Monday, February 13, 2012

Energy Points launches with sustainability metric and $3M

By Rodney Brown

Zik Energy Points Inc. has launched with a new $3 million initial funding round and a way to help companies measure their sustainability efforts - by sophisticated algorithms and a new universal energy usage metric, the EPG.

The acronym stands for Energy Per Gallon, and is based on the amount of energy contained in one gallon of gasoline. With its EnergyPoints platform, which will be sold under a Software-as-a Service model, Energy Points will then take geospatial data for the region a company has its operations in, and apply that to the EPG constant, to give each company an accurate baseline of the energy cost of any activity at the company for that specific location. So, one hour of running 100 light bulbs in one office in Cambridge, for example, may be 1 EPG, but in Alexandria, Va., it might be 1.2 EPG and in Seattle maybe 0.8 EPG.

CEO and co-founder Ory Zik said, “If you are a customer and a located in Cambridge and are using, say, 100Kwh, what we do is convert this into energy points based on the energy efficiency available in Massachusetts.”

Energy Points sells a Software-as-a Service platform that allows its customers to see in very understandable terms just what effect any sustainability effort they are using are having, which would allow the customer to shift resources and priorities, Zik said. The corporate customer pays a small amount each time they run a calculation through the SaaS platform.

“They pay per transaction,” Zik said. “Every time they make a calculation they make a payment.”

They, in this case, happen to be Energy Point’s initial target of Fortune 500 companies, Zik said, and the startup is already having its product being tested out by a bunch of potential paying customers.

“We are currently in the pilot stage with 10 different organizations ranging from Fortune 250 to government organizations to NGOs and some energy services companies, which is a real promising channel for us,” he said.

The $3 million in initial funding came from Plan B Ventures, and in conjunction with the deal, Plan B Ventures partner Barbara Goldman will join Energy Points’ board of directors.