Sponsored Content

When the New Brunswick innovation community celebrated its annual InnovateNB awards recently, there was only one company that took home multiple awards – Fredericton-based Anessa.

The company’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Dr. Farough Motasemi won the Emerging Innovator Award, and the company itself walked away with the prize for the Most Innovative Product or Service.

In fact, Anessa’s trophy cabinet is getting a bit crowded these days. In the past year, Motasemi and his Co-Founder, Anessa CEO Amir Akbari, were winners of the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 for Atlantic Canada, and Anessa won the Opportunities NB Innovative Exporter Award at the 2023 Export Awards.

And while awards are great, its actual business of providing software to the biogas industry has been going great guns. With customers in 13 countries, the company is experiencing exponential sales growth as biogas players adopt its software to plan and monitor their biogas project development, progress and operation.

“We doubled our revenue from 2022 to 2023,” said Akbari during a break at the InnovateNB awards. “This year, we are looking at a 4X increase in our revenue.”

He added that the big difference between the sales secured in 2024 and the previous years is that Anessa is signing multi-year contracts, so much of its revenue is now recurring. It shows the strength of the company that first emerged as WenTech Solutions in the 2017 Breakthru competition, the startup awards once organized by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.

The company, which changed its name to Anessa in 2020 provides software to the biogas industry, allowing players in this industry to assess their biogas project during the development phase , optimize it and monitor these energy assets during the operation phase.

Biogas growing strongly

A burgeoning sector in many parts of the world, the biogas industry produces burnable gas from organic waste and uses this product for such purposes as energy production or fertilizer. In energy production, the gas can be burned to produce electricity or sold off as biomethane, as it’s known in Europe, or renewable natural gas (RNG) in the U.S. Since Russian gas exports to Western Europe were restricted due to the war in Ukraine, biomethane has gained significant interest as a replacement for natural gas in Europe.

The industry is made up of disparate players, from small farmers producing biogas from animal waste to huge utilities, many of whom collect the gaseous product from hundreds of these producers. In the past five years, Anessa has released three products that can be bought individually or as a package:

  • Anessa AD•A – This product evaluates opportunities, streamlines feasibility studies, and helps operators gain a deep understanding of project risks. For example, a food producer considering a biogas operation to gain revenues from food waste could use Anessa AD•A to assess the viability of the project and determine which form of production would suit its situation.

  • Anessa AD•O – This product optimizes feedstock recipes, accounts for seasonality and explores the effect of adding new waste to the mix.

  • And Anessa AD•M – This product monitors a facility’s performance in real time, centralizes a project’s data and visualizes it with customized dashboards.

“We thought we had three different products, but the market told us differently,” said Akbari, adding that customers can license the package, use one product to plan their venture, another to optimize it and the third to monitor it. The products use artificial intelligence to optimize their solutions, and the companies are always generating more and more data, so the AI works more efficiently.

One client connected to 460 producers

The product can be used by the small companies that are plotting commercial use for their organic waste, or by the major oil and gas companies or utilities that they sell to. In France, for example, Anessa is working with one major utility that is connected to 460 different biogas producers.

France is becoming such a major market for Anessa that Akbari is learning French, which will be his fifth language. He added that facility with the language will also help with sales in Quebec – an important part of the company’s Canadian business – and at home in the bilingual province of New Brunswick.

Anessa recently has been working closely with partners in New Brunswick to help develop a strategy for a biogas industry in the province, which could help many stakeholders, including farmers and fish and food producers. Akbari said the province’s economy includes a lot of seafood processors and farms, which could earn extra revenue by producing a clean form of fuel.

About Opportunities New Brunswick

Opportunities New Brunswick works with businesses of all sizes in every region of New Brunswick — helping them to invest, grow, scale, and tap new markets for their products and services. If you are a business operating in the province, or a potential investor interested in pursuing business in New Brunswick, ONB is there for you every step of the way.