Technology startup Leaptran was formed with a single goal in mind: create software tools to help reduce costs for renewable energy sources.
The San Antonio-based company was founded in 2016 and was the brainchild of founders connected with the University of Texas at San Antonio. Among its co-founders were former Southwest Research Institute scientist Jeff Xu, who serves as CEO, and Chief Operating Officer Edward Hooks.
Xu previously served as entrepreneur-in-residence at UTSA and chief technology officer for Microvast Inc., a German-based battery research company.
With no smart system in place, cloudy days and waning sunlight can prove pricy for properties which face a spike in electricity costs. Leaptran offers products and services that manage and apply forecasting-based portable energy generation and storage options.
Hooks said the first product they brought to market was called LeapSmart. It was a smart building management system that used electric metering to measure electronic usage, see how the building uses energy and try to offset costs.
Another product, LeapMind, also uses adaptable data, algorithms and artificial intelligence to forecast energy loads and connects to preexisting infrastructure.
"We've been able to do something that's really different," Hooks said. "We've introduced the ability to actually leverage the onsite that's generated from equipment that's in solar farms (and) ... forecast electricity production based on actual assets in the field and not a theoretical model."
This model offers a lot of opportunities for the market, he added, since Leaptran's products would allow industrial and commercial properties to better measure and predict how much energy would be used.
This reduces the burden on the grid and helps combat "ramping," or periods of time when the solar power output radically dips or spikes and — along with it — regional demand.
Xu told the Business Journal that founders bootstrapped the company with their own capital in the beginning. Other early funding included the first phase of a grant from the Department of Energy in 2017 in the amount of nearly $145,000 and a $50,000 grant the same year through the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps program. UTSA was also awarded $356,631 from the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute for Leaptran's early research alongside CPS Energy.
As part of UTSA's "Strategic Research Alliance" begun in 2010, starting in the spring of 2017, Leaptran installed a microgrid system for CPS Energy, located at the Fort Sam location of Joint Base San Antonio and one at the Campbell Library building.
The projects demonstrated a 20% reduction in energy consumption and a 200% improvement in demand reduction compared to the previous year's performance, Hooks said.
Leaptran recently received non-dilutive research grants from multiple federal agencies and funding agencies including the Department of Labor, Xu told the Business Journal.
Today, the company has two part-time and four full-time employees. In the next two years, Xu and Hooks hope to double its size, aiming for more than $1 million in revenue by 2024.
Most recently, Leaptran was one of five companies awarded the American-Made Solar Forecasting Prize sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office and given to solar industry stakeholders with state-of-the-art solar forecasting capabilities.
