Que: Tell Energetica India readers in brief about ExactSpace including its vision.

Ans: ExactSpace is a Bangalore-based start-up, incorporated in December 2017, with a vision to help its clients have zero energy wastage and unplanned failures using AI-based solutions. We have been globally deployed for power as well as steel plants. Recently, the start-up was chosen by the Ministry of Defence to provide predictive maintenance solutions to the Indian Navy and was also instrumental in implementing tech in thermal power plants in India. As of now, we have a total employee headcount of 26.

Que: How do you help companies in having zero energy wastage and unplanned failures using AI-based solutions?

Ans: We have built a highly verticalized (domain-rich) AI platform called ‘Pulse' with a library of 50+ Asset models and Process models. This platform then learns about the behaviour of individual assets in a plant and uncovers relationships in the overall process in order to detect the early onset of degradation and failures. It then further diagnoses the reason behind the onset and provides inputs to maintain an asset to avoid failure, all while optimizing the process to reduce wastage of energy.

Que: Which are your target industries?

Ans: We have spent over 3 years in building technology directed purposely at thermal power plants. We have now started building new vertical solutions in Steel and Cement as well that have been deployed globally.

Que: Shed some light on founding and leadership team experience across sectors.

Ans: The founding and leadership team combine expertise in AI technology and the Energy domain. Two of our leaders come with close to 60 years in the energy domain working in organizations like NTPC, STEAG and GE and across 100+ Power Plants across the world. Two others have started their careers in Analytics and led product development of Industrial IoT platforms working across Power, Steel and Cement sectors.

Que: What market scope do you see? How do you plan to market your services?

Ans: With the ongoing Energy transition, a key part is to decarbonize the industrial sector and reduce inefficiencies of systems. Thermal Power is the first to be impacted due to incoming renewables and being one of the industries with the largest carbon footprint.

India has 150 GW of thermal power plants and globally there is 2,300 GW. Beyond this, Steel and Cement industries present a large potential. We work directly with some of the largest utilities in India. Beyond this, we work with global partners, OEMs, System Integrators to take our solutions to market.

Que: As an entrant what kind of challenges have you faced?

Ans: There are two main challenges that we have faced as an entrant:

Firstly, industries are conventional and have liked to work with large industrial players. The primary competition for us comes from very large incumbent industrial solution providers (like GE, Schneider, etc).

Secondly, long sales cycles and initial projects to prove the technology.

Que: What are your views on government support for the start-up ecosystem in the country? Any suggestions for making it better?

Ans: There is a lot of support for every new start-up (like grants for creating demos, tax sops, etc).

However, there needs to be a Ministry-level (e.g. Power, Industries, etc) mandate to accept and utilize Indian products. There are cases of some large companies only dealing with large global competitors.

Que: Kindly share details about ExactSpace’s investment and funding? Any new plans?

Ans: We have been bootstrapped to date using customer revenues. We are currently in the process of raising funds.

Que: What kind of support have you received from Shell under the E4 program?

Ans: Shell E4 has been instrumental in terms of our mentorship. It validated our solutions are scalable nationally and internationally. It also provided us the platform for Networking with various enterprises and investors.

Their mentorship for business strategy, business model, preparedness for a global market and access to Shell sites for trials has been very supportive to our start-up.

Que: What are your future expectations and targets?

Ans: We aim to be the largest provider of digital solutions in the industries we operate in, first within India, and then expand globally. We want to be able to tackle up to 50 GW of Power assets and want to help in the decarbonization goals of the country.