Dutch company with Cambridge offices offers 'decarbonization as a service'

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Working on what is now his sixth business venture, Dan Harple, founder and CEO of Context Labs BV, is focusing on the intersection of AI and climate to help businesses meet their emissions standards. 

Harple has contributed to some of the 21st-century's biggest technological advancements. He has founded companies and technologies that provide streaming capabilities for services including Netflix, database solutions for Oracle, and the technology behind Weibo, China’s largest social media platform. 

Context Labs, which has offices in the heart of Kendall Square at the old IBM Watson building, is Harple’s latest venture, and he believes it will have the largest total addressable market ever. The company uses AI to provide an auditable record of emissions, making it possible to track progress in climate commitments.

“I think the total addressable market for Context Labs is the biggest in the history of anything,” Harple said. “And the reason is because every country, every company needs a decarbonization strategy and a technology.”

This week at the LDC Gas Forum in Boston, an annual event focused on the natural gas market in New England, Harple provided a live demonstration of Context Labs' latest technology, called "decarbonization as a service," or DaaS. The service was first used by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Rocky Mountain Institute for the climate action engine, a way to use descriptive analytics on climate and reduce emissions. 

EQT Corp., a Pittsburgh company that's the largest natural gas producer in the U.S., and The Williams Companies, the Oklahoma-based processor and transporter of one-third of the nation's energy supply, are two of the current users of DaaS. Harple and his team plan for more on the way.

Handling the world's largest dataset on energy supply emissions is equally daunting and dangerous. DaaS “shrink wraps” its data, encrypts it, and keeps it safe from bad actors who want access to the data.

DaaS takes advantage of the other software developed by Context Labs to create “digital twins” of company facilities — digital copies of equipment, facilities, pipe flow rates and more. By taking digital readings of the facilities every four milliseconds, DaaS helps companies predict where leaks of methane and other problems may occur, allowing them to fix problems before they happen. 

The next step for Harple and Context Labs is to make the software behind DaaS open-source. In doing so, they aim to cultivate an ecosystem of methodologies, starting with what they’ve done for the energy industry, allowing anybody to use the software.

“We're taking traditionally deployed technology techniques, like open-source, and intersecting those into a sector that's never seen,” Harple said. “So we're combining these components that actually drive ecosystems to grow faster by using techniques that were in a different sector altogether.”