Carbon Relay Launches to Provide AI-Driven Solutions for Optimal Energy Efficiency in Data Centers

BOSTON, Jan. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Carbon Relay, the AI innovator helping the world's largest enterprises overcome their energy-related operational challenges, today launched and announced funding from a series of strategic investors, including Foxconn Technology Group. The company's products, now commercially available, leverage advanced data science, deep reinforcement learning and augmented intelligence to deliver proven ways for finance and operations executives responsible for large data centers to achieve tremendous energy efficiencies. These, in turn, allow for major carbon emission reductions and cost savings at a time when data centers are under pressure to meet growing operational and regulatory requirements.

Today, energy costs comprise 40 percent to 60 percent of the cost of running a data center in the US. Within data centers, HVAC systems (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) consume roughly 40 percent of all energy as they work to regulate temperature, humidity and other variables that can shift every few seconds. Current energy management tools and consultative methods cannot track, understand, predict or control enough of the variables associated with energy use by HVAC systems to yield efficiencies greater than three to five percent. Carbon Relay's breakthrough AI technology provides a better solution, particularly for enterprise, bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining, and federal data centers striving to reduce the financial and environmental impact of their expanding operations.

"The Carbon Relay team has been together since 2015, driven to apply AI to one of the most pressing energy management challenges today," said Matt Provo, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Relay. "We've taken on data center energy use because we have an opportunity, working alongside our partners, to make a near immediate and massive impact on power use. Our team is motivated by the prospect of helping large facilities dramatically cut OpEx and CapEx. More than that, we're looking to support data centers in their drive to reduce carbon emissions. We're excited to formally launch the company today and to bring our products to more businesses."

Carbon Relay is backed by Foxconn Technology Group, as well as Boston-based investors Dr. James I. Cash, who also has served on the Boards of Walmart, Microsoft, GE and State Street; Douglas Levin, founder and first CEO of Black Duck Software (acquired by Synopsys); Dr. Karim Lakhani, a specialist on technology management, digital transformation and crowd-based innovation who serves on the Boards of LM Industries and Mozilla Corporation; and Paul Deninger, senior M&A advisor at Evercore and current Board member of Iron Mountain and Resideo (formerly Honeywell). They have provided $5 million in Series A funding alongside $1 million previously raised. Dr. Cash and Dr. Lakhani have joined Carbon Relay's Board of Directors.

Dr. James Cash noted: "Each data center is unique and enormously complex, requiring its own approach to managing energy use over time. The Carbon Relay team is comprised of people who are passionate about creating a solution that will adapt to the needs of every large data center, creating a tangible and rapid impact on the way these organizations do business. It's an exciting time to bring Carbon Relay's solutions to a broader range of enterprises."

Integrate with existing data center systems to reduce costs, increase insights
Carbon Relay offers two products today, Optimize and Predict, to collect information from customers' existing IoT platforms, leverage their massive data sets and data visualization platforms, and then control industrial HVAC systems continuously and automatically with continuous decision making.

Carbon Relay's Optimize product uses AI and automated control to begin improving operations and generating results quickly. In contrast to existing solutions, which require 6 to 12 months of historical data up front, and upwards of a year to move into production, Optimize can create a simulation of a customer's environment in 48 hours and, based on information from their facility blueprints and electrical layout diagrams, move into production in 12 weeks. An operator supervises Optimize as it makes hundreds of continuous decisions across 40 variables to regulate the data center's HVAC and cooling systems directly, for rapid efficiency gains.

The company's Predict offering leverages each customer's historical operations data--such as temperatures, power levels and flow rates--collected by the thousands of IoT sensors inside data centers to train its predictive module. Carbon Relay Predict also adds advanced data visualization tools to highlight efficiency opportunities, making it easy for data center managers to focus on and prioritize those items. With Carbon Relay Predict, customers can accurately visualize the energy road ahead for their data centers.

About Carbon Relay
Carbon Relay brings together world-class data scientists and software engineers to help the largest businesses drive breakthrough energy efficiencies in their data center operations and substantially cut carbon emissions. The company's commercially available AI technologies seamlessly connect to customers' existing IoT platforms, data visualization tools, and facility heating and cooling systems to achieve energy cost savings that are 5X higher than those available with traditional products. Founded in 2015 and based in Boston and Washington, DC, Carbon Relay brings together a team that is committed to using the power of AI to address complex business and environmental problems. To learn more about what Carbon Relay can do in your data center environment, go to https://www.carbonrelay.com.   

SOURCE Carbon Relay