Smart Retro, a smart city project by Demos Helsinki and it’s distinguished partners, was kicked off in a spirit of enthusiastic co-operation. Smart Retro aims for creating effective business models and tools, which can be used for refurbishing residential areas in smart and sustainable ways. This is one of the presentations held in Smart Retro Meetup.
-Based in Amsterdam, in Rockstart Spaces with about 40 startup companies in the building
-Main activity are the 6 month Accelerator programs, one for general web/mobile startups, one focused on Smart Energy
15 years of working with and in web startups, last at a company called Hyves, a local social network we sold in 2010
Time for a change, wanted to get into sustainability and energy business
For exactly the same reason Rockstart did
Fairly simple, increasingly we are seeing innovation happening at the intersection of sustainability, energy systems and IT. Existing business models and large incumbents are coming under pressure from bottom-up innovation drive by internet technology. Nothing new for this audience.
We’ve teamed up with big industry players like Nuon (owned by Swedish Vattenfal), Alliander and two large investors in sustainable businesses. With them we’ve created a fund that invests in startups participating in the Smart Energy Accelerator progra,
If you are not familiar with an accelerator program, in short it looks like this
From 130 applications coming from 39 different countries, we’ve selected the best 10 last December
They had a few weeks to pack their stuff and move to Amsterdam
5 Dutch teams, another five from Greece, Moldavia, Norway, Chili and Israel
The program consists of three phases, in which we involve a fantastic network of 85 mentors to help the teams do in three months what would normally take at least year
The accelerator program forces teams to re-evaluate choices and assumptions, the result being that some companies did real pivots, some made tough changes to their teams, and some of the company names are not like they were at the beginning
From 139 applications we could see a few trends, relevant to this audience
The enabling of distributed renewable energy
Crowdfunding, tranparency, hardware, tools
Modular home automation related to smarter use of energy
Awareness on sustainability and energy use, focus on chaging our behavior either through technology or gamification
Low cost, low tech, small scale solutions for (often) developing countries
Network & grid intelligence for better balancing fluctuating supply and demand
Open source paradigm, for both development of hardware and software
Sustainable modular and plug & play building
Shift from ownerschip to access and sustainability
Enabling decentralized renewable energy
Crowdfunding, transparency, hardware, tools
Status of teams, funding & international
Preparing next edition
-Rockstart was founded to help startups get through their first 1000 days successfully