ElectrikWalk receives the PEPITE Challenge Award from ENGIE

The PEPITE Challenge is a competition that honors projects run by student entrepreneurs. This special student-entrepreneur status allows students to build and develop an entrepreneurial project and get support from one of the 29 PEPITEs (Student Pole for Innovation, Transfer and Entrepreneurship).

The aim of the PEPITE France Challenge is to connect student-entrepreneurs and businesses to better tailor their offerings to economic realities, foster partnerships with companies and create new business opportunities. ENGIE is a sponsor of the PEPITE network and gives out an award in the "Innovate for energy and its associated services" category.

This year, the ENGIE Award was presented to ElectrikWalk, which analyzes the flow of people in a building using sensors placed on the ground and an AI capable of recognizing the sex and the age range of the occupants according to the pressure exerted by their footsteps (anonymously). An interface allows operators to visualize data flows in real time, compare them over different periods and recover the data. ElectrikWalk also offers the ability to recover the mechanical energy produced by the footsteps of passers-by and turn it into green energy.

The innovation in these floor slabs rests both on the production of energy and the artificial intelligence used for the analysis of the data collected.

Why did you give the award to the Electric Walk project?

In search of innovative services to improve the environment and create a more harmonious world, ENGIE is moving from being a "pure" energy company to a low-carbon energy supplier and energy services provider to reduce consumption and therefore the impact on the climate.

For ENGIE, the next step is to become a service provider for buildings about comfort, well-being and modularity (among other things). In order to create real service offerings in this area, it is essential to be able to link user needs and input data. This is already the case for service offerings related to the technical analysis of installations and energy performance. For other services we have to rely on partners, which ElectrikWalk could become, to enrich our offerings in smart buildings services.

What will you do with Electric Walk?

The prize was awarded a few days ago, so we are really at the beginning, but we have three areas of collaboration with them.

• Seeing if ENGIE's BIM Factory data can be useful for improving its service offerings
• Check if we can integrate their solution into the offers we already provide our customers
• Perhaps help them boost the AI part of their product with the help of our specialists in Artificial Intelligence at ENGIE Digital or some of our partnerships like Microsoft.

And finally, we will investigate whether this collaboration can lead to a more structured partnership like a POC on a building.