This Indian startup wants to reduce wasted electricity in buildings and it just raised funding

India’s government is taking initiatives toward improving the electricity grid and promoting energy efficient practices like replacing CFL bulbs with LEDs. But a large portion of India’s electricity is being consumed by commercial buildings. Several studies show that buildings, consuming more than 40 percent of the total energy consumption in the country, have operational wastage of about 20 percent. That’s a lot of juice going down the drain, especially when you consider that some villages in India don’t have power. Zenatix wants to reduce this operational wastage to ensure that there is electricity in all Indian homes.

Today Zenatix, which calls itself an internet of things (IoT) company, announced that it raised seed funding from a group of angel investors led by former Canaan Partners managing director Rahul Khanna. The other investors include Google’s southeast Asia head Rajan Anandan, Snapdeal founders Rohit Bansal and Kunal Bahl, and former UTC head Zubin Irani.

Zenatix is an IoT company that provides an energy management product to help building managers save one-tenth of their energy costs. It uses intelligence from the real time data collected using hardware installed on-site. This data is converted into actionable insight, which is then sent to clients via SMS.

The startup was founded last year by Indian Institute of Technology Delhi graduates Rahul Bhalla, Vishal Bansal, and Amarjeet Singh. Singh completed his MS and PhD from UCLA and had been extensively involved in research and teaching in the area of building energy efficiency space at IIIT Delhi since returning from the USA after his graduation. Bhalla spent a few years as vice president at UnitedLex and Bansal worked in portfolio management for ING Asia Pacific.

How it works

They teamed up to form Zenatix, which is a combination of hardware and software. The hardware includes energy meters installed at different feeders like pumps and lighting, and temperature sensors are placed across floor areas and server rooms. There is another device to pull data from these meters and sensors and pushes that data to a cloud server.

Based on the collected data, the software provides a dashboards that help users understand the energy consumption at various levels of the building in real time. Moreover, it generates alerts (SMS/email) whenever there are deviations from the optimum operations. The product is also capable of automatically controlling (on/off) electrical loads based on the intelligence delivered by the software.

The product automatically generates daily reports specifying the energy consumption for the day, and comparisons with pre-defined benchmarks so that users can keep a tab on the energy spend across buildings and within each building.

The startup uses a SaaS based engagement model.The customer pays a fixed monthly or annual fee. It claims that the energy savings solutions delivered far outweigh the fee paid.

The one-year-old startup claims to have more than 100 installations to 35 customers mostly corporates including Google, NIIT, United Health Group, IIT Delhi, Galxo Smith Kline, and Tata Teleservices.

Zenatix plans to use the funding to expand its technology offerings and expand to other cities.