Hi Rosana, tell me more about ENGUIA and how you met ENGIE
We are a startup of engineers, architects and developers, and we had the idea of bringing energy efficiency to properties that can’t afford an on-site consulting. So, people can access the ENGUIA platform, describe what they have inside their homes. We then issue a personalized consumption reduction plan, an estimation of the expenses necessary to carry out the exchanges we suggest, and an estimation of the following economy and the investment return.
ENGUIA has a very strong socio-environmental concern. Our objective is that people who use the platform reduce their energy bill so they can use their financial resources, for example, in education and food for their families.
The environmental side is also evident because when we aim at reducing energy consumption, we aim at cleaning the matrix and we encourage the use of renewable energy.
We are based in Rio de Janeiro and we met ENGIE when we applied our idea to ENGIE’s Innovation Award last year.
What was the impact of the Innovation Award on you and on the company?
The Innovation Award we won with ENGIE had excellent results for us.
We took part of the Innovation Events in Paris, we made a partnership with ENGIE in order to develop our solution in Brazil, offering our energy efficiency services.
This contract started last January so we are now at the beginning of our relationship, which has been very good so far. It has been an excellent experience for us as a small company, to understand how a large company works, as well as identify the existing opportunities inside the energy sector. As a large company, ENGIE finds in us agility and speed, features harder for them to have.
Carlos Gothe, you are Innovation Manager at ENGIE Brazil. What is your opinion on this collaboration?
We made this partnership with ENGUIA for the development of a premium version of their platform, to be integrated into our BtoC offers. The development is still ongoing, we are very happy both with the first results and the way ENGUIA team works in cooperation with our team. We already envision other areas of cooperation for development of new solutions.
In this partnership, we are also testing our new way to evaluate startups on initial phases: instead of a due diligence, we contract the startup to develop a product or service. The contract includes a Call Option to acquire a minority stake for a defined price.
Last but not least, Rosana, what do you expect from the future?
We have great expectations for the future! Our platform is already on, we already have our first clients, and ENGIE is one of them. We have everything to make an exponential scale process, spread this tool for more users and be able to close deals with more companies.
We also intend to implement new resources in the tool, so we are now working in the distributed generation market, and also with IoT, machine learning, big data, which allow us to gather very useful information about residential and small company markets.
We have a long way ahead of us, a very promising one, and we are happy to be alongside ENGIE in this process.
