After three weeks in the Propel accelerator in Fredericton, SimpTek has quickly changed its business model and already drawn the interest of at least one potential corporate customer.
The young company – comprising tech entrepreneurs Asif Hasan, Lionel Fernandes and Keelen Gagnon – is now dedicated to developing an automated system that helps people control the use of their household appliances with the goal of saving them money.
“We are a home automation solution and we help you control every appliance in your home,” said Hasan in an interview in Fredericton last week.
Sitting in a meeting room in Planet Hatch with his colleagues, Hasan said that the team is working on a software platform that overlays on top of a home automation system to improve energy efficiency. The system will analyze data from “smart plugs” (wall sockets that measure the energy consumption of individual appliances) to determine where the homeowner could save on electricity costs.
The team hopes to design a system that understands the residents’ habits and then be able to predict their behavior, helping to realize more savings. The goal is to develop a platform that can be used with any home automation system.
They have already begun to market the product, and received some interest from New Brunswick Power, which is working on the province’s smart grid. Not only could the company eventually become a customer, but it could also provide a controlled environment to help test the product.
The three entrepreneurs have created what they call “a crude prototype” of the system, which allowed them to demo the product.
The business plan calls for the homeowner to pay SimpTek a subscription fee for the service. As the company builds up data on consumer behavior, it could sell the data to utilities. With smart grids, utilities will get a deeper understanding of all the energy demands from the generating station to the end-user. The SimpTek platform will deepen this understanding by telling the utilities what is happening inside the end-users’ homes, said Hasan.
Though all three members of the team pitch in with all the tasks, they are developing roles within the company with Hasan becoming CEO, Gagnon dealing with communications and investor relations and Fernandes specializing in the technical side.
SimpTek began in the engineering faculty of the University of New Brunswick, and had been working on a wearable technology. They took the project into the Propel accelerator and within three weeks pivoted into the home automation project.
“The wearable technology is relatively new at this point, so rather than push a new tech into society we want to make something more user friendly,” said Hasan.
As it goes forward, SimpTek will have to raise funding from various sources. They plan to enter Breakthru, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s biennial startup competition, and the will look for funding from other private and public sources.
“We expect the whole project will be done and we’ll be on the market within two years,” said Gagnon.
Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support start-up companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies are featured in this column nor do they have the right to review columns before they are published.
