Stealthy startup Aclima makes environmental quality visible through sensor networks

Aclima

San Francisco-based Aclima has come out of stealth today, announcing partnerships with EPA, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and Google. The company designs and deploys environmental sensor networks as well as a software platform for measuring and understanding environmental quality in real-time.

“We’re on a big, ambitious mission at Aclima to usher in an age of environmental awareness that creates a more resilient, healthy and thriving world,” said Davida Herzl, co-founder and CEO of Aclima. “There is a growing need—for businesses, governments and citizens alike—to ‘Live Aware’ by first understanding, and then improving our built and natural environments. Aclima has spent years in stealth creating a complete system to map environmental quality in an entirely new way, enabling us to see how our buildings, communities and cities live and breathe.”

Aclima’s modular and scalable networks of internet-connected sensors generate billions of data points across a range of environmental factors. And each sensor network is customized to meet the needs of enterprise and government partners, whether a partner is interested in mapping greenhouse gases across an entire city, or air pollutants that affect human health inside commercial buildings.

The company’s cloud-based back-end along with modular front-end tools can process, analyze, and visualize virtually limitless amounts of environmental data, to discover real-time and long-term insights. Aclima works hand-in-hand with partners to explore their spaces and apply insights toward optimal decision making. The company calls this service model – Sensory Science.

In 2013, Aclima and the EPA signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to bring together EPA scientists with Aclima’s R&D team to improve data quality from small-scale sensors. The partnership is advancing Aclima’s measurement methods for its stationary and vehicular sensing platforms.

Aclima’s modular and scalable networks of internet-connected sensors generate billions of data points across a range of environmental factors.Also, the company is collaborating with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the EPA to engineer and commercialize a miniaturized particulate matter sensor for the air pollutant most responsible for respiratory health problems, like asthma.

Finally, Aclima is working with Google and has helped the search giant deploy a global indoor environmental sensor network across 21 offices around the world. At the moment, 500 networked Aclima devices process 500 million data points each day on indoor environmental quality, including comfort measures of temperature, humidity, noise, and light, and emissions like CO2 and particulate matter. The information allows Google to evaluate environmental factors in their offices and, eventually make better decisions on workplace design to support employee wellbeing, productivity and creativity.

“We strive to create the healthiest and best possible work environments for Googlers,” said Anthony Ravitz from Google Real Estate and Workplace Services. “Our vision is to create buildings that seamlessly support the people who inhabit them. Using Aclima’s science-driven sensor networks to map our indoor environmental quality is a big part of making that happen.”

Aclima Advisory Board members include a number of luminaries, including Jane Lubchenco, former Administrator of The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under President Barack Obama; William K. Reilly, former Administrator of the EPA and Senior Advisor to TPG Capital; Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer at MIT School of Management, pioneer in systems science and author of “The Fifth Discipline”; Elad Gil, Serial entrepreneur and former VP of Corporate Strategy for Twitter; Greg Niemeyer, Professor at UC Berkeley and Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media; David Sherman, co-author of the “Flourishing Enterprise” and distinguished fellow at the Fowler Center for Sustainable Value; and Martin Goebel, Founder of Sustainable Northwest and former country president for World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International.