Commercial real estate is considered one of the biggest energy consumers worldwide, as much as 70% of consumption comes from the cooling and heating systems. The Zero Energy Solutions (ZES) system enables personalized operation of different climate control systems, which leads to immense savings in costs. Just recently, the company announced the completion of a $5.3 million funding round.
Remote - climate control system
ZES’s system can adapt itself to all types of air-conditioning infrastructures and manufacturers, thus providing a solution to older and more wasteful systems, that falter under the load of the ever-changing climate conditions. The system creates a climate profile for every controlled room, including the many variables: temperature, humidity, presence of people in the room, opened windows, heat accumulated in the walls, weather reports, electricity costs, the capabilities of the AC unit, and of course, tendencies and preferences. Looking to the future, the company one day hopes to create a “personal climate signature” which will accompany each user from their homes to the various other buildings they may visit. The company has filed for a patent on its various developments that enable them to optimize each system separately, so to avoid high energy consumption of the whole building as a unit; another advantage the system provides is a short 20 minute installment time.
ZES was founded in 2019 by Iftach Cohen, CEO; Ofer Maor, COO; and Daniel Heifetz, CTO. The company’s latest funding round was led by the Thai building technologies company Siam Cement Group, Investor Vincent Tchenguiz, also among investors were Israel G-TEK, and Fusion LA, the accelerator program. Additional funding came from $1.8 million in grants from the Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Finance, the BIRD Foundation, and from the state of New York (via NYSERDA). Currently, the company employs 15 employees spread out through their offices in Bnei Brak (Israel), New York, and North Carolina.
In a conversation with Geektime, ZES CEO, Iftach Cohen said that with the help of the latest round of funding, the company can turn to develop more hardware capabilities and intelligent software. Preparing the company for a fast-paced growth over the next 2 years. Cohen continued to tell that the company’s product has already been installed in over 60 sites in Israel, the U.S., and Thailand.
According to Cohen, the latest funding series was completed before the crisis, however, he claims that there have been no signs of fear coming from investors over the past 2 months: “The fact that we are connected to the hotel and protected living industries, that were severely hit each in their own way by the crisis, has caused us to recalibrate the value we offer, to those who already connected a loT infrastructure to their AC system and rooms,” Cohen said.
Cohen claims, that the crisis even added value to the system when a hotel in Manhattan housed COVID patients, the system was installed and could be controlled remotely without physically interacting with the infected residents.
