Zenatix helps empower businesses and take control of their energy usage in real time, through technology, analytics, control and operations

Zenatix Solutions, a data-driven energy efficiency company, has raised US$1.2 million in pre-Series A round of funding led by pi Ventures, an early-stage fund co-founded by LetsVenture Co-founder Manish Singhal.

The round also saw participation from existing investor Blume Ventures.

Zenatix has previously raised funding from a group of angel investors led by Rahul Khanna of Trifecta Capital, Google Indian Head Rajan Anandan, and Snapdeal Co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, besides Blume Ventures.

The current round of capital will be used primarily for hiring across all its functions — technology, product, operations and sales. The company aims to become profitable by middle of 2018.

Founded by Rahul Bhalla, Vishal Bansal and Dr. Amarjeet Singh, Zenatix helps empower businesses and take control of their energy usage in real time. It does this through technology, analytics, control, and operations.

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It uses advanced machine learning-based models and claims to deliver 10 per cent to 30 per cent energy efficiency to large commercial consumers of electricity. The models are built by collecting and analysing more than 30 million of previously unseen data points every day from electrical assets. These models allow for automated and intelligent controls along with predictive and preventive maintenance of these assets, resulting in consistent and comfortable consumer experience in retail and banking sites while delivering high energy savings.

Zenatix aims to address the energy efficiency problem across a range of customers and eventually help grids turn smarter. Its first solution, WattMan addresses the problem for large retail chains and banking/financial set-ups. WattMan is built over a scalable Internet of Things (IoT) stack and includes connected hardware developed in-house by Zenatix.

Given the distributed nature of retail/banking set-ups (hundreds of thousands of outlets/branches, spread across the country), having a control over the electricity spend and providing the right customer experience at the same time is a big challenge. For example, in a Quick Service Restaurant, maintaining the right temperature in customer areas, kitchen areas and cold storages is crucial. Also, they need to make sure that all their air-conditioning, kitchen and refrigeration appliances are working optimally all the time.

WattMan addresses these challenges in an automated manner through its cloud-based intelligent controls driven by advanced machine learning algorithms. While it ensures the right quality of service with consistent temperature maintenance, the savings resulting from it, pays for the solution by itself. This value proposition in retail/banking segment alone will allow Zenatix to capture significant portion of more than US$2.5 billion market opportunity (in ARR terms), in India and Southeast Asia, it said in a statement.

WattMan was launched in April 2016 and since then around 20 customers (large retail chains/banks) have signed up. The company aims to continue adding more customers with additional focus on scaling up with the existing customers.

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“We have a subscription based engagement model — the customer doesn’t have to pay anything upfront. It is a fixed annual fee whereby the energy efficiency benefit itself outweighs the fee. Additionally, there are multiple other benefits such as improved consumer experience and ability to automatically audit the usage of electricity. Typically, the customers become cash flow positive from 1st quarter itself,” said Rahul Bhalla, Co-founder and CEO, Zenatix.

The company is currently focused on the India market, with a plan to expand internationally over next six to 12 months.

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Singhal said: “Zenatix’s integrated approach of building connected hardware, with sophisticated machine learning algorithm to work on resulting dark data generated is what will set them apart. In India cost of electricity is same as in the US, despite the purchasing power parity. Thus it’s a big space with plenty of innovation & upside possibility, given the kind of data, Zenatix is starting to lay its hands on.”

“One obvious solution for solving world’s electricity problem is to increase the generation capacity. However, since the demand for electricity is increasing much faster than the supply, only sustainable solution is energy efficiency. Zenatix is committed towards delivering data driven energy efficiency with the aim of building a sustainable planet. We are now at an inflection point in our journey. We now have a strong base of almost 20 customers, each of whom have a very large presence across the country. The money can now be used to expand the customer base and deliver additional value from the product in an automated fashion,” Bhalla added.

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