What is the elevator pitch you use for your startup?
Edgecom Energy reduces energy costs and emissions for midsize facilities like greenhouses, manufacturing plants and malls using custom lot metering and real-time grid analytics.
What pain points are you trying to solve in agriculture?
Agricultural facilities, food processors and manufacturers spend large amounts of money each month on electricity, water and natural gas, yet they don’t know what exactly they are paying for and which equipment is consuming (or wasting) the most. Edgecom Energy provides these facilities with improved visibility into their operations with the end goal of reducing both their costs and emissions. Our scalable, plug-and-play solutions give our customers real-time granular information on how their processes consume electricity, water and natural gas which enables them to understand, improve and control their operations like never before.
How did you get the idea to start your company?
Our founder, Behdad Bahrami, was an energy manager for six years at one of Ontario’s largest plastic manufacturers where he experienced firsthand the lack of scalable energy management and monitoring solutions available for large energy consumers. On the residential side, you could easily and relatively cheaply get a smart thermostat and various smart appliances that allow you to view and control your energy consumption in real-time, but the industrial version of these solutions were incredibly complex, expensive and not scalable. With this problem in mind, Behdad set out to create a truly scalable energy monitoring and management platform that would allow facilities of all sizes to better manage their consumption and energy spending.
What are your plans to work with the Grand Farm?
We hope to collaborate with Grand Farm and tap into their network of partners to help Edgecom Energy find customers and develop partnerships of our own. In the future, we also plan to have a local office and hope Grand Farm will be able to help us source local talent to start up this new location. There is also significant potential to collaborate on various innovation and research projects as we continue to diversify our offerings for new markets.
What are your plans for the US market? Do you think you’ll have a presence in the midwest?
We are currently in the market exploration and identification phase of our expansion into the states and are focusing our efforts on picking which regions should be our first targets. We have currently shortlisted California, Texas, New York and the Midwest as our top priorities in the US and we fully expect to expand into these regions over the next two years. The Midwest especially presents as a perfect expansion candidate due to its concentration of ideal customers and energy pricing structures.
If your product/service was already being used by everyone, globally, what impact would that have?
If our product was used by everyone globally, the largest impacts would be widespread savings, emissions reductions and optimized demand-side energy management. Management of the grid as a whole would be perfected to the point where blackouts and energy price spikes would be unheard of. Our product deployed on such a scale would allow facilities of all scales to seamlessly integrate and optimize their own operations in tune with those of the grid, enabling a perfectly balanced supply and demand for generators and consumers.
We would also have significant impacts on the education side, allowing customers to be better informed on the cost and environmental impacts of their consumption and the time-sensitivity of their usage. In this world, human errors would be entirely removed from the energy management equation and our software would be in charge of organizing and dispatching massive energy loads with the end result being the smoothing of demand curves and reduced energy prices for all, while both increasing the reliability of the overall energy system and reducing the need for capital expenditures.
How are you incorporating growers into your business plan?
We plan to incorporate growers into our business plan as we expand and adapt our products for applications both up and down the supply chain. Indoor growers like greenhouses especially will play a crucial role in testing and helping us validate our solutions and business models as we expand into new markets and segments.
Where do you see your company in 10 years?
In 10 years, we see Edgecom Energy being the industry standard for energy management and monitoring. In 10 years’ time, we also expect to have sales and local teams in all major markets across the globe following a successful IPO.
This magazine reaches 16,000+ farmers. In one sentence, what would you like to tell them?
If you need help managing and monitoring your electricity, water or natural gas consumption with a scalable, cost-effective, plug-and-play solution, Edgecom Energy is here and ready to help!
416.640.2401
edgecomenergy.ca
Unit 1 – 90C Centurian Dr.,
Markham, ON, L3R 8C5, Canada
