Tata Power and startup incubator Social Alpha have announced an investment in energy analytics startup ‘Urja’. The device-level, industrial Internet of Things-enabled solution by Urja combines smart sensors and analytics platform to detect energy losses and predict maintenance of production machinery, allowing small and medium businesses to save on their electricity consumption. Companies can track circuit-level energy wastage in real-time.
Urja intends to use the new investment to scale up its sales strategy, expand B2B business and strengthen back-end technology using advanced artificial intelligence/machine learning capabilities.
Tata Power declined to comment on the investment when contacted by pv magazine.
The target industries for the Urja energy analytics solution are industrial manufacturing, power and industrial HVACs.
With this offering, Tata Power aims to become a fully integrated Energy as a Service (EaaS) solution provider.
“We are glad to strengthen our partnership with a deep tech company like Urja. It shares our goal of delivering an enhanced value-added energy management experience for customers. With this seed support, we look forward to creating a robust solution to offer newer services to our customers in the space of energy consumption and optimization,” said Praveer Sinha, chief executive officer and managing director, Tata Power.
Manoj Kumar, founder and chief executive officer of Social Alpha, said their co-investment in Urja alongside Tata Power provides Urja access to their entire ecosystem of technology and business offerings and investor network to help it become growth-ready.
Energy saving
According to Urja founders, their patented sensors and analytics solution has the global potential for energy saving to the tune of over US$ 2 billion. They claim to have already tracked INR 20 crore worth of energy consumption through their EcoSense solution till now.
“We are just scratching the surface of how powerful device-level insights can be when it’s offered at a massive scale to a manufacturing and power ecosystem. The financial backing of Social Alpha and Tata Power will help us execute our vision even more rapidly and build scalable products, learning from experience, perspective and relationships of a leading Power Company,” said Saurabh Jhamb, Chief Executive Officer, Urja.
RISE Institute Sweden has estimated that device-level energy innovations such as Urja can enable the avoidance of 13 MtCO2e per year by 2030.
Urja is being incubated since 2019 at Social Alpha’s Clean Energy International Incubation Centre (CEIIC), a joint initiative of the Government of India and Tata Trusts, and supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), BIRAC, Tata Power, and Tata Power-DDL. CEIIC is India’s first international incubator in clean energy under the aegis of Mission Innovation.
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