Every week we feature a new startup at Fundsup that forces a radical breakthrough. MeterInsight is developing an intelligent energy monitoring platform to analyze data from the energy sector and thus help companies save energy. Today pose five questions to Erwin de Moel, co-founder. Read the Dutch version on Emerce.
What is your role within MeterInsight and what exactly does the company do?
“I am Erwin de Moel, 37 years old. I have always worked in IT consultancy and mainly did projects in the energy sector. We started in August 2018 to develop a platform that reads and analyzes data from meters and sensors and provides easy insight into the results. From my consultancy work at Accenture and Siemens I saw that existing tools did not meet the growing needs of customers who want to become more sustainable. Our goal is to make this possible, for example through more extensive options for data analysis and high-quality software.
There are two of us and we know each other from studying at the University of Twente (mathematics and computer science). We develop our smart data platform ourselves. We are especially proud of our high quality standard and automated test and release options. We want to minimize the chances of software errors and develop everything as flexibly and generically as possible, so that we can help customers faster. Our platform is fully cloud-based and runs on Microsoft Azure. Through my work experience I have gained a lot of market knowledge of the energy sector and we use that at MeterInsight.”
Where are you now?
“We started at water company Brabant Water. They had installed smart water meters for large corporate customers, but they were not sure how to make that data transparent. There was a lot of manual work and we automated it for them. For example data analysis for leakage detection, alarms and dashboards. We then started to focus more on energy monitoring, helping energy consultants to benchmark their entire portfolio of buildings and meters.
We are currently very busy with the go-live of WHC, a consultancy for Energy and Maintenance Management. Their customers have more than 8,000 analog and smart meters, from which we collect and provide insight into consumption data. WHC will soon be able to use our platform for automatic alarms and energy reports for their customers. With our benchmark function, they can easily see which buildings are the biggest increases or decreases in energy consumption.”
What will be the priority for 2022?
“We are now conducting a pilot with two other organisations. They are currently using a different energy monitoring solution. Together with them, we are developing desired features that they lack, in order to develop a better solution on our platform. We expect to finalize our energy monitoring solution in March and launch it on the market.
We always work with a subscription form, whereby customers pay a recurring amount per meter. That way we can quickly connect customers and configure the product for new customers.”
In 2021 we expect 90% of our revenue to come from our subscriptions, also known as Software-as-a-Service
Are you currently looking for an investment?
“We run on our own financing. We have been approached by investors in the past, including through Fundsup, but we are not actively looking at the moment. We want to scale up in the second part of 2022. Then it might be interesting to attract financing.”
If you are ready for financing, what kind of investor would be the ideal match?
“The most important thing for us is connections and a network with potential customers for our energy monitoring platform. These are mainly energy consultants and companies with many buildings and meters. In addition, someone with marketing and sales experience would be a good addition to our technical team, as we do not have that experience.”
Best of luck with everything!
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