With over 20 years of experience in the energy sector, Jeff Soplop is taking what he’s learned to form his first startup that will address a prominent issue he’s seen in the field of energy management.
When he was starting out in the field, Soplop said that for most building owners and operators—whether for homes, businesses or industrial plants—there was little to no need to think broadly about energy use beyond simple concepts like adjusting the thermostat for the hours a building wasn’t being used.
But as buildings have grown and expanded, so have the uses of energy. The world is evolving to where energy usage on the demand side needs to become more flexible and responsive to what’s happening on the supply side, especially as more energy generation shifts to renewables. But, according to Soplop, it’s becoming more complicated to balance energy usage on both sides of the supply/demand curve and trying to do so is very expensive for everybody.
That’s why his Pittsboro-based startup Nimble Energy is dedicated to working with building operators and owners to help them understand and be best prepared for the pathway to move into this new world. The goal of the platform is to advise their clients on the areas of opportunities across all of their facilities and assets.
Their mission is what led GrepBeat sister company Primordial to add the startup to its 2023 portfolio, acting as one of its lead seed investors. The startup launched in early 2023 and the platform opened publicly in July, already attracting about half a dozen clients to use its platform today.
According to Nimble’s website, 30% of energy is wasted in commercial buildings, estimating around $42 billion that is wasted in the U.S. alone each year. A lot of that waste is driven by operational issues, such as incorrectly set schedules, malfunctioning equipment, improperly calibrated sensors and more.
In order to best navigate this new world of energy usage, organizations would theoretically need to have teams that include data scientists, financial analysts, energy managers and engineers. But the reality is that having such a large team is not possible for most of these organizations, forcing them into choices of hiring third-party consultants and service providers, which can be very expensive to make personalized.
The Nimble Energy platform acts like a virtual team for the organizations, helping them objectively understand available choices. The platform’s AI algorithms analyze all data to deliver real-time insights into a building’s performance and offer comprehensive solutions to allow users to shift from being reactive to making strategic planning and management decisions.
Nimble Energy’s goal for their users is to look at this increasingly complex world of energy management and teach them to be nimble in their strategies. The goal is to take organizations from a place where they may be stuck and not being able to think far down the road, to a nimble mode of operation where they’re ready to survive and thrive in this new energy environment. Hence the name Nimble Energy.
Soplop said, “Our view with [these organizations] is that if we can deliver 90% or more of the value of what you would get from people who come in and do the services work, you’ve got more information about where your best opportunities are and where you actually need to do work in order to move projects forward faster.”
Nimble Energy looks to transform energy management across different types of sectors such as in commercial energy, government and public buildings, utilities and K-12 schools. By working with a wide range of sectors, they can expand their help easily for organizations that have a lot of facilities and assets to manage and have generally very thin teams and limited resources to do so.
By helping the organizations to understand their current issues in energy management, Nimble Energy can then provide solutions that will not only resolve those issues, but also can prevent further issues and can help these buildings to save more money down the line.
Soplop said that the startup is increasingly focused on improving the user experience and engaging people who are not ordinarily involved in the energy management process. But in order to do so, Nimble has to work to build trust in their platform to their clients.
“That trust comes from providing a really nice user experience,” Soplop said. “Making sure they know we’re personalizing things based on their preferences and we’re providing [these building operators] things that are going to help them achieve their goals and to be very successful in their job . We want to help show the efforts that they’re putting in in order to help to accelerate actions and get more projects approved.”
