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Conservation is key in Los Angeles. From water to energy, people are trying to take daily action to help. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to know how your purchases will impact the environment.
Enervee, an energy smart data and commerce platform, has created a way for consumers to find the most energy efficient household appliances and electronics.
The Santa Monica-based company announced $3.7 million in funding today, but co-founder and CEO Matthias Kurwig remembers when the company was nothing more than a pile of data.
Five years ago Kurwig was working in digital marketing on the East Coast when he decided it was time for his new family to move to a new home. With energy conservation in mind, he began searching for household appliances, but struggled to find any reliable data on which brands were truly eco-friendly.
The industry relies on Energy Star certification, but some argue it fails to give a quantifiable energy ranking because it only asks manufacturers to meet a bare minimum, not exceed it.
“Energy and resources are an important subject matter and the number of purchases made in this country are enormous,” said Kurwig. “10 million fridges and 40 million TVs with no system to find out which product is best.”
After years of sifting through data, Kurwig and his co-founder Don Epperson were confident they had finally created a well regulated system that reflected what was on the market.
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“We knew there were tens of millions of people making these purchases annually and that data set could have a meaningful impact in terms of how much money people will spend over time and, for people who care about the environment side of things, what their impact will be,” said Kurwig.
However, the duo had yet to find a way to monetize the data they had collected. For the first few years, the data was licensed to government entities in order to monitor market development for energy efficiency and design new policy levels.
Shortly after, Kurwig and Epperson used their marketing backgrounds to create the marketplace that became Enervee. The site ranks appliances for consumers but also assists customers with their rebates on individual items.
The mail in rebate process is a notorious struggle, but Enervee has moved it entirely online. After the purchase, the customer simply emails a picture of the sales receipt and the rebate is paid out within days.
The $3.7 million in funding will be used to grow Enervee’s staff while also growing the products they feature on their site.
The biggest conservation topic in Los Angeles, water, is next on Enervee’s agenda. Within the next two months the site will feature water efficient products like shower heads and toilets, offering the same rebate system for California customers.
In the future, Kurwig believes the approach could be applied to real estate. By considering the square footage, utility bill, and climate, they hope to calculate an indicator for energy consumption for different homes.
Enervee is confident the company will maintain its steady growth because they aren’t convincing customers to make a purchase. “It’s only about influencing the purchase of people who are already buying,” Kurwig said.
The company has taken in a few million dollars in revenue over the past year and Kurwig believes the company will grow by more than 100 percent in the coming year.
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