INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Aclima, a San Francisco-based company which builds Internet-connected air quality sensors and runs a software platform to analyze the
extracted intel, has closed a $24 million Series A to grow the business including by expanding its headcount and securing more fleet
partnerships to build out the reach and depth of its pollution maps.
The Series A is led by Social Capital which is joining the board
Also participating in the round: The Schmidt Family Foundation, Emerson Collective, Radicle Impact, Rethink Impact, Plum Alley, Kapor
Capital and First Philippine Holdings.
Three years ago Aclima came out of stealth, detailing a collaboration with Google on mapping air
quality in its offices and also outdoors, by putting sensors on StreetView cars.
Though it has actually been working on the core problem of
environmental sensing and intelligence for about a decade at this point, according to co-founder Davida Herzl.
&What we&ve really been doing
over the course of the last few years is solving the really difficult technical challenges in generating this kind of data
Which is a revolution of air quality and climate change emissions data that hasn&t existed before,& she tells TechCrunch.
&Last year we
announced the results of our state wide demonstration project in California where we mapped the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles
And really demonstrated the power of the data to drive new science, decision making across the private and public sector.&
Also last year it
published a study in collaboration with the University of Texas showing that pollution is hyperlocal — thereby supporting its thesis that
effective air quality mapping requires dense networks of sensors if you&re going to truly reflect the variable reality on the ground.
&You
can have the best air quality and the worst air quality on the same street,& saysHerzl
&And that really gives us a new view — a new understanding of emissions but actually demonstrated the need for hyperlocal measurement to
protect human health but also to manage those emissions.
&That data set has been applied across a variety of scientific research including
studies that really showed the linkages between hyperlocal data and cardiovascular risk
In LA our black carbon data was used to support increased filtration in schools to protect school children.&
&Our technology is really a
proof point for emerging and new legislation in California that going to require community based monitoring across the entire state,& she
&So all of that work in California has really demonstrated the power of our platform — and that has really set us up to scale, and the
funding round is going to enable us to take this to a lot more cities and regions and users.&
Asked about potential international expansion
— given the presence of strategic investors from south east Asia backing the round — Herzl says Aclima has had a &global view& for the
business from the beginning, even while much of its early work has focused on California, adding: &We definitely have global ambitions and
we will be making more announcements about that soon.&
Its strategy for growing the reach and depth of its air quality maps is focused on
increasing its partnerships with fleets — so there a slight irony there given the vehicles being repurposed as air quality sensing nodes
might themselves be contributing to the problem (Herzl sidestepped a question of whether Uber might be an interesting fleet partner for it,
given the company current attempts to reinvent itself asa socially responsible corporate — including encouraging its drivers to go
electric).
&Our mapping capabilities are amplified through our partnerships with fleets,& she says, pointing to Google StreetView cars as
one current example (though this is not an exclusive partnership arrangement; a London air quality mapping project involving StreetView cars
which was announced earlier this monthis using hardware from a rival UK air quality sensor company, called Air Monitors, for example).
But
flush with fresh Series A funding Aclima will be working on getting its kit on board more fleets — relying on third parties to build out
the utility of its software platform for policymakers and communities.
&There a number of fleets that we are going to be speaking about our
partnerships with but our platform can be integrated with any fleet type and we believe that is an incredible advantage and position for the
company in really achieving our vision of creating a global platform for environmental intelligence to help cities and entire countries
really manage climate risk at a scale that really hasn&t been possible before,& she adds.
&Our technology provides 100,000x greater spacial
resolution than existing approaches and we do it at 100-1,000x cost reduction so our vision is to be the GPS of the environment — a new
layer ofenvironmental awareness and intelligence that really informs day to day decisions.
&We&re really excited because it taken really
I incorporated Aclima 10 years ago and started really working on the technology around 2010
So this has taken… a tremendous amount of technical development and scientific rigor with partners… to really have the technology at a
place where it really set up to scale.&
It finances (or part financies) the deployment of its sensors on the vehicles of fleet partners —
with Aclima business model focused on monetizing the interpretation of the data provided by its SaaS platform
So a chunk of the Series A will be going to help pay for more sensor rollouts.
In terms of what fleet partners get back from agreeing for
their vehicles to become mobile air quality sensing nodes, Herzl says it dependent on the partner
And Aclima isn&t naming any additional names on that front yet.
&It specific to each fleet
But I can say that in the case of Google we&re working with Google Earth outreach and the team at StreetView… to really reflect their
commitment to sustainability but also to expand access to this kind of information,& she says of the perks for fleets, adding:&We&ll be
talking more about that as we make announcement about our other partners.&
The Series A financing will also go on funding continued product
development, with Aclima hoping to keep adding to the tally of pollutants it can identify and map — building on a list which includes the
likes of CO2, methane and particulate matter.
&We have a very ambitious roadmap
And our roadmap is expansive — ultimately our vision is to make the invisible visible, across all of the pollutants and factors in the
invisible layer of air that supports life
We want to make all of that visible — that our long term vision,& she says.
&Today we&re measuring all of the core gaseous pollutants that
are regulated as well as the core climate change gases… We are not only deploying and expanding our platform availability but in our RD
efforts investing in next generation sensing technologies, whether it the tiniest PM2.5 sensor in the world to on our roadmap really having
the ability to speciate COC [chlorinated organiccompounds].
&We can&t do that today but are working on it and that is an area that is really
important for specific communities but for industry and for policy makers as well.&
A key part of its ongoing engineering work is focused on
shrinking certain sensing technologies — both in size and cost
As that the key to the sought for ubiquity, saysHerzl.
&There a lot of hard work happening there to shrink [sensors],& she notes
&We&re talking about sensors that are the size of a thumb tack
Traditional technologies for this are very large, very difficult to deploy… so it not that capabilities don&t exist today but we&re
working on shrinkingthose capabilities down into really, really tiny components so that we can achieve ubiquity…You have to shrink down
the size but also reduce the cost so that you can deploy thousands, millions of these things.&
Commenting on the funding round in a
supporting statement, Jay Zaveri, partner at Social Capital, added: &Aclima has successfully opened up an entirely new market domain with
their innovative approach, tackling one of the biggest global challenges of our time
With a proven ability to quantify emissions and human exposure to pollution at global resolutions previously impossible, Aclima creates
enormous opportunities for industry, cities and society.&
