily-regulated industries including Aerospace and Automotive. George Zheng has a grid data and power modeling background — he has also led technical teams, with over 13 years of experience modeling and analyzing power systems at GE Digital and PowerTech Labs. He also has experience applying generative AI to grid modeling. George previously led the design and development of advanced engineering analytics across the GE Vernova product platform. We believe deep subject-matter expertise around industry-specific data is the most important success factor for applying Generative AI to specific industries. Collectively, the team has excellent utility/grid data experience and strong industry networks: critical for getting to scale quickly. The team is currently hiring for ML software and data engineers – interested applicants should apply at thinklabs.ai

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in Buzz Solutions, which uses  AI-powered visual data insights and predictive analytics to safeguard critical infrastructure.  Blackhorn previously invested in Buzz’s 2022 Seed Round, and we’re proud to co-invest in their Series A alongside GoPoint Ventures and MaC Venture Capital . 

The electric grid is the backbone of the energy transition. For the past two decades, demand for electricity across the United States was flat. However, this is dramatically changing. The combination of accelerating growth in electricity use by data centers mining cryptocurrency and delivering AI, plus longer-term electrification of manufacturing, electric vehicles and building heating has upended that status quo. All told, grid planners across the U.S. forecast an increase of 38 gigawatts of peak demand by 2028, according to data reported to federal regulators.  As the Washington Post recently reported, “Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.”

As both the transmission network and the electrical distribution network are increasingly strained, utilities are looking to build ‘digital twins’ to streamline asset maintenance and repair. Utilities face three large and growing problems that require immediate behavior change: 1) the growing cost of extreme storms, wildfires, unexpected blackouts and preventable failures, 2) the need to rapidly modernize the grid given a jump in renewable energy generation and distributed energy resources (including EVs and energy storage), and 3) an aging workforce and severe labor shortages as more than 50% of the utility’s workforce is set to retire over the next decade.

At the center of these three challenges sits Buzz Solutions. Their AI-powered visual data insights and predictive analytics platform is designed to provide fault detection, monitoring, and management for utility power infrastructure and renewable energy assets. Buzz Solutions’s 100,000+ image-to-image source of record acts as a foundational data asset that is core to training their best-in-class AI model. The company is quickly becoming the go-to solution for visualizing data sets to enable resilience – and real savings for utilities.

The world of grid inspections is plagued with inefficiencies

When it comes to speed, accuracy and expense, grid inspections are far behind the standards of other critical infrastructure. Electrical utilities suffer losses of $170B annually due to network failures, forced shutdowns, and natural disasters. On average, grid inspection takes six to eight weeks for an engineer to conduct manually. This work comes at a great cost to utility workers: power line repairmen rank in the top 20 most dangerous jobs in the US and account for 24.2 deaths per 100,000 workers according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Compounding this historic challenge for the energy industry, utilities have faced a record number of thefts (e.g., copper and other raw materials), break-ins and vandalism at substations (including several high-profile incidents resulting in blackouts). These events have spurred calls for new regulatory mandates for greater monitoring and autonomous operations, given that many substations are in highly remote areas. The utility industry is urgently looking for new solutions to help avoid these costly and high-risk incidents and their associated negative publicity and potential for lawsuits.

Buzz Solutions offers an AI platform to efficiently inspect, monitor and manage power infrastructure 

Buzz Solutions provides a multi-product visual data digitization and analytics platform to address utilities’ inspection and monitoring analytics needs via two solutions: PowerAI and PowerGUARD.  Unlike other solutions on the market, Buzz does not need to bear the expense of collecting raw data.  Instead, they partner with drone, helicopter, and ground-based providers and existing utility sub-contractors.

PowerAI is a cloud-based AI software analyzing visual transmission and distribution data.  It does this faster, cheaper, more accurately, and safer than current manual processes. With its human-in-the-loop algorithm, PowerAI generates materially higher accuracy, at 60% of the cost, and 5X faster than manual processes, saving Buzz’s customers~$5M daily in reduced outage risk (assuming analysis of roughly 2M images per year). PowerAI ingests aerial visual data collected via third-party drone partners or a utilities in-house drone inspection team. It processes these images through their data management and AI fueled smart algorithms. It stores the analytics and reporting on a utility’s IT/OT systems to address cybersecurity considerations; and then integrates the insights into the utility’s GIS or work order systems via APIs to ensure the necessary actions tie into workflow and maintenance prioritization systems. In 2024, Buzz plans to expand PowerAI functionality to include smart analytics of solar and hydro assets. For PowerAI, Buzz’s extensive field inspection data volume source acts as a foundational data asset that is core to their competitive advantage.

In 2023, Buzz launched its second platform solution, PowerGUARD, as an edge AI monitoring platform providing 24/7 visual monitoring for utility substations. PowerGUARD analyzes visual data and thermal imagery via fixed on-site cameras; and provides intrusion, worker safety, and equipment condition monitoring as well as fire, smoke and arcing detection with their AI-powered alerting algorithm. It then delivers these alerts to the relevant utility teams, such as the substation operators or security teams. In 2024, Buzz plans to expand PowerGUARD’s product coverage to include monitoring and analytics of wind infrastructure assets.

It’s there but we can make it more explicit about how it has influenced our conviction. The primary piece is adding on the Substation product and evolving to a full platform solution that captures, digitizes, analyzes and builds actions into the utility workflow system for all visual data assets. The other piece is the significant uptick in utility customer “readiness to act”. Thanks for that input.

The transmission inspection market is massive and becoming more connected 

Globally, the transmission inspection market accounts for over $40B. The market is expected to double over the next decade as voluntary and mandated inspections increase. New transmission builds, for example, now require an initial and post-construction inspection. As inspections transition from manual processes to more autonomous drone and robotic data collection, it is expected that utilities will capture 10x more images for each monitored structure. With more data comes the need for better prioritization and actionable insights – exactly where Buzz is positioned to win.  Additionally, the growth of renewable energy assets creates a large and growing market opportunity for solar, wind, and hydro inspection analysis, which PowerAI could service with minimal product updates.

Given the intermittent and unpredictable load profiles of EVs and DERs, implications for the  utility distribution network are still unknown. However, the aging grid is increasingly stressed and strained. The more utilities monitor grid equipment and assets, the better they understand their condition. With this understanding, grid operators will be able to better estimate  load patterns, infrastructure capacity, and speed the pace of electrification and decarbonization. We believe the combined offering of PowerAI and PowerGUARD position Buzz to be the 0nly utility tuned platform that will increasingly capture, digitize, provide superior analytics, and seamlessly build actions into the utility workflows  across all visual data assets. We see this broader visual data analytics platform accelerating customer interest, early adoption and full enterprise deployment in the coming years.

Founders with a customer obsession

Buzz was co-founded by CEO Kaitlyn Albertoli and CTO Vikhyat Chaudhry in 2017. The pair met at Stanford University and started Buzz as part of their coursework. Kaitlyn graduated from Stanford and has a background in finance and sustainability. She leads go to market for the company, and has spent the past seven years working with utility customers and channel partners. While earning his MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Vik specialized in energy engineering and AI/ML for smart grid technologies, working as a research assistant focused on ML and computer vision for drone sensing of wind farms. He spent three years as a data scientist at Cisco Systems, and worked as an embedded systems engineer focused on firmware design and Machine Learning based intent prediction algorithms. Since we invested at the seed stage, the team has been laser focused on serving customers like NYPA, Southern California Edison and others monitor their critical infrastructure, achieving best in class performance. They’re currently hiring a Marketing Manager, Sales Specialist and Solutions Engineer to join the team and their mission of safeguarding the world’s energy infrastructure. For more information on open roles at Buzz Solutions, visit their job board here.

Blackhorn Ventures Leads the $7.5M Equity and Debt Round for RidePanda: The One-Stop Shop for Micro Mobility Access for the Enterprise

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in Ridepanda, the turnkey platform for micro mobility benefits. Their customers, public agencies and large private enterprises, use Ridepanda to offer their employees the ability to lease the highest-quality e-bikes and scooters through their pre-tax benefits package. Other investors include co-lead Yamaha Ventures, Proeza Ventures, Porsche Ventures, Oyster Ventures, Somersault Ventures, General Catalyst and Urban Us Capital.

With Ridepanda, employers are transforming how their employees commute, starting in New York, Seattle, and San Francisco. Ridepanda customers include Amazon, Google, Intuit, Goodwin Law, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the County of San Mateo benefit from improved employee wellness and retention, a safe and healthy post-Covid return to work that reduces single occupancy vehicles, and validated and transparent ESG reporting.

Almost 100 million people commute to work in the US on a daily basis. With 60% stating that they would use micromobility solutions, like Ridepanda, to commute daily, there is a massive opportunity to reverse current trends and change habits toward sustainable mobility options. With Ridepanda, employees of public and private sector entities benefit from the convenience, joy and wellness benefits of a zero-emission transportation option.

Urban Transportation Revolution: The Growing Demand for Micromobility

The market for micromobility solutions is growing rapidly, driven by a combination of environmental concerns, urbanization, and technological advancements. According to a report by McKinsey & Company, the global micromobility market is projected to reach $300 billion by 2030, with e-bikes and e-scooters as the fastest-growing segments.  Regulatory changes and infrastructure investments are making it easier for companies like Ridepanda to operate and expand their offerings.

e-bikes and scooters are seeing unprecedented demand: according to Bloomberg NEF, there are nearly 300M electric two- and three-wheelers on the road worldwide, and collectively, they displace about 4x as much oil demand as the entire global fleet of electric cars.

Ridepanda is well-positioned to capitalize on this growing market, with a platform that makes it easy for individuals and organizations to access and use a range of micro-mobility solutions. By leveraging partnerships with local bike shops for test rides and repairs, and their deep expertise from stints at Lime, Bird, and Scoot, the team at Ridepanda is poised to be a leader in the industry and to make a significant impact on the way we think about enterprise transportation.

“Regardless of what value pool you’re in, regardless of what mode you’re in, this is a great story, in our mind, because micromobility is going to grow across the globe. It’s going to grow across form factors, across sharing and ownership,” -Kersten Heineke, a partner at McKinsey and Company and co-leader of the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility.

Navigating Urban Mobility Woes

As cities become denser and urban populations grow, the way people move within cities is rapidly changing. COVID left its mark on many major metropolitan areas; in just five US cities we’ve seen 335 miles of new bike lanes in just 24 months. 

With the transportation industry accounting for roughly 29 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and short trips of less than 5 miles accounting for ½ of all passenger vehicles trips, we can only make a dent in our emissions profile by rapidly shifting to zero-emission transportation choices.  Where a car doesn’t make sense, it can be hard for first-time riders to choose the right electric option that meets their needs. Figuring out insurance, maintenance, and financing also present challenges. That’s where Ridepanda comes in.

Transforming the Way We Move

While working at the first wave of micromobility companies, RidePanda co-founders Charlie Depman and Chinmay Malaviya recognized that the micromobility market was moving towards longer-term ownership vs. shared fleet access. Recent events, including the Paris e-scooter ban, have put increasing pressure on shared fleets.  Meanwhile, as municipalities have launched e-bike rebate programs and the growth of individual ownership models have contributed to  e-bikes growing faster than ever.

When Ridepanda first launched their original online marketplace, they realized that companies offering mobility leases and subscriptions lacked diversity in vehicle form factors, experienced supply chain constraints, and had limited access to repairs due to proprietary components and lack of local support. Where unit economics are challenging and profitability has proved elusive for companies like Bird, Vanmoof, Helbiz and others, Ridepanda benefits from an asset-light revenue model that is generating significantly more revenue per vehicle over the course of the vehicle’s lifetime.

Ridepanda’s new subscription and leasing platform (available at ridepanda.com) features an extensive range of vehicles including cargo e-bikes, mountain e-bikes, road bikes, commuter e-bikes, folding bikes, and high-performance scooters from well-established brands like Giant, Diamondback and Dahon, as well as newer brands like Segway, and Okai. With Ridepanda, employees log in to a customized portal, select their vehicle from a wide variety of form factors, price points, and size/color/frame variations from a diverse set of high quality vendors using standard components.

The shift to a leasing model with owned and operated local hubs (called ‘PandaHubs’) has allowed Ridepanda to have a closer, longer-term relationship with their customer by  allowing them to test ride and choose the right vehicle, and receive ongoing servicing as needed throughout the duration of their lease.

This new round of financing will be leveraged to grow Ridepanda’s team across engineering, sales and marketing, and help accomplish their mission of having 100,000 employees commuting to and from work, living an active lifestyle, on a Ridepanda vehicle by 2026.

Jane Smith, Transportation Demand Manager at Amazon emphasized the value to the company’s 100K+ commuters, saying “Ridepanda’s platform has provided a unique and valuable solution for our employees, offering them a wide array of options and making their commutes more enjoyable and sustainable while reducing our environmental impact.”

Traction to Date: How Ridepanda is changing the commute

Many large companies find themselves in a tricky balancing act: trying to retain talent, achieve decarbonization commitments, and bring employees back to the office in-person. Ridepanda has begun working with some of the largest tech companies in the world to help them tackle all three of these issues. Google, Amazon, and others are seeing their employees jump at the opportunity to have a healthier, environmentally and pocket-friendly way to come back into the office. This offers a seamless introduction to micromobility for the employee, and a compelling employee benefit that improves overall wellness, decreases scope 3 emissions, and increases employee satisfaction.

The right team at the right time

The Ridepanda team is led by Chinmay Malaviya (CEO) and Charlie Depman (CTO). Chinmay sold his last company to Delivery Hero and led strategy at Lime. Charlie has spent his career building partnerships and back-end infrastructure in some of the largest players in the micromobility space including Scoot Networks, which was acquired by Bird. The two have extensive experience scaling startups from zero to scale, and just brought on a new Head of Marketing, Stephen Rodriguez, who was previously at Scoot/Bird. They have surrounded themselves with an outstanding set of experts in micromobility, GTM sales, and engineering. For information on open roles at RidePanda, visit https://ridepanda.breezy.hr/

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to upsize our investment in carbon accounting software provider Optera’s Series A round alongside Next Frontier Capital,  with participation from Engage VC, Overture VC, Massive VC and others. 

Pressure is building for public and private companies to disclose the greenhouse gas (GHG)  emissions that form both the direct and indirect footprint of their operations. More challenging, these entities need to demonstrate meaningful progress to decarbonize their entire value chain, and do so while continuing to generate profits.  As regulatory, consumer, and investor pressure builds, the demand for transparent, pragmatic, and scientifically accurate data, and carbon accounting solutions is rising exponentially.  At Blackhorn, we believe the future belongs to those providing actionable data for industrial transformation.  Optera’s stellar team of industry veterans is providing direct data to improve the global supply chain.^[1]

The first step in emissions reduction is measurement. Carbon accounting systems account for emissions based on the three scopes introduced by The Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Scope 1 includes all direct emissions (i.e., those generated in a company’s facilities), Scope 2 refers to all emissions through purchased energy (e.g., electricity, heat), and Scope 3 includes indirect emissions (i.e., supply chain emissions, emissions from product usage). Since Scope 1 and 2 emissions are directly controlled by the company, they are much easier to calculate than Scope 3.

Optera empowers companies to identify real levers for emissions reduction, resource efficiency, and cost reduction by addressing the complexity of Scope 3 emissions.

According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, (where Optera’s founding team literally helped write the book on corporate sustainability) the average company’s supply chain GHG emissions are 5.5 times higher than the direct emissions from its own assets and operations. And Bloomberg reports only 5% of US companies report Scope 3 emissions. An effective carbon accounting system, therefore, needs to provide transparent and accurate measurements of the company’s supply-chain carbon impacts. Calculating Scope 3 emissions is the most difficult and complex task in carbon accounting since the information needed is not directly available. This makes Scope 3 data the hardest, and most valuable element of carbon accounting.

Optera’s specialization in complex supply chains enables corporations to calculate, track, and drive pragmatic action towards their sustainability and net zero goals.

Optera’s suite of tools automates key functions to help streamline the process while pairing clients with sustainability consultants who can assist with nuanced analyses, ongoing education, and long-term strategies for reduction. In early 2023, Optera launched its holistic supplier engagement platform in partnership with the Responsible Business Alliance–a nonprofit coalition of companies dedicated to improving social, environmental, and ethical conditions in their global supply chains. Through this partnership, Optera’s platform captures all essential emissions data for companies and their suppliers across the global electronics industry, providing a self-serve tool for thousands of suppliers to develop their own Scope 1 & 2 inventory, and visualizing analysis and suggestions to drive action.

Blackhorn upsized our investment to co-lead Optera’s Series A because of a strong alignment with our investment thesis in carbon.

There’s an alphabet-soup of opportunities within the emerging carbon landscape that feel like the ‘wild west’ (DAC, MRV, CCUS, etc.). Scope 3 carbon accounting is not one of those areas.  While carbon accounting has grown increasingly competitive in the last 12 months, Optera’s specialization in complex supply chains is unique. First, Optera helps complex organizations create holistic plans for achieving net zero emissions in an economic and timely manner. Second, it enables companies to prioritize and stage initiatives to maximize the impact achieved per dollar and effort invested. Finally, Optera provides systematic and rigorous measurement and monitoring tools to accelerate the transition to net zero while surfacing other future value streams. We believe that carbon accounting “guesstimates” will no longer suffice, and that specialist firms will demonstrate a competitive advantage at least until carbon standards and markets mature significantly. Specialists can leverage domain expertise and accrue large and proprietary data pools to help them scale efficiently and build a competitive moat. 

By managing and driving action across the supply chain, Optera plays a pivotal role in the transition to a low-carbon economy.

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) Corporate Net-Zero Standard implores companies to reduce >90% of emissions through direct and indirect value-chain improvements and to use carbon removal and storage to balance the final <10% of emissions. Optera enables companies to do just that. The will is there, but it is daunting to compile, analyze, and trust impact data, especially for businesses with many players across their supply chain. Optera is streamlining that process so their clients can feel confident in the data and focus on action.

One entity’s Scope 3 emissions are someone else’s operational emissions (their Scope 1 and 2). For large multinational companies, this could encompass thousands of organizations (suppliers, customers, portfolio companies, etc.). Across corporate value chains, this interconnected matrix of suppliers creates the single biggest lever for catalyzing action on climate change around the globe.

Optera’s team has the sustainability expertise and technical know-how to lead us to the next frontier of carbon accounting and meaningful action against climate change.

We first met Optera’s three-person founding team – CEO Tim Weiss, CRO Ty Colman, and (former CIO) Jason Denner – in Boulder, Colorado when they were a scrappy, pre-seed company.  The team worked together previously at a sustainability consulting firm where their work and research helped inform the foundations of corporate climate action.  They’ve made a huge amount of progress since that first meeting led by Weiss, an experienced SaaS product manager with experience at AES Distributed Energy and Uncharted. Colman led sustainability services for Fortune 500 companies, and Denner is a 25-year industry veteran that co-developed Rocky Mountain Institute’s industrial efficiency consulting services. They have built out an impressive team of software engineers, operations managers, and sales professionals to execute on their next phase of growth. We’re excited to continue our partnership with this rockstar team as they accelerate our transition to a low-carbon economy.

^[1] The US EPA’s Clean Air Act and Clean Power Act require emissions reporting from mobile and stationary sources (primarily power plants)today, while the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed new climate disclosure rule would result in widespread GHG emissions reporting across a number of new industries. Policies in the Inflation Reduction Act and in several key states also include carbon pricing schemes, which put a price on GHG emissions and provide a direct incentive for companies to reduce their emissions.

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in Fero Labs, alongside Climate Investment (formerly known as OGCI Climate Investments), Innovation Endeavors, and DI Technology.  Fero Labs is an AI-driven manufacturing process optimization software that simultaneously reduces emissions and improves operational performance in hard-to-decarbonize industries. 

Emissions from heavy industry and manufacturing are hard-to-abate, and a large and growing source of global emissions

Factories consume 54% of global energy resources, drive 25% of global emissions and comprise 16% of global GDP according to World Economic Forum estimates, making manufacturing a high impact area on the path to net zero. Asset-heavy approaches are necessary in emissions reductions efforts, but they take time and are expensive to implement. We believe that digital infrastructure (especially AI and Machine Learning) can be leveraged to accelerate emissions reductions and drive operational savings in the immediate term.  Factory optimization is a deep pool where we see massive opportunities for value creation.

Fero Labs works with some of the largest global players in cement, steel and chemical manufacturing, using AI to help their engineers make more efficient production decisions. Fero Labs’ software has uncovered upwards of $20M in savings across more than a dozen plants. Their customers, including Covestro, Gerdau, and CELSA Nordic, reduced more than 100,000 tons of carbon emissions and close to a million pounds of raw materials.  Reducing the carbon footprint of manufacturing is a much more complex process than making a one-to-one substitution for lower carbon raw materials, energy sources, or production equipment. Each change in the manufacturing process requires engineers to adjust operating conditions to maintain the same level of production quality, throughput, and profits. When these adjustments are made manually, production lines can take several years of engineering hours to achieve a 5% reduction in emissions. Fero Labs has helped their customers drive as much as 20% emissions reductions – in a matter of months.

Fero Labs offers a scalable, easily deployable solution for manufacturing process decarbonization

Fero Labs is no-code platform for manufacturing engineers and operators to identify areas for decarbonization in their operations, starting with cement, steel, and chemicals. These three subsectors are the highest emitting industrial sectors, according to International Energy Agency (IEA) data.

Unlike the black-box AI popularly seen in tools like ChatGPT, Fero Labs makes it possible for users to know if they can trust the results.  Their solution makes it easy to implement changes to an active manufacturing process, without sacrificing metrics such as profit margins or yield:

Predicting how changes impact the factory bottom line requires both deep data science experience and manufacturing process knowledge. The intersection of these two highly specialized skillsets in the same person is rare. Advanced data science is not typically taught as part of engineering training, and data scientists rarely have prior experience in manufacturing processes. Manufacturers struggle to compete with tech companies to attract data science talent. Fero makes it possible for manufacturing engineers to use complex data science-driven optimizations without needing to know how to program in Python.

(Image courtesy of Fero Labs.  The screenshot shows how one of Fero’s actual customers in the steel industry uses their solution to test the impact of changing raw materials suppliers impacts the tensile strength of the final product).

We got to know Berk and Alp, the co-founders of Fero Labs, over nearly a year before we invested. Their technical expertise was obvious from the beginning: Berk’s PhD research focused on optimizing optical networking using software, and Alp teaches machine learning at Columbia. During that period the team’s passion for decarbonization and unique product insight became increasingly apparent as we saw how quickly they were able to deploy the product to new customers, and how little support Fero’s users needed.

Fero’s platform drives long-term decarbonization strategy in heavy manufacturing

Fero’s customers use their platform to plan and execute their long term decarbonization efforts, rather than using it to merely drive a once-and-done emissions reduction effort. Reducing emissions in a manufacturing process is a gradual process that requires continuous adaptation to changes in energy supply, raw materials purity, and changing business priorities. In addition to predicting the operational or business impacts of decarbonization efforts, Fero Labs also recommends process changes in order to achieve emissions reductions goals:

Fero Labs directly drives Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions reductions for heavy industrial customers via a suite of process optimization models, including:

• Energy minimization through shorter batch cycles and reduced over-processing of raw materials [Scope 2]
• Scrap rate reduction via improved process stability, despite variability in input purity [Scope 1 and 2]
• Enabling circular/recycled manufacturing and reducing raw virgin input consumption [Scope 3]
• Fouling minimization [Scope 2]
• Enabling alternative fuels for clinker production in cement [Scope 1, 2, and 3].

On a blended and averaged basis, their solution helps customers reduce emissions by 5-10% while improving process profitability. The company estimates that it could achieve over 800 MT in CO2 emissions reduction in heavy manufacturing.

Fero Labs is led by a highly technical team with deep domain expertise

Fero Labs is led by co-founders CEO Berk Birand, (PhD in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University), and Chief Scientist Alp Kucukelbir, (PhD in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale and faculty at Columbia). They have brought together key manufacturing sector leaders to join their management team and advisory board including Klaus Kleinfeld, ex-CEO of Alcoa and Siemens. The company serves major sector leaders as customers, including Gerdau, Covestro, and Henkel. Since launching in 2015, Fero software has provided industrial customers an average ROI of 233% and saved hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 emissions. They’re hiring sales development representatives to scale up their go-to-market efforts. For more information on open roles visit our job board here.

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in Golioth, a provider of turnkey enterprise software infrastructure for hardware companies to securely connect their devices to the cloud, with participation from Differential, Zetta Venture Partners, and MongoDB.

The adoption of cloud-connected devices has become ubiquitous over the past few years and is currently accelerating as new use cases emerge and investments in operational efficiency quicken. The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming the Internet of Everything (IoE). Led by an embedded systems expert who was an early Product Manager at Nest, Golioth is building the developer platform that provides 10X leverage to teams solving the biggest challenges in digital infrastructure.

Golioth solves the large and growing issue of connecting hardware devices to the cloud.

Connecting hardware devices to the cloud and having them function as intended is exceptionally difficult and time-consuming; this problem is exacerbated for hardware developers with little to no experience managing cloud applications. To connect and control these devices, cloud architects must contend with many applications spanning machine learning, communication, and data storage.Today, there isn’t a centralized platform/workspace for hardware and software developers to collaborate on the development of connected devices. Hardware and IoT companies lack the deep knowledge that is becoming ubiquitous in the software world around general cloud services like AWS, GCP, and Azure. Skilled engineering talent for these software capabilities is scarce. Hardware companies often struggle to scale software capabilities due to competition with pure play software firms.

Golioth empowers hardware engineers and teams to efficiently decrease the time and cost required to bring connected IOT devices to market.

Golioth’s platform connects existing or new hardware products to the cloud through a general purpose platform that unites hardware and software protocols. The company’s solution is middleware that allows hardware developers to quickly and effortlessly connect their products while remaining hardware and cloud agnostic. Golioth standardizes tough-to-build IOT capabilities and offers them to hardware developers on day one of their development cycles. Golioth’s long term vision is to become the de facto developer platform for IOT devices and provide the infrastructure orchestration layer for device to cloud interoperability and connectivity. Golioth has the potential to enable countless new applications within IOT and connected devices in a similar way that Stripe enabled a cambrian explosion of new application use cases through embedded transactions and Twilio gave rise to a new paradigm shift of in application communications.

Golioth is the bridge for technologies that drastically increase  industrial efficiency and decrease carbon emissions.

Golioth’s platform is part of a fundamental infrastructure shift that enables new innovation within the IOT and connected hardware markets. Market analysts expect the IoT market to reach $194B in 2022 and grow 22% year-over-year to $525B by 2027. Research from Mckinsey also shows that 127 new devices connect to the internet every second, while IoT is projected to have an annual economic impact between $4-11T by 2025. The growing IoT devices market is a strong macro for combating climate change since connected devices weave in greater intelligence for energy efficiency and intelligent resource utilization. Consumers, businesses, and government organizations are usingIoT platforms to enable efficiency across a wide range of markets, including individual homes, entire cities, connected vehicles, manufacturing, supply chain and energy/utilities. The proliferation of 5G and improvements in other network protocols such as Wifi 6 have provided customers with a broader range of connectivity options; these options, in turn, boost capacity, speed, latency, and reliability while also fitting into their technical requirements.

Source: IoT Analytics

Golioth is in a strong position in their post seed phase from both a team and product position. 

The company was founded by Jonathan Beri (CEO) who was an early product manager at Nest and subsequently spent six years at Google leading their IOT platform development group. Brian Rucker (Head of Ops) has ten years of experience split between technical management, revenue operations, and strategy. He was a senior strategy manager at Comcast, focused on connected living and WiFi. Brian was also the director of business development at Praescient Analytics, working with federal agencies and private companies. He also spent time as a senior counterintelligence agent in the US Army. Jonathan’s focus on closing key hires has paid off with recent additions of a Head of Marketing, Product Manager, and Staff Engineer. For insight on open roles at Golioth – check out their careers page on Blackhorn’s website. Golioth’s platform is now GA for developers and support embedded engineers Golioth created a library of free reference designs using their platform including:

• Trashcan Monitor
• Electric Power Monitor
• Greenhouse Controller
• Soil Moisture Monitor
• Air Quality Monitor
• Cold Chain Asset Tracker

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in HVAC asset intelligence software provider Specifx Data, with participation from Powerhouse Ventures, Better Ventures, SaaS Ventures, and Soma Capital.

Data is at the core of our belief in the power of digital infrastructure to accelerate decarbonization.  Buildings, a foundational element of our transition to a lower-carbon future, account for 40% of global energy consumption – yet building asset data is still largely a black box – building management is generally left in the dark on the state of maintenance and the useful life of the systems that use the most energy – and are responsible for the lion’s share of emissions. With Specifx, real estate owners and managers now have an operating system that gives them real-time granular visibility into that black box, and helps them understand what’s driving energy consumption and when they should make efficiency upgrades.

While the demand for HVAC systems is expected to triple by 2050, information asymmetry undergirds the relationship between HVAC OEMs, energy management companies, and real estate portfolio owners and managers. In order to rapidly modernize our heating and cooling systems, improve operational efficiencies and reduce emissions, Specifix is building the central operating system (OS) for HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning). Leveraging proprietary algorithms and machine learning, the team of industry veterans have built a best-in-class data enrichment platform to optimize the useful life of assets, facilitating optimal replacement strategies for the oldest, most inefficient, and least cost-effective HVAC assets in large real estate portfolios.

A shift to newer, more energy efficient HVAC systems can cut up to 460 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions globally, but the real estate industry lacks the visibility and insights needed to cost-effectively upgrade their HVAC portfolios.

While traditional building management systems look at energy consumption data in aggregate, they do not provide data granularity into the specifications, features, and/or performance levels of the equipment itself. The result is manual, labor-intensive data collection and poor data quality that makes it difficult to manage day-to-day operations, ensure compliance with ever-growing regulation and plan long-term decarbonization. At the same time, regulations mandating the use of better-performing, energy-efficient HVAC systems and new refrigerants are changing the game. New York Local Law 97, for example, charges building owners a penalty for out-of-compliance HVAC assets, which is worryingly common as owners and property managers don’t have enough insight to act before assets go out of compliance.

Specifx’s operating system provides customers with visibility, context and insights of their entire HVAC portfolio.  Their unique capability enables cost-effective lifecycle planning, resulting in enterprise-scale decarbonization and accurate compliance reporting. Ultimately this leads to more durable, cost-effective HVAC systems that provide cleaner heating and cooling at scale – while helping organizations reduce energy and maintenance over-spend.

Specifx is tackling the HVAC industry’s most pervasive and costly problem: a lack of quality data to drive smart decarbonization and investment planning.  Specifx directly quantifies the economic and environmental inefficiencies of a given portfolio of assets, as well as provides portfolio scale, asset level strategies to mitigate and eliminate waste (such as overspend, environmental impact, etc.).  Data integrity is the foundation of an approach that creates a system of record and layers on tools that capture more of the facilities manager workflow. The Decoder solution democratizes essential HVAC data and enriches traditional CMMS systems that inventory HVAC assets, their Scout product increases the efficiency of traditional facility audits through automation, and the Planner and E-Modeler tools use that data to provide enterprise-scale scenario planning for investment, energy modeling, and decarbonization.

Source: Specifx Data website.

Specfix’s purpose-built HVAC solution improves worker productivity, enhances portfolio-level energy efficiency, and improves economics for an industry that is just beginning its digital transformation journey.

Redpoint Ventures makes a strong case that this is the defining decade of vertical SaaS.  Specifx’ vertically focused SaaS model has a unique opportunity to help the analog HVAC industry enter the digital age by building custom workflow solutions. Specifx is weaving together point applications, such as data capture, cleansing, and insights, underpinned by a common data model within a system of record platform. This not only improves productivity and user experience, but should drive greater market penetration and customer stickiness. Specifix is following in the footsteps of companies like Shopify, Toast, and ServiceTitan – headline vertical SaaS success stories that highlight the value of taking a highly targeted approach within a specific industry vertical.

Source: Precedence Research, 2021

Specifx’ founding team has worked together to revolutionize energy-as-a-service and is poised to transform the HVAC industry.

CEO Ryan Martineau is a two-time founder in the climate technology space, having previously co-founded and led sales and partnerships at Redaptive – a leading Efficiency-as-a-Service provider in the C&I sector. Before joining Martineau at Redaptive, CPO/CSO Pete Shimkus was a Managing Director at CBRE and spent 20 years in commercial real estate, cost consultancy and more. COO Ellie Crowley is also an ex-Redaptive leader where she led all operating activity across Sales & Delivery functions. HVAC industry veteran and Chief Data Officer Ben Patchspent 10+ years acquiring, structuring, coding, and productizing Specifx’s core capability to decode and enrich HVAC asset data before joining forces with the rest of the founding team in August 2022 to form Specifx Data. The team is on the hunt for a world-class CTO with enterprise experience and a track record of executing on the vertical SaaS playbook.  If this describes you, apply here.

Blackhorn Ventures is excited to announce our latest investment in rail efficiency platform RailVision Analytics, with participation from Trucks Venture Capital, MUUS Climate Partners, Incite.org, and Measured Ventures, and returning investors Active Impact Investments and Neil Murdoch.

The rail industry is the backbone of the global supply chain. Easily overlooked, it is responsible for moving the majority of the world’s raw and finished materials. According to the Association of American Railroads, in a typical year, US freight railroads move around 1.7 billion tons across nearly 160,000-miles of track – and the physics of steel on steel vs. rubber on asphalt mean that rail will always be more efficient than air, road or sea transport.

While COVID exposed the Achilles heel of global supply chains, new climate realities and domestic supply chain reorganization are demanding a more advanced rail system. However, innovation in the rail industry has been underfunded for decades, in favor of cost-cutting. Meanwhile as domestic manufacturing ramps up and manufacturers demand more reliable and timely service from railroads, rail remains by far the most efficient and environmentally friendly mode of transportation.

Source: JustMeans.com

Two-thirds of the global rail market still relies on diesel fuel for propulsion, versus electricity, (which tends to be the fuel of choice in China and the EU). The most recent study, from 2o12, suggests that freight rail electrification in the US could cost $4.8M per mile, which is prohibitively expensive. In 2021, the US transport sector consumed approximately 47 billion gallons of diesel fuel, an average of 128 million gallons per day, according to the EIA. Unfortunately, diesel fuel will be with us for a while.  While railways consume 9X less energy per tonne-kilometer traveled than trucks, they have yet to benefit from the digital revolution that has drastically improved our planes and cars, let alone the cloud-native and API centric architecture that is driving enterprise efficiency. The penetration of next gen GE Wabtec diesel electric locomotives today is minimal: less than 5% of all locomotives running in North America are diesel electric. Our rail infrastructure still consumes billions of gallons of diesel fuel each year, generating millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions and cancer-causing particulates, especially around urban rail corridors.

Digital advancements are needed to improve railway operations and enable cost-savings and emissions-reductions within the industry.

While the railroad industry is open to innovations that will drive efficiencies (including locomotives powered by batteries or hydrogen), tools typically used by the sector to address the issue of high fuel costs are limited and require complicated integrations. Low rates of digitization across commuter, passenger, freight and switching systems means that rail operators and agencies have limited visibility into where fuel efficiency gains are to be found. The rail industry’s second biggest expense is fuel (after labor) at $60B annually. Innovation in the rail industry must be durable, high value-add, and user friendly. And it must be broadly adopted by rail industry management and labor; The Association of American Railroads estimates that a national rail shutdown (which Congress is actively trying to avert) would cost the U.S. at least $2B per day and could cripple energy delivery with risks for grid reliability.

RailVision substantially reduces a rail provider’s carbon emissions and fuel costs

RailVision was launched in 2020 with the objective of mitigating skyrocketing fuel prices by lowering consumption, reducing emissions, improving crew safety, monitoring operational compliance, and reducing wear on equipment for the $100B North American rail industry. RailVision’s flagship EcoRail platform is a lightweight app used on a crew tablet. RailVision’s platform integrates data sources already on locomotives (including passenger data and scheduling, equipment monitoring systems, fuel consumption data, event recorder data, crew reports, GPS mapping, and wayside inspection devices) to create an intuitive tablet-based app. The app securely collects and sends existing rail data to RailVision’s cloud platform. Then, the company’s machine learning algorithms analyze and translate that data into simple suggestions for braking, throttle, and other train-handling operations — all of which provide concrete ways to reduce fuel consumption, decrease CO2 emissions, and improve safety. Crews and supervisors are then able to use RailVision’s dashboard to monitor their savings and performance.

RailVision’s flagship solution, EcoRail, enables real-time fuel-saving recommendations

Source: RailVision Analytics company materials

The rail industry is just beginning its digital revolution and its contribution to sustainable transportation

The transportation sector makes up 27% of US greenhouse gas emissions due to the burning of fossil fuels – the most of any sector.^[1] While rail emissions are dwarfed by emissions from passenger vehicles or heavy duty trucks, railroad operators have recently faced increased pressure and incentive to reduce emissions and increase investments in digitalization. We believe that there is a huge opportunity for this sector to accelerate its path towards efficiency, and gain market share as the low-carbon option for freight. Rail can reduce heavy congestion and pressure on public roads, GHG emissions, and the likelihood of traffic accidents (according to NHTSA there were 5,601 fatalities involving at least one large truck in 2021.) In early demonstrations with Canadian customers, EcoRail delivered meaningful fuel cost savings of 10 – 15% and in turn lowered GHG emissions.

RailVision’s team: domain expertise, engineering DNA, and deep enterprise sales know-how.

RailVision is led by CEO and Founder Dev Jain, a mechanical engineer and former member of the Canadian Armed Forces with 5+ years of rail experience. RailVision’s CTO, Mark Smith, has 35+ years of team building and product experience and was formerly a VP of Technology at Virtusa. Dennis McDonald is RailVision’s VP of Sales and brings 10+ years of enterprise software sales at IBM, Oracle and Infor. Dennis also founded the rail association’s fuel efficiency conference 20 years ago. The broader team of 15 has experience across CN, Siemens and Urbint. The team has already demonstrated early traction and has been in pilot testing with several companies, including Genesee & Wyoming, Metrolinx, Port of Montreal, and Via Rail. The app is now commercially available for deployment by all passenger and freight shortline railroads. We’re excited to partner with this stellar team as they build digital infrastructure to power the future of rail transportation efficiency.

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in smart EV fast charging storage provider Electric Era Technologies, with participation from Proeza Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, and previous strategic investor Remus Capital.

The unprecedented acceleration of EV growth has created an urgency to build affordable and accessible charging infrastructure: 145 million electric vehicles (EVs) will be on the road and require fast charging by 2030.^[1] Recent federal and state policy, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, provide incentives and funding to switch to EVs, while President Biden’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Program includes $5 billion dedicated to deploying public EV charging infrastructure. While federal leadership is welcome, states across the US are also passing historic policies – California and New York recently mandated that all new vehicles sold be either electric or plug-in hybrid electrics by 2035.  Making fast charge EV infrastructure ubiquitous is a generational opportunity.

The EV landscape is growing quickly, but installing fast EV charging today accentuates key grid challenges, resulting in higher costs for site owners, utility ratepayers, and EV drivers.

Electric vehicles are expected to demand nearly 60X more electricity by 2040 – from 11 TWh in 2022 to an estimated 655 TWh in 2040.^[2] Even if utilities drastically increase their investments into grid upgrades, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to source equipment and deploy capital quickly enough to accommodate forecasted EV growth. Public site hosts – such as convenience stores, gas stations, and retail chains – recognize the need to install EV fast charging to remain relevant, but face two major challenges: 1) Expensive and time-consuming grid upgrades, and 2) higher expected energy costs for site hosts and EV drivers that are subject to volatile peak energy prices depending on their time of use.

Electric Era’s behind-the-meter smart EV storage solution gets fast EV charging infrastructure built quickly – without needing to wait for grid upgrades.

Electric Era builds modular EV battery and smart charging systems that are easy-to-install and adaptable with any EV charger. Its PowerNode solution includes a 120 kW/60 kWh battery pack and a smart power management platform. This enables site hosts to discharge power to 4 separate fast chargers via one centralized location while using just 120 kW of power from the grid rather than the 600 kW required with a direct grid connection (see image below). Its small-footprint, power-dense solution uses 10X less energy storage than alternatives and is the most affordable EV fast charging solution today. Importantly, the PowerNode platform enables convenience store owners to meet eligibility requirements for the $5 billion in federal NEVI funding, minimize costs, and still support fast EV charging speeds.

Source: Electra Era Website

To reduce peak energy demand costs for site hosts and consumers, Electric Era’s solution includes an AI-driven smart software to predict and optimize charging.

Electric Era’s patent-pending smart software solution enables battery and charger site control, predicts expected power load and peak demand charges, monitors utility tariffs, and manages power load and delivery to ensure the optimal and most economical charging for site owners and consumers. One existing DC fast-charge site host and Electric Era customer noted that their utility costs exploded after installing fast chargers directly. With Electric Era’s PowerNode system, they were able to save thousands of dollars each month as its smart software filled the battery pack when energy prices were low to avoid peak demand charges while still ensuring EV fast charging was available whenever needed.

By enabling affordable and accessible fast EV charging, Electric Era will help us accelerate towards a clean transportation future.

The transportation sector makes up 27% of US greenhouse gas emissions due to the burning of fossil fuels – the most of any sector.^[1] According to BloombergNEF’s lifecycle analysis, EVs produced in 2030 will emit 70% to 90% less carbon dioxide than equivalent internal combustion engine vehicles.^[2] We need smart hardware plus software charging solutions today to enable the electrification and decarbonization of the transportation industry and reduce our global emissions footprint.

Electric Era’s team has the right mix of engineering and business skills to lead us into a new era of transportation.

The Electric Era team has an exceptional background: CEO & Founder Quincy Lee, CTO Sam Reineman, VP of Software Sith Dharmasiri, and Director of Build Development Eoghan Kyne all worked together previously at SpaceX. Lee and Reineman were Lead Mechanical Engineers there, where they led the engineering design, development, rollout and business outcomes for the Starlink Gateway Antenna Ground Stations. These engineering heavyweights are complemented by Director of Business Development Will Hersey, who previously led go-to-market sales and strategy, fundraising, and business operations at an early stage clean energy company. With their collective skills and experience, the Electric Era team stands out within the EV charging space, and we’re excited to be on this journey together.