Enerbrain is an Italian startup with an international team providing integrated solutions to improve energy efficiency in our buildings. A further step beyond in the cleantech development involving IoT devices and sensors to deliver effective solutions in making our buildings more green oriented and improve the indoor environment performance.

Enerbrain: Italian startup, international team

Enerbrain is based in Turin, northern Italy, and features a well composed team of entrepreneurs, IT engineers, cleantech experts. Their main purpose is to create proper city assets with a relevant economic and social impact and contribute in developing a smarter city right now.

Our interview with the founders of Enerbrain has been a unique chance to understand once more that ideas are commodity, execution is not (as Michael Dell would say).

Why did you decide to found Enerbrain? How did you manage to put your team together?

The four founders of Enerbrain have been friends, colleagues and teammates for years before starting a business together. It all started with a simple idea: how can we adjust the general temperature of a building to avoid energy-hungry performances? From this starting point our team, which was located all around the world, gathered in Turin (our home town) to start a business in Italy.

What’s your view on the startup support environment?

Almost everybody in our team comes from an international working or studying experience abroad (mostly USA and UK): that’s why we came to a wider vision and a better awareness on the opportunities offered by government and independent startup support systems. It’s really easier to start such a business abroad: better financial support and a more sensitive approach to new ideas and innovative projects. We didn’t start any crowdfunding campaign because our product/service is mostly oriented to commercial or non residential buildings, with a pretty different target. We mostly relied to the academic support: the Politecnico di Torino startup incubator I3P has always supported us and helped us to promote our business in dedicated events.

At first we had to contact by ourselves press, bloggers and everyone because interest in our projects was beginning to grow gradually. We’re noticing right now an increased interest and we’re managing to meet our potential audience in industry fairs, events and everything that could help us in growing a business community and communicate our vision and project.

Energy cloud!

What’s your market segment?

Our target buildings is non residential: corporate, hospitality, healthcare, retail and entertainment. Everything with a HVAC annual cost above USD 70.000

We featured several posts about Tesla (with its Powerwall and Gigafactory projects), Nest and other players like Ohmconnect, Yetu and more. Integration is the answer, according to many observers. How do you see Enerbrain in a future smart home or smart city, integrating with other IoT systems?

Integration is a key goal when we design buildings and structures for the people. A smart building needs to be dynamic with several systems supporting its performance and services at the best. Enerbrain is perfectly integrated with every HVAC system without hard modifications in few hours. We believe that a powerful solution for a smarter building needs immediate integration with the current building features: an upgrade that can be installed in few hours, saving time and energy.

8 Gallery project (retail): first project, top performance

There’s plenty of interesting projects in your gallery. What’s your favourite one?

We had a great feedback for a retail project: 8 Gallery in Turin. It’s our favourite because it was the first one to feature our system, and it’s a permanent proof of our efficiency performance with a -32% save in the summer HVAC expenses. A relevant effect which is harder to measure compared to the winter season, and we’re proud of it! It’s also a complex project, because a retail spaces is challenged by sudden variation of visitors streams during the day, and it’s quite a good achievement for us.

Everybody’s boosting the hype on IoT, smart home and smart grid. What’s the future of the IoT industry in your opinion?

Smart home is the future. There’s plenty of devices that we could integrate to increase efficiency and comfort in our houses. IoT offers the opportunity to achieve even greater results in our everyday life with a net profit for everybody.

Smart city? Integration is the key