Driving Industrial Decarbonization with AI and Data - Announcing Our Investment in Sesame
Almost eight years ago, Dr. Emre Gençer, a principal research scientist at MIT, and some of his colleagues saw a challenge in the Industrial sector and its drive to decarbonize. On one hand, the Industrial sector accounts for 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions, so the need for innovative solutions was clear. On the other hand, for leaders of these companies, making decisions is hard given evolving technologies, a myriad of potential tradeoffs, capital intensity, and a high degree of complex interrelationships across the industrial sector. Emre feared that without an effective way to model and optimize decisions, Industrial companies would either invest in less-than-ideal ways or, more likely, defer essential decisions that could have a significant positive impact on their carbon footprint and operating costs.
This insight led to the creation of Sesame, an innovative software suite that simulates and optimizes the costs and emissions associated with decarbonization investments in heavy industry. Sesame is backed by seven years of deep research at MIT to develop both the data and the models to handle the complexity of these simulations, the tradeoffs and interrelationships therein, and the ongoing operating decisions and investments that will result. Working from plant-level data on up, the system offers economic, environmental, and systems analysis capabilities to accurately and rapidly evaluate industrial decarbonization solutions at scale and in so doing, they become a single source of truth from which optimal decisions can be made.
When we first met Emre and his co-founders Paul and Jim (shown below in the obligatory first-day founder selfie) last year, we were immediately drawn to the depth of their insights, the completeness of the solution that had created at MIT, the strong customer backing, their compelling plan to commercialize the platform in a software sector that analysts expect to exceed $9B by 2030, but most of all their passion for the space and the mission to drive effective decarbonization decisions across the heavy industry segment.
One of my greatest joys as a VC - and one that correlates with success - is the opportunity to work with deeply talented, exceptional founders looking to turn their passions and life’s work into a company that can succeed and thrive in the market. As a result, we immediately committed to work with the team to spin Sesame out of MIT, provide the initial financing, and partner with the team to build a compelling company over the coming years. Our friends at Powerhouse Ventures join us in this commitment and we are excited to see the company launch this week. More on this exciting company can be found in its announcement, website, and this excellent post from the Powerhouse Ventures team.
