Decarbonizing Data — Our Investment in Ocient

Our Investment in Ocient

Even before ChatGPT, data centers were consuming terawatts of energy to power our modern economy.

Data centers are on track to consume as much energy as the country of Brazil by 2028. Demand globally is projected to grow approximately 10% annually until 2030 driven by advancements in AI, real time analytics, 5G, work from home, and more.

Our Research

Through our research on how to decarbonize data centers, we learned the following:

• Data centers are on track to consume 10% of the world’s energy supply by 2030. Additionally, they consume a lot of water. In 2021, US data centers consumed 660 billion liters of water, equivalent to double the amount of water Coca Cola uses each year globally.
• Data center efficiency must address both the IT load: critical power attributed to IT equipment and computing, and the non-IT Load: HVAC, lighting, and water. There are fewer known ways to reduce the IT load in a meaningful way beyond migrating from on-prem to the cloud and basic hardware upgrades. As for non-IT load, more mature building efficiency technologies can help, and newer AI co-pilots for operations are emerging.
• Major software companies such as Microsoft and Google have made commitments to 24/7 carbon free power by 2030, which is an ambitious goal beyond 100% clean energy. This goal requires achieving 24/7 carbon free power through hourly matching, which today is difficult. In addition to procuring renewable energy to address emissions, to really make a dent in decarbonizing this sector there must be inherently more efficient ways to run the software and power the chips crunching all the data.

We share more on emerging solutions in this sector in our recent newsletter here. Below is a summary from our research depicting the scope of emissions from data centers:

What does this mean for customers of data centers services who are concerned about their data and cloud expenses?

As these customers’ data needs scale, current software providers solve the compute problem by throwing more servers at it, which increases both cost and power required. New database and analytics software companies building innovative infrastructure to lower the cost of computations and related energy is required.

Our Investment in Ocient

Ocient is a database software solutions company focusing on serving customers with large datasets with differentiated capabilities in geospatial data, machine learning, and real-time analytics. This volume of data is cumbersome to manipulate and requires a lot of computing power which is very carbon intensive.

Ocient’s database software solutions are up to 90% more efficient than traditional competitors at managing and querying these datasets, which makes it up to 10x less expensive to use. Although at its core, Ocient is a database software solutions company, Buoyant is excited by the GHG avoidance potential Ocient provides through more efficient software.

Ocient currently serves customers in adtech, telecommunications, and the public sector, enabling organizations to harness more of their data while reducing the cost, system sizing, and energy consumption of their compute-intensive workloads. Climate intelligence and energy are new verticals where Ocient can help entities with complex and robust data needs. Ocient can help utilities manage the grid and trade energy, help insurance companies & financial institutions measure climate risk and manipulate complex weather data, and help airlines & shipping companies make real-time decisions about routes and fuel consumption to meet the demands of customers while striving to meet carbon reduction goals. A solution like Ocient significantly reduces the price of running computations, which will enable climate companies to have an outsized impact.

Ocient’s World Class Team

Ocient is a global technology company headquartered in Chicago and is led by veteran entrepreneur Chris Gladwin, who successfully built and sold three prior companies, including his most recent sale of Cleversafe to IBM.

His experienced co-founders and team of sales and technology executives such as Kumar Abhijeet, George Kondiles, and Joe Jablonski worked together at Cleversafe and bring deep levels of sophistication and entrepreneurial stamina to Ocient. Together, they have developed a strong IP portfolio with over 70 patents issued to date.

We are proud to roll up our sleeves to help this pioneering tech company bring their solution to climate industry customers. We expect to learn a lot from this veteran group of entrepreneurs that we hope to share with the rest of our portfolio companies.

Welcome to the Buoyant Boat!

Buoyant invests in digital solutions for climate change, including mitigation across climate intelligence and energy, making Ocient the perfect fit for our thesis.

We are thrilled to join a strong set of investors including OCA Ventures, Greycroft, V Capital, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Great Point Capital, and many others who not only know how to build successful tech companies, but have funded the Ocient founders in the past.

Buoyant is proud to join these friends to support the burgeoning Chicago tech ecosystem, and ultimately, we aim to make a dent at reducing the carbon intensity of data centers

We are excited to welcome the Ocient team into the Buoyant boat!