Krakow-based Ecois.me, a provider of hardware and software for energy saving, has snagged $100,000 in seed investment from T-Venture, an innovation fund of Germany's Deutsche Telekom. Run by a team of Ukrainian programmers, the startup intends to monetize energy consumption reduction.
Ecois.me
plans to sell specially designed sensors to customers who keep track of their household power
consumption, upload the data on this sensor to a website, and then a mobile
app gives tips on how to save energy, recognizing the most
energy-inefficient devices and finding ways to optimize the usage of various
devices during energy consumption peaks.
“Upon
our estimations based on an ordinary two or three room apartment in Poland, the
user will be able to save up to 20 percent of energy,” says Ivan Pasichnyk, the 27-year-old project founder originally from Kyiv, “which is around $25-40
per month.”
Moreover,
Ecois.me wants to charge energy distributors willing to reduce consumption peaks a special commission, whose rate will depend on the
amount of energy saved as a result of the solutions provided by a startup in Krakow.
“When
we come home from work, we turn everything on – all the lights, TV, laptop, boiler, toaster, and a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t really need to
be on all at once,” says Pasichnyk, graduate of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.
“The same thing happens daily in every home at the specific periods of
time. These are the energy consumption peaks, which utility providers should
be happy to cut, since they are the main energy drags and are costly.”
Users
will see their Ecois.me profiles on their utility provider’s website as if it’s
the provider’s offer. “It will make the user more likely to use it,”
explains Pasichnyk.
The
project is still in its development stage, however. The hardware part of the
product is also being tested and there is no user-friendly app yet.
Thanks
to the strong ties of Deutsche Telekom in the European energy retailing sector,
the Ecois.me team recently started negotiations with a Polish
utility provider. The talks are still in progress, but Pasichnyk hopes it is
going to be their first big fish.
“At
the time of the Deutsche Telekom offer, we have also received an invitation from a
small Dubai accelerator. The promised amount of $30,000 issued right away in cash
was very appealing, but there would be no connections or partnership
possibilities with the Dubai group. With Deutsche Telekom, however, we can see the future,” Pasichnyk
says.
The startup’s
strategy includes expansion of sales to 10 European countries where Deutsche
Telekom operates.
Ecois.me
plans to expand to Ukraine too, but there are several major problems with this.
Pasichnyk accuses Ukraine’s energy market of being highly monopolized that
demotivates electricity providers from looking for energy-efficient
solutions, since there’s no way they’ll ever lose their customers who have no
other company to turn to. “If you live in Kyiv, I hardly imagine anyone changing from Kyivenergo to another energy provider. Whole districts are tied to one
provider,” he adds and points to the European Union, where countries usually
have a competition on the market of electricity providers.
Another
problem is the extremely low energy prices in Ukraine, which makes Ecois.me’s
solutions unattractive in terms of the amount of the money saved. “Ukrainians
would save (just) some $2 monthly with Ecois.me,” Pasichnyk assumes.
Intellectual
property protection is also weak in the 45-million nation. Moreover, getting all
the patents and licenses is too complicated, which means producing the hardware
in Ukraine would be too money- and time-consuming.
Pasichnyk
came up with an idea to launch Ecois.me in August 2013 during a hackathon on
solar energy and presented it to three of his friends, one of them a
programmer. And it worked out.
After
continuous bootstrapping, pitching to various investment funds, negotiations
with the Happy Farm incubator and presentations at tech events like IDCEE
conference in Kyiv, Ecois.me finally settled in Poland’s Hubraum Accelerator in
Krakow with Deutsche Telekom backup in midsummer this year.
Deutsche
Telekom’s T-Venture, a source of financial support for Ecois.me, has been one
of the most powerful players on the European venture capital market collecting
the portfolio of around 100 companies since 1997. However, soon it’ll be
replaced by the new innovation fund Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners,
according to tech.eu.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be
reached at [email protected].
Kyiv Post’s information technology reporting is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
