Amazon Web Services (AWS) has chosen nine start-ups to participate in its Sustainable Cities Accelerator for Infrastructure programme.

These start-ups are developing technologies to help cities address infrastructure-related sustainability problems. Infrastructure, or the built environment, encompasses all aspects of people’s lives, and includes real estate, manufacturing, power, utility and transportation systems.

The nine start-ups in the cohort originate from America and Europe, and represent a wide range of sustainable innovations:

• Accelerate Wind, from St Louis, Missouri, is developing affordable wind turbines for commercial buildings designed to be installed at the edge of roofs to take advantage of wind that naturally speeds up as it travels over roof edges. It uses high performance computing (HPC) to run models that inform the placement, shape and size of turbines.
• BlocPower, from Brooklyn, New York, provides smart, all-electric heating, cooling, and hot water systems to building owners. BlocPower uses its software for analysis, leasing, project management and monitoring of urban clean energy projects. It seeks to help customers save costs on energy bills annually.
• Conservation Labs, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, delivers technology that monitors water use and equipment to reduce costs, carbon and risk. The company monitors sound signatures from plumbing to measure accurate water flow estimates, leak alerts and water insights. This information helps show ways to use less water.
• Ecolibrium, from London, UK, uses IoT infrastructure and proprietary machine learning (ML) algorithms to deliver an instant snapshot of energy performance across commercial and residential properties. These data help better decision-making to support operational cost optimisation and net zero carbon targets.
• ElectricFish, from Freemont, California, builds and deploys distributed, resilient electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure to accelerate deployment in grid-constrained sites. The company aims to deliver technologies that make energy more equitable and resilient.
• Hello Energy, from Rotterdam, Netherlands, offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) that enables real estate owners to engage tenants and stakeholders to connect and create energy-positive buildings. Through surveys, communication, and sharing tips and tricks, it helps make change manageable, simple and fun to drive more sustainable behaviour.
• Runwithit Synthetics, from Edmonton, Canada, uses synthetic data modelling to show customers the impact of sustainability decisions. It creates digital city sandbox environments, then adds scenarios of weather, policy, technology and infrastructure to help measure predicted outcomes, including climate, emissions and economics.
• Via, from Sommerville, Massachusetts, offers a Web3 platform that gives consumers ownership of their private energy data, compensates consumers for taking actions that contribute to mitigating climate change, and verifies that consumers took the actions they said they would, including turning down thermostats or selling rooftop solar.
• Vutility, from Sandy, Utah, offers a scalable, wireless, and battery-less, behind-the-meter tracker that delivers minute-by-minute visibility for energy use down to the circuit-level or individual asset. Vutility’s IoT and cloud-enabled technology can help reduce the total cost of ownership for sub-metering applications.

“At our core, we are a data and analytics company,” said Mark Kovscek, CEO of Conservation Labs. “We invented a way to interpret the sound of water in a pipe using machine learning. We believe that digitising the world’s water use will have a significant impact on global sustainability and carbon emissions.”

The nine companies were selected from hundreds of applications, representing 27 countries, by a panel of experts from AWS, Freshwater Advisors and Public Spend Forum. The accelerator will be delivered in collaboration with Freshwater Advisors, an innovation consultancy and venture catalyst, and Public Spend Forum, a market intelligence platform connecting government buyers with innovation.

AWS launched the Sustainable Cities Accelerator programme in March 2022 to help address the crucial need for innovations and collaborations that focus on global climate and clean tech challenges. Over five weeks, the programme immerses start-ups in cloud education with hands-on technical training in capabilities such as ML and HPC. In addition, selected start-ups are eligible to receive business and go-to-market mentorship from AWS sustainability experts, and opportunities to connect with AWS customers, industry leaders and members of the AWS Partner Network.

These content delivery partners include CBRE, ProLogis, AmFAM Institute and Evergreen Climate Innovations. Start-ups are also eligible to receive AWS computing credits.

The culmination of this programme will be the AWS Sustainable Cities Demo Day in 2023, during which the selected start-ups will showcase their technology in person.