Urbio secures funding to accelerate the energy transition
Summary
In early February, cleantech startup Urbio was granted a Tech Seed loan from FIT (Foundation for Technological Innovation) and secured an investment from leading climate and cities-focused investor, Urban Us. Developed in two doctoral theses at EPFL, Urbio blends the analytical strengths of humans and advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to generate optimized plans based on hundreds of criteria like CO2 emissions, technical parameters for renewable technologies, renovation rates, energy prices, or costs for different actors. Today, customers must first reconcile data from scattered sources, then manually design energy systems for each building, and finally evaluate their technical and financial feasibility with ad-hoc tools. Since its creation in 2020, Urbio was applied in 8 commercial pilot projects with industrial partners, and has received multiple innovation grants and awards, including from the Swiss Innovation Agency, Swiss National Science Foundation, Hasler Foundation, EPFL’s Tech4impact and Enable, and the Herbert & Audrey Rosenfield Fund, in order to improve and transfer the technology to the market. In February 2021, Urbio received a Tech Seed loan of CHF 100’000 from the Foundation for Technological Innovation (FIT) and secured its first VC investment from Urban Us, a leading early stage investor for start-ups upgrading cities for climate change.