Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are honoring startups across the region's innovation space. Here's the honoree in the climate tech category.
Just as Google Street View maps the world in images, Aclima is mapping the world by the quality of its air, block-by-block. And Aclima is working closely with the tech giant, hitching its air sensors to Google’s Street View vehicles.
Since its inception in 2010, Aclima has collected billions of hyperlocal air pollution and greenhouse gas measurements using hundreds of stationary and mobile sensors across the United States and nearly 20 other countries.
Aclima Pro, the company’s subscription-based software, contains the largest dataset of air pollution in the world, providing real time measurements and historical trends to public- and private-sector clients.
CEO and co-founder Davida Herzl said the company’s sensors serve as “X-ray goggles for pollution,” tracking anything from methane leaks in underground pipes to carbon emissions from school buses.
“If you put them on, you’d be surprised,” Herzl said. “It’s just incredible how much is out there, but we don’t see it.”
For Herzl, the goal is to provide the necessary data to “aggressively reduce emissions” occurring within communities. Many solutions to reduce emissions are relatively simple and easy to implement, she said. However, without proper data it becomes difficult to identify the sources of emissions and track the effectiveness of investments.
Through Aclima’s data collection and analytics, Herzl hopes to provide regulatory bodies and private companies with the tools to pinpoint sources of toxic emissions, identify impacted communities, and take actionable steps to effectively reduce pollution.
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” Herzl said. “Yes, there’s big transitions that need to happen on new energy sources, etc., but in the meantime, we need to take action to tamp down local emissions.”
From sensors to software, everything Aclima uses to measure and interpret data has been developed in-house. After initially struggling to find funding, Herzl said the company got its first big break in 2011 when Google hired Aclima to map the air quality of its indoor offices. Three years later, the company partnered with Google again, deploying its first outdoor air sensors in Google Street View vehicles.
Today’s fleet of vehicles uses adaptive driving methods to create “representative pictures of pollution,” Herzl said. The company uses machine learning to forecast emission trends and provide insights for decision-making throughout its data generation, sensor signal processing and analysis. Herzl said there’s a lot more the company is working on but not yet ready to announce. They are currently exploring the option to allow the public to buy sensors and put them on their own cars to play a part in the AQI mapping network.
Herzl declined to disclose revenue, but she said the company has experienced average growth of 3x per year and expects this year to be higher, partly due to some major upcoming announcements.
“I truly believe that our solution is a big part of the puzzle, but there’s a lot of puzzle pieces,” Herzl said. “I’m excited to see investment continue to flow into climate tech and into other amazing founders that are building incredible solutions right now. We need all of them.”
About Aclima
Location: San Francisco
Industry: Climate tech
Founders: Davida Herzl and Reuben Herzl
Founded: 2010
Funding: $64 million
Major investors: Bosch Ventures, Microsoft Climate Fund, NGP, Splunk Ventures, Emerson Collective, Kapor Capital, Social Capital, the Schmidt Family Foundation, Radicle Impact, Plum Alley Investments and Rethink Capital Partners.
Why they were chosen: Aclima has provided a value add to Google’s network model in an area that can serve to improve the climate.
