The End of Pilot Purgatory

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We’re excited to have Andrew Bright, former ABB executive and VIA’s advisor to our Swiss office, contribute to our blog. Read on to hear his commentary on VIA’s GDAC™ Transformers: 3-Minute Pilot, which was recently upgraded to maximize the value of transformer data while minimizing time.

Many industrial digitalization projects suffer from “Pilot Purgatory.” The pilots seemingly take forever and never end because no one can decide if they are a success or a failure. Since the term Pilot Purgatory was first coined a few years ago, much has been written about how to avoid it. However, the vast majority of this advice seems to involve throwing more resources, money and scale at the pilot, until well it no longer looks like a pilot but a full-scale roll-out. The logic is clear if the monthly cost of a pilot project is high enough – no one can afford to let the pilot continue indefinitely. How refreshing then, that VIA has come up with a radically different and frankly opposing approach for avoiding Pilot Purgatory.

Their new GDAC™ Transformers: 3-Minute Pilot takes just 3 minutes to complete once data is gathered. If this were a recipe, you would be allowed up to 27 minutes to source the ingredients and just 3 minutes to do the cooking. Resources, time and money are all minimized. After this experience, VIA hopes to have delivered a valuable summary of the health of one of your transformers. If this has proved insightful, the pilot has been a success, if not then GDAC™ may not be for you. Either way, the pilot will have been concluded.

With their 3-Minute Pilot, VIA aims to demonstrate three specific concepts:

  1. show valuable insights about the health of one transformer and that the math really works;
  2. show that valuable analysis can be conducted whilst keeping data private and confidential; and
  3. provide an educational component about how VIA does what it does. VIA does more than provide recommendations, it also explains why & how a particular recommendation was made.

All three of these components are embedded in the 3-Minute Pilot. If you are interested in performing a full fleet analysis going back say 20 years, that’s more of a project and not the goal of this pilot. VIA’s 3-Minute Pilot is true to the spirit and literal about the term “proof-of-concept.” This seems to be an industry first and given the simplicity and radical reduction in resources, I hope that it becomes an industry standard approach.

VIA note:

If you are interested in learning more about VIA’s GDAC™ Transformers: 3-Minute Pilot and perhaps want to give it a try, feel free to contact us.

VIA’s 3-Minute Pilot provides valuable insights on the health of transformers in just 3 minutes.

 

Swiss Media Features VIA and HSLU in Article on Securing Smart Meter Data

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Smart meters are rich with insights that can optimize the operation of the power grid. Yet, the current practice of gathering energy consumption and production data from a centralized source carries data privacy and security concerns. Our partners at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) recently penned a piece for Bulletin.ch about our research through the Swiss Federal Office of Energy to solve this dilemma. A key component of the KnowlEDGE project, VIA’s Trusted Analytics Chain™ (TAC™), allows utilities to access distributed datasets while maintaining cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.

To learn more about this work with HSLU and how it’s supporting Switzerland’s decarbonization goals, read the full article here.

End of Year Reflection
Company

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As this year comes to a close, we are taking our readers on a journey through 2021 in this 3-part reflection series written by VIA’s co-founders. The series covers the incredible milestones VIA has achieved in laying the foundation for big things ahead in 2022 as we Scale Up!

If any of you are Ted Lasso fans, you’ll know the philosophy that he lives by, “It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about being the very best versions of ourselves that we can be.” This year we definitely had our share of ups and downs. I, personally, am most proud of the positive attitude and resilience that our VIAneers demonstrated this year. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to win too!

This year VIA turned five. It seems like the perfect time to review in “ABC format” a few of our company wins. For D and E, see the blogs of VIA’s CSO, Jeremy Taylor, to learn more about the technical Distance we covered this year and COO, Kate Ravanis, to learn about Employee related milestones. 

A is for Series A. Earlier this year, VIA closed our $10M Series A equity financing round. While cash is always good, we’re privileged to have what we consider to be the premier clean energy fund in North America to lead the round. We also had one of the top 3 largest Silicon Valley-based B2B software companies in the world co-invest. We think quality begets quality. It’s an honor to have this level of support and growth capital to continue to scale VIA. You’ll see investments in our people and technology as we continue to keep up with increased customer demand.

B is for Buildings (and infrastructure). Our mission is to enable cleaner, safer, more equitable communities. Buildings and infrastructure are clearly the biggest physical components of our communities. While infrastructure was in the headlines for almost the entirety of 2021, this is a sector where VIA started to gain traction last year. In 2020, we won a significant contract to support the efficiency and improve the quality of life of a community of 800 buildings by analyzing and monitoring daily the 15,000 associated subsystems (utilities, HVAC, etc.). That expanded this year and in 2022 you’ll see a ten-fold increase in the number of buildings and other critical infrastructure that we support.

C is for Customers. VIA’s customers doubled in 2021 and we are on track to double again in 2022. For our critical infrastructure application, JARVIS™, we were able to add Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida as a customer and in December have a new multi-million dollar award that we will announce fully in January. 

It’s also the most positive endorsement of our value that two of our power customers have not only renewed their contracts but grown from an annual commitment to a three year contract. You’ll see new announcements in the first quarter of 2022 regarding our work with the U.S. Space Force. For obvious reasons, you won’t see anything about work that we won recently with a U.S. intelligence agency. Those are also both great endorsements of VIA’s value proposition: data analytics that’s cyber secure and privacy protected.

This past year was really a breakthrough year from a people, technology, and customer perspective. 2022 will be all about building on that base and continuing to scale. In the meantime, thank you all for your support in creating the solid foundation that VIA has laid. We sincerely wish all of you the very best to you and yours for 2022.

 

End of Year Reflection
Research and Technology

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As this year comes to a close, we are taking our readers on a journey through 2021 in this three-part reflection series written by a variety of VIA’s leaders. The series covers the incredible milestones VIA has achieved in laying the foundation for big things ahead in 2022 as we Scale Up!

In 2021, VIA began to harvest some of the fruits of our research and previous development efforts of years past. We’re proud to share with you our technology accomplishments and what will make 2022 another record breaking year.

Technology Platform: Security and Agility

2021 was a year filled with major accomplishments for our technology platform.

Our VP Architecture, Jesus Cardenes, along with the entire DevSecOps team, pioneered a number of significant security enhancements to our data privacy-preserving analytics platform,  TAC™. In 2020, we released the capability to run TAC™ in a multi-cloud environment and continued to enhance these capabilities this year. In 2021, thanks to a robust container hardening pipeline, VIA celebrated having the first U.S. Department of Defense-wide cybersecurity accredited blockchain application. As part of our cybersecurity accreditation, we ensured that we migrated TAC™ to a Zero Trust Architecture and implemented Least Privilege Principle cybersecurity practices throughout our full product suite.

This year, TAC™ scaled as an application platform and currently supports multiple distinct analytics capabilities. Technical Architect, Ashley DaSilva, and her team put the TAC™ Ingestion Engine into production. This enables applications to orchestrate complex data ingestion and transformation workflows like taking thousands of files and automating their wrangling into an AI-ready database format. Early in 2021, execution auditability was demonstrated by our Technical Architect, John Muddle and his team, and was further developed by fellow Technical Architect, Madjid Aoudia, and his team demonstrating a highly scalable and auditable analytics system for satellite image data. These new features are key enablers for VIA’s full solution range, including VIA Insights Market™, GDAC™ Transformers, SWEET™, and JARVIS™.

There’s a Patent for That

In 2021, we were proud to have been granted our first patents developed by our VP Engineering, Kai Cheung, and fellow collaborators. These initial patents protect innovative technologies for homomorphic encryption and machine learning model evaluation. We also filed three new patents, ranging in scope from encrypted search, decentralized aggregation, and workflow threat mitigation. This brings VIA to a total of more than ten pending patents. We look forward to positive news on several of these filings in 2022. These technologies make TAC™ more secure, improve model execution performance, and lower power consumption. You’ll hear more about our efforts to reduce the carbon intensity of AI in 2022.

Research: Setting the Stage for Big Things

In 2020, we began work with our university research partner HSLU, smart meter manufacturer Landis+Gyr, and the Swiss Federal office of Energy. We finalized our first use cases that will help Distribution System Operators (DSOs) understand how technologies like electric vehicles, solar power generation, and battery storage are driving changes in the Swiss power system. In 2021, the team developed novel privacy-preserving algorithms to detect congestion in power systems, and completed a study of federated learning and model personalization for improved energy consumption forecasting. These technologies are being deployed at the edge, directly on smart meters and will be field tested in the first half of 2022. 

In 2022, we look forward to the start of a research collaboration with the University of British Columbia (UBC) on demand response for grid stabilization. The project will include the development and testing of blockchain-based algorithms for coordination between distributed energy resources across multiple distribution feeders. At VIA, we see this project as the start for a number of avenues of research collaboration into data-driven and privacy-preserving AI solutions for power system stabilization.

With all of our technology advancements in 2021, we were able to meet the needs of our customers, accept prestigious awards, and set the foundation to scale in 2022. The last blog in this series will highlight these major milestones we achieved as a company this year.

SwissInfo Highlights VIA in Article on Switzerland’s Shift to Renewables

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Switzerland aims to rely solely on renewable energy by 2050. Artificial intelligence (AI) is crucial to making this a reality, according to a recent SwissInfo article. The piece featured in Switzerland’s top English language news outlet highlights how VIA and our partners at Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts (HSLU) are putting AI into practice through smart meter research. With this work, utilities have a way to securely analyze smart meter data while protecting customer privacy.  

“No country in the world has a longer history or stronger reputation for data privacy. At the same time, no single utility has enough data on its own for AI,” noted VIA CEO Colin Gounden in an interview for the piece.“With so many utilities (650), Switzerland is a great proving ground for VIA’s collaborative technology (VIA Insights Market™).” 

VIA’s recently launched Insights Market brings AI models to data to increase data privacy and cybersecurity. It enhances security as power companies do not need to send  data to the cloud or to analysts. 

To learn more about our work and implications for creating a stable, carbon neutral energy system, read the full article from Swissinfo here.

VIA Invited to Speak at Swiss-US Energy Innovation Days 2021

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We’re strengthening our presence in the Swiss energy market — learn more about how we’re supporting the Energy Strategy 2050 from VIA’s SVP, Strategic Initiatives, Joe Babiec at Swissnex in Boston and New York’s Swiss-US Energy Innovation Days 2021 event. Learn more on their website: https://swissnex.org/boston/event/swiss-us-energy-innovation-days-2021/

VIA Participates in Deeptech Showcase Energy Event

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Our team shared the value of solving with VIA during the Deep-Tech Showcase on July 15th. We joined companies from across the clean energy landscape to discuss what’s possible with innovations in renewable and alternative energy, as well as power management and supporting systems.

VIA Presents at Westly Group Summer Summit

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VIA presented at The Westly Group‘s Summer Summit in California. The talk was about the work we are doing to accomplish our mission of increasing clean energy adoption. We enjoyed this opportunity to connect with our partners – thank you to the Westly team for having us!

VIA Attends Hanscom Air Force Base Invite-Only Event

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Our CEO Colin Gounden and SVP, Strategic Initiatives, Joe Babiec represented VIA at Hanscom Air Force Base (Bedford, Mass.) in today’s invite-only event. Hanscom AFB is a long-time innovation hub for the USAF and the headquarters for Program Executive Office (PEO) Digital and PEO C3, Intelligence and Networks. We were excited for the opportunity to share more about JARVIS, our proven base operations and infrastructure application, and its underlying data integration, data security, and data analysis platform with United States Department of Defense leadership!

Leaders at VIA Present at Deeptech Showcase Smart Cities

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VIA leaders Colin Gounden and Joe Babiec presented at Deep-Tech Showcase’s virtual Smart Cities event on June 17 at 2:15pm. The team covered our mission and technologies, as well as how we are leading the clean energy revolution. View the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7DuekF3V3U

VIA CEO Colin Gounden Presents at EPRI AI and Electric Power Summit

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Data is the fuel for AI engines, yet securely sharing data remains a major roadblock for the electric power industry. Our CEO Colin Gounden joined an executive panel at Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)‘s AI and Electric Power Summit to discuss how we overcome it with data curation and governance. Visit here for recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZIasTCQgyI&list=PLphKrnecF69U4xTsLqzs2F0GJWFJxXEur&index=6! ⚡ 

VIA SVP, Strategic Initiatives, Joe Babiec Attends USAF Flightline Operations Showcase in Las Vegas

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VIA’s Joe Babiec, SVP of Strategic Initiatives attended AFWERX‘s Revolutionizing USAF Flightline Operations showcase in Las Vegas. At the showcase, Joe represented VIA at our booth “Airfield Maintenance and Repair Challenge.”

VIA Participates in Energy Data Hackdays in Brugg, Switzerland

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For the final stop on his Swiss adventure, our CEO, Colin Gounden, attended Hightech Zentrum Aargau AG‘s Energy Data Hackdays in Brugg, Switzerland. At the event, the VIA Insights Market™ was officially debuted and tested by several early users.

End of Year Reflection
People

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As this year comes to a close, we are taking our readers on a journey through 2021 in this three-part reflection series written by a variety of VIA’s leaders. The series covers the incredible milestones VIA has achieved in laying the foundation for big things ahead in 2022 as we Scale Up!

2021 was a big year for us at VIA, so big, we needed three blogs to cover all of our milestones! This first part highlights our team, the VIAneers.

All About That Base

To keep up with our customer growth, we had our biggest year ever for new hires: 16! Our new VIAneers tell us that the onboarding experience when they join VIA is incredibly supportive, inclusive, and engaging – even when remote! In no small part, this is due to the continuous improvements we have been making over the past five years. 

From our founding, our core values have been reinforced day-to-day through a cohesive program of supporting processes. These ranged from six monthly offsites, formal mentorship programs, awards and incentives, learning and development, and structured feedback. With a hugely diverse team (e.g., we have 17 nationalities across 39 people around the world) we believe that systematic reinforcement of values has created the base necessary for a scalable organization. 

Our VP, People and Operations, Emma Fechney, deserves a huge shout out for instantiating our commitment to values into a successful system over the past several years. Emma took our theory of the case about the importance of mission, values, and diversity and built a program that we scaled and has an impact every day. In 2021, we branded this program the “VIAneers’ Experience Program.”

Great Support for Great People

A big milestone for VIA in 2021 was raising our Series A. We were genuinely surprised, in the best possible way, to hear from several investors during the diligence process that our “people processes” are on par with IPO-ing companies. 

Unsurprisingly, the first investment we made was in people, in particular, the kind who take care of others. Emma’s People and Operations team grew to include Felice Sicoli, our talent acquisition extraordinaire. Felice has helped shape our candidate experience and ultimately led us to our biggest recruitment year. Angelica Novoa, also joined this year as People and Operations Partner. Angelica joined us through a recommendation of a current VIAneer, Jonathan Chirwa. Referrals of friends are the best possible validation of our company culture and experience – and Angelica has proven this with her thoughtful contributions from day one! Both Felice and Angelica have been instrumental in enhancing and systematizing our onboarding experience.

Welcoming Felice and Angelica has yielded 16 new people to accept offers with us in 2021 while maintaining consistency in quality. Fewer than 1% of applicants ever get an offer at VIA. As one of our technical VIAneers, Antoine Dozois, says when he assesses candidates, “It’s not enough for candidates to be ‘good.’ They have to be ‘VIA Good.’”

A highlight of 2021, was our first hybrid (virtual and in person) company event, called Power Up Week. While we have a long history of assembling our company together weekly through “All Hands” video conferences and bi-annual offsites, this year we extended the invitation to our advisors, Lt. Gen. Spigelmire, Maj. Gen. Nesbitt, and Brig. Gen. Blackstock, as well as prospective advisors. We believe they are an extension of our team and need to be aligned on values and mission as much as our full time VIAneers.

Want a sneak peak at Power Up week? Watch our Day 1 Kick-off video where we cover VIA’s mission.

Hey, 2022!

2022 will be a great year for VIAneers. To keep up with exponential customer growth, we already have three new hires starting in January on our technical team and have aggressive hiring plans across our offices globally.

We feel confident that we have the foundation in place for our next few hundred hires. Some of our processes date back to previous successful companies and are proven in diverse and challenging environments. 

Always staying agile, we look forward to the ways our new growth and team members will continue to spark our creative expansion of our VIAneers program. It is the part of the job our People and Operations team loves the most – and we see it pay off in the many successful commercial and technology milestones we achieved this year. We look forward to sharing more about them next! #lovein=loveout

VIA Named One of the Most Innovative Analytics Companies in Massachusetts by Data Magazine

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Data Magazine spotlights VIA in a list of the Most Innovative Analytics Startups & Companies in Massachusetts. VIA was selected from a range of companies, including well-known brands like HubSpot and Rapid7, based on performance in innovation, growth, management, and impact on society. At VIA, we are committed to upholding this title both in Massachusetts and worldwide as we continue to work with power providers, clean energy companies, and governments to overcome barriers to data and AI integration.

To read the full announcement from Data Magazine, you can visit their website here.