Led by Founder Andrew Joiner and other experts in public policy and in energy markets, Durham-based startup nvend is striving to help bioeconomy companies aggregate data and information faster to scale a specific renewable energy source: organic waste.
Waste isn’t just taken from animals. According to one of nvend’s blog posts, the process to obtain organic waste—or biogas—occurs naturally in the absence of oxygen, in places like swamps and landfills, where organic waste decomposes over time. The World Wildlife Foundation includes food waste from supermarkets and restaurants in this category.
When waste is broken down, the output is between 50-75% methane, which can be used as fuel for cooking, heating, even generating electricity. As an alternative to burning fossil fuels, biogas has the potential to slow climate change, reduce agricultural and food loss and increase energy access. That’s why Joiner pivoted from his background in public policy in energy to creating his own companies dedicated to servicing the biogas industry.
Joiner created nvend to address what his previous startup, EnMass Energy, couldn’t at the time. EnMass Energy was a software tech platform that supported the transportation and logistics for materials of a biogas project or company. (We profiled EnMass Energy in February, 2022.)
But Joiner quickly realized that in order to provide that support most effectively, he would need real-time information about surrounding project details such as market intelligence and competitor locations. There weren’t any existing tools or platforms for him to use, so he created his own.
Unfortunately, EnMass Energy turned out to be ahead of its time; it officially ceased operations in Q2 of 2023. But from what he’d learned running EnMass, he was already hard at work on nvend.
The new startup officially launched out of stealth at the beginning of March. Its first product is Nexus, a software platform that streamlines the development of biogas projects by enabling faster project bankability, facilitating quicker closing of investment and maximizing portfolio efficiency while using the least resources.
Nexus can actually tell developers the best locations for projects based on real-time market data and feedstock availability. It also provides ongoing risk reports, a big need given that planning and completing a biogas project takes many months.
“Let’s say six months or a year later, you’re finally ready to start building or even start operating, but the market in that time has changed,” Joiner explains. “You can run the entire process and schedule of your project through Nexus and figure out if your suppliers are now working with another organization because we hypothetically missed our deadlines or they offered more money.”
Even many funded biogas projects don’t progress to operational status due to those issues of an elongated timeline. That’s why bioeconomy investors have to quickly understand the implications for the success of project investments. Nexus brings potential investors into the process, providing itself as a due diligence tool for funders to be updated on company progress and to assess other opportunities for their portfolios.
On top of providing real-time updates, Nexus will also provide graded reports on a project, comparing it to other operating facilities and outlining what makes a specific project a good or bad bet.
Joiner said that nvend addresses a disparate data problem that other bioeconomy companies haven’t yet solved. That’s why he and his team of three (and a handful of freelancers) have spent months before and during nvend’s stealth mode to build databases of livestock farms, restaurants, food manufacturers and more in order to fully flesh out Nexus’ accountability rate for locations where organic waste is generated.
“In order to fully understand and build biogas projects, it’s got a long way to go in terms of tapping out the value of replacing traditional fossil fuels with renewable fuels,” Joiner says. “But it has become an industry over the past three or five years, with lots of money flowing into it, since it’s another sustainable solution.”
And the numbers speak for themselves, as investors such as Goldman Sachs and IFM are already pledging billions to biomethane and renewable gas projects.
“I believe that this is a huge market,” Joiner continued. “It’s still in its early days so there’s a lot of growth and opportunity in this space. I left the carbon market before they became big, so I don’t want to look back five years from now and say, ‘I should have stayed and helped in this space.’”
