The battle over ideal office temperatures is an ongoing, hard-fought one — particularly for women, whose productivity has been proven to be hindered by chilly workplaces. But as Fast Company reports, a startup called 75F has received $18 million in a series A round of funding from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. Their aim: to create and implemented automated air-conditioning technology that will reduce energy use and make offices more comfortable.
“I believe most people would love to conserve energy, but they find it unpalatable,” Deepinder Singh, the company’s CEO, told the publication. “That’s a key thing that we’re trying to work on — make sure that people are more comfortable and productive, but at the same time, let the energy conservation occur in the background.”
The 75F system uses sensors throughout a building to determine whether a particular area is too hot or too cold and adjust accordingly. It also monitors weather forecasts and predicts how the building temperature will be impacted by temperatures outside. Singh said companies who use the system have cut energy use by 30 percent.
“It’s really hard to compete with machine learning,” he said. “You could perhaps make the same building work as well, but you would need a dedicated engineer making tweaks each and every minute of the day.”
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