{span}Therma’s commercial refrigeration monitoring is built to track food safety in coolers, freezers and other walk-in cold storage systems.
{span}Therma’s commercial refrigeration monitoring is built to track food safety in coolers, freezers and other walk-in cold storage systems.
Manik Suri is a Harvard grad from Delhi who worked both on Wall Street and in the Obama White House. But it’s in a palm-sized, radio-controlled device that can control temperatures in industrial cooling systems that he sees his future.
Suri, CEO and co-founder of Therma, is an energy efficiency enthusiast who is betting his San Francisco startup has cracked a way for large hotels, restaurants, hospitals and schools to save millions on refrigeration costs, and help reduce load on their local utility grids at the same time.
“We think of refrigeration as a battery. Energy in the form of cold storage,” Suri told me recently on the roof deck of his classic San Francisco startup’s office, sitting atop a sushi house in the Mission. “It turns out you can tap that battery. If we can lower or turn off refrigeration for a short period of time, we can save energy.”
More than 16% of the estimated 50 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted by global economies comes from electricity used in buildings, including industrial ones. Cooling systems are a prime culprit. By reducing temperatures and saving electricity at scale, energy efficiency can greatly reduce emissions.
Therma is one of several companies approaching the cooling issue, albeit from a unique angle. Spun off from a previous startup in 2018, the company has raised about $15 million to date and is planning a $20 million Series A round later this summer. Suri and his partner, Aaron Cohen, employ about 60 people, mostly remote, but with concentrations in San Francisco and Suba, a tech hub in the Philippines.
Smart refrigerators have been around a long time, but mostly they are scheduling devices that allow users to coordinate dinner menus, look up recipes and alert users to expiration dates of things like eggs and milk. They work at close range using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
But at long range, those frequencies can’t operate well through refrigerator walls and doors. Therma cracked this issue using long-range radio waves to transmit from its monitors to a router directly to phone apps. The technology makes it possible for large industrial customers like restaurants or supermarkets to monitor temperatures from afar and be ready to act in case of brownouts or equipment failure.
“That was one of our early advantages, that we could get the signal out of refrigerators and freezers,” he said.
The Series A is in part to help Therma introduce a new product next year, one that actually lets users control temperatures of their cooling systems from afar, saving energy at crucial times, such as midsummer. Imagine a school’s refrigeration system, operating at the same temperature all year long. By turning temperatures down just 5% or so during the summer, when it’s not occupied, real electricity savings develop. Not to mention cost savings for the school.
“It’s archaic,” said Ardith Alexander, marketing director at Therma, describing the current state of cooling. “Everyone wants to work on EVs, but the real problem is the massive food waste and emissions that all these old assets are driving.”
Therma has signed up more than 1,000 customers, mostly to small contracts, Suri said. They include McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Marriott, Hilton and even Vail Resorts, according to the company’s website. Also, a dozen or so universities, including Cornell and University of Southern California, and a few hospitals.
Revenue is in “the single millions,” Suri said. Half is from customers paying for the Therma monitors and half is from utilities, in the form of capacity payments. Those are payments made to customers whose usage comes in under what is determined by utilities to be the peak amount of energy needed for each customer.
By dynamically controlling cooling temperatures at such large operations, Suri imagines a system where companies can work with struggling electric grids to control usage, and costs, during down hours.
“Energy prices are constantly varying, utilization is constantly varying,” Suri said. “We’re trying to shift load to when it’s cheaper and cleaner. So much electrification is happening that the utilities don’t have the infrastructure to keep up with it.”
When utilities see demand exceeding supply, they are required to activate secondary plants called peaker plants, which operate mostly on dirty oil and coal energy. So, reducing this need keeps the lights on and prevents usage of more dirty energy.
For Suri, who studied political economy at Harvard and tried his hand on Wall Street at D.E. Shaw Group, and then at the National Economic Council at the White House in 2011, the idea of becoming an entrepreneur and working on climate change issues sprang from a relationship with co-founder Cohen, a serial entrepreneur in digital ad technology.
The two met at The Governance Lab at New York University, which was dedicated to bringing technology to government, but Suri noticed that smart people would come and work there for a few years and then go on to the private sector. The two went into business in 2015 with an early company, Collaborative Inspect, which invented the Therma device as an early product. They spun it into a new company four years ago.
Suri says Therma sees the same issues all startups have this summer:difficulties getting employees to come into the office, concern about raising money due to tough financial markets. But looking out from the roof deck toward San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood, he gets excited about what things might look like when COVID is over, and people are back in the office and using the deck.
It’s a long way from the White House, but every entrepreneur in Silicon Valley knows the feeling.
David Callaway is founder and editor in chief of Callaway Climate Insights. Formerly, he was president of the World Editors Forum, editor in chief of USA Today and MarketWatch, and CEO of TheStreet Inc. This article originally appeared in Callaway Climate Insights.
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