“Cement is one of the biggest contributors to climate change and carbon emissions,” says Sherif
Elsayed-Ali, co-founder and chief executive of Carbon Re. In fact, cement production alone is
responsible for 8% of all carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Carbon Re, a spinout of University of
Cambridge and University College London, is developing machine learning software that can help
cement makers cut these emissions by optimising fuel use in the pre-heater and kiln processes.

“Heating up limestone is responsible for half of the emissions in cement,” explains Elsayed-
Ali. “We take hundreds of data points to build a digital twin of the process, then run live
optimisations.” Carbon Re will recommend specific settings for a plant, which Elsayed-Ali says
can lead to an 8% to 10% drop in fuel use.

Carbon Re has two other products, for the manufacture of glass and steel, which are still under
research. The team is working with non-profit organisations such as ResponsibleSteel on testing.
Carbon Re was co-founded by chief operating officer Buffy Price, chief scientific officer Daniel
Summerbell, chief technology officer Aidan O’Sullivan and Elsayed-Ali.

The company secured a $5m in seed round in 2022 led by Planet A Ventures, with participation from UCL Technology Fund, tech transfer office Cambridge Enterprise and Clean Growth Fund.

Read the full profile here.

Drones have obvious uses in construction and mining, and PwC forecasts that this could eventually become a $28.3m global market. But usage of drones by these industries has so far been held back by the inaccuracy of location and the fact that fog and rain can severely hamper use.

Australia-based startup Emesent is working on a technology to solve these issues. It specialises in drone autonomy, LiDAR mapping and data analytics through its Hovermap ST which can capture data in beyond line-of-sight areas that were once considered inaccessible or were GPS denied areas.

Stefan Hrabar, the company’s chief executive officer, and Farid Kendoul, the chief technology
officer founded Emesent in 2018. Combined, the two have nearly 40 years of experience in the
autonomous vehicles and aircraft sector, with Hrbar previously serving 12 years at the Australia based national science agency, CSIRO as a senior research scientist and research team leader in aerial robotic inspection.

Since its launch, Emesent has raised $23.6m in funding. In 2022, the company raised $23m in a
funding round led by Australian investment firm Perennial Partners with Tiger Global participating.

Telus Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the Canada-based telecommunications conglomerate
Telus also provided significant funding which Emesent has used to open offices within the US and UK to extend its services to more industries.

Some $1.6bn to $5.9bn is spent every year on treating firefighter injuries, according to the US Fire Administration, with some 14% of those injuries happening in training.

Flaim Systems, an Australia-based VR company, is hoping to change these statistics with a fully immersive platform that simulates real world emergencies, but allows firefighters to train more safely.

The platform includes a vest that reproduces the heat intensity firefighters would experience,
stress level tracking and uses standard firefighting equipment too. The technology simulates high rise buildings, gas stations and rural fires. It collects biometric biometric performance data and provides real time training feedback.

In addition to supporting professional firefighters, the company has developed a version that helps train corporations on safety training and accurate fire extinguisher handling. A spinout of Deakin University, Flaim Systems was founded in 2017 by James Mullins, the chief technology officer who is also a third-generation rural firefighter.

The spinout has raised a total of $5.8m which they hope to use to further commercialise the
company and their product. It recently raised $4.4m in a series A round with investors ranging
from Deakin University, Significant Capital Ventures and Breakthrough Victoria, who also took a minority stake in the business for $3.3m.

Factory automation has come a long way since the industrial robot was patented by George Devol
in 1954 in the US. Any kind of factory today will include some automation. Yet, some tasks still need to be done by hand and human error will inevitably creep in.

This is where Ollo Factory comes in. The spinout of University of Tokyo’s Matsuo Lab has
developed a palm-sized edge device, called Ollo Box, equipped with artificial intelligence as well as facial and behavioural recognition to track all work on a factory floor. It monitors the site in real time and detects variation in work and, just as importantly for a company’s bottom line, it detects waste.

It does all of this without requiring a large amount of training data. Instead, a webcam films just one cycle of a work process and can start analysing immediately.

The technology has applications outside the factory, too. The Ollo Box can be used, for example, to record employee attendance at a meeting. Just upload a single photograph from each person and the company claims a 99.81% accuracy for facial recognition from that.

Founded in 2019, Ollo Factory has backing from management consultancy Industrial Growth
Platform, which invested in the startup in 2020 and participated in a ¥200m ($1.45m) series A
round in 2022. The series A also attracted SoftBank’s Deepcore and Deep30, which invests in
technologies emerging out of the Matsuo Lab.

While most of the hype around the metaverse focused on the visual side and the VR headsets, an equally important aspect of creating an immersive experience is sound. In order to create a realistic virtual world, you need to have accurate spatial audio — giving the impression of sound coming from the right direction, the echo of a room, and other ambient noises.

Treble Technologies has developed proprietary technology for sound simulation and spatial audio specifically for use in virtual environments. The cloud-based platform connects with leading gaming engines and 3D modeling software allowing for the design of more realistic soundscapes than presently accustomed to.

While hype about the metaverse may have died down recently, the Treble team is pursuing real
commercial opportunities in working with architects, such as Henning Larsen Architects, BIG Architects, and COWI. Architects can use the sounds simulation platform to model how different building material choices will affect the acoustic of a building. Henning Larson, for example, used this in the design of the Uppsala Town Hall. The company is also working with automotive engineers and designers on a similar solution for use in car design.

Treble Technologies was founded in early 2020 by Finnur Pind and Jesper Pedersen, a couple
of acoustic engineers with extensive experience and expertise in sound simulation. It has raised
$13.6m to date, including a €5.5m seed round in which Saint-Gobain Nova took part.

Forestry management, with its largely manual and analogue processes, may seem like one of the
last industries in need of a cloud-based platform. But precision forestry is an emerging sector that was worth $4bn in 2022.

Vibrant Planet was set up as a public benefit corporation in 2020 by chief scientist is Hugh
Safford, who has spent the past two decades as a research ecologist at University of California,
Davis, and has worked on several solutions for climate, forest and fire challenges for the US
Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service.
Vibrant Planet’s platform helps government agencies like the Forest Service, as well as NGOs and fire departments, with treatment planning, monitoring and wildlife preservation.
It uses lidar to create a 3D map and fills in the gaps with machine learning (because dense forests are difficult to map). AI and satellite imagery keep the map updated.

The company launched in California soon after 6.5m of the state’s 33m forested acres had burned in fire seasons. Vibrant Planet’s 17m seed round last year was led by the Ecosystem Integrity Fund and Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust. It included a consortium of eight others including network equipment manufacturer Cisco’s impact investment fund Cisco foundation.