After four years in stealth mode, Carbon Relay, an artificial intelligence startup that was founded in 2015 in Boston and Washington, D.C. has stepped into the limelight with a $5 million Series A round that brings the company's total financing to $6 million.
One of the investors is Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturing company that focuses on nanotechnology, heat transfer and green manufacturing process.
The mission of Carbon Relay is to optimize energy usage in data centers. The product is an artificially intelligent "digital agent" that can make hundreds of cost-effective decisions, such as controlling humidity, in the blink on an eye. In the end, carbon emissions are reduced and data centers contain the costs of electricity.
"For me and our team, carbon emissions are the source of a really large humanitarian issue," Matt Provo, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Relay, said. "Carbon... doesn't have to be as negative. If optimized, if controlled and, ultimately, if 'relayed' to the right locations and redistributed, then we can actually balance out the amount of emissions being emitted."
Provo added that the company will use the investment to scale its products, capture more market share and bring on more clients. Currently, there are 18 "technical" members as part of a team of 20 people in total, based in Downtown Crossing.
"We will continue to hire on the technical side, but the company is very focused right now on building out the sales, marketing and account support functions of the business," Provo said.
Other Boston-based investors in this round are Dr. James I. Cash, who also has served on the boards of Walmart, Microsoft, GE and State Street; Douglas Levin, founder and first CEO of Black Duck Software (acquired by Synopsys); Dr. Karim Lakhani, a specialist on technology management, digital transformation and crowd-based innovation who serves on the Boards of LM Industries and Mozilla Corporation; and Paul Deninger, senior M&A advisor at Evercore and current Board member of Iron Mountain and Resideo.
