Fasade tackling climate change with dark data

You may think that in a world of hybrid workplaces, where most events are online and the need for travel is greatly reduced, organisational emissions are down. But actually the internet and its supporting infrastructure are responsible for more carbon emissions than the entire aviation industry, and part of that is attributable to data.

That’s where Fasade step in, this Climate Tech startup helps companies manage data and cut emissions. Their goal is to mitigate carbon emissions by 500 million tonnes.

How do they do this? As Co-Founder Pavel Stanek explains, “A great portion of the emissions from data are unnecessary, only about 20% of data is utilised with the remainder of stored data being ‘dark,’ or unstructured. Think about your own laptop, how many files sit there unused, unopened and not necessary. It’s the same with cloud storage.” 

But with cloud account providers charging for storage, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to reduce this unnecessary dark data. Until Fasade decided to disrupt this. 

Fasade helps organisations to reduce these emissions by creating a platform that makes all data, spread across different cloud accounts and systems, accessible through one source. Their algorithm then searches through the systems in order to find dark data and structure it, so that companies can then remove the unnecessary data. In turn, this reduces the burden on data centers as well as the rest of the ICT infrastructure, as they consume less energy and produce less emissions. These efficiencies can also save businesses money while reducing their cyber security risk. ‍

Customer Focus‍

B2B and looking at SME to large companies. 50 to 100 employees, the ones that use a lot of data.

‍Challenges‍

Similar to most startups, as Pavel puts it “there’s not enough time in the day.” This could explain why they’re hiring three more positions this month. ‍

Highlights‍

Unlike many of the climate solutions presented today, Fasade offers a unique solution in that there is no behaviour change required of the employees or their supply chains to reduce emissions. Simply by consolidating their cloud applications with Fasade, they can reduce their energy consumption, reduce their biosecurity risk and reduce emissions by structuring dark data.

‍Report Card

• Team: Co-Founders plus one employee 
• Product: Multi-Cloud Data Management Solution Platform 
• Market: $500M Market in APAC for Dark Data Analytics 
• Momentum: MVP, and a waiting list to gain early access
• Impact: The internet and all of its infrastructure accounts for around 4% of global emissions and this figure is set to rise. With Fasade addressing the 90% of data that is deemed dark or unstructured, their scale for impact is quite huge.

From the Founders

• Company Name:  Fasade https://www.fasade.com.au/
• Themes: #Energy #Business #Reduce #emissions #Improvetheenvironment #data
• Summary: Fasade helps businesses to reduce emissions by streamlining cloud platforms, and reducing dark data. 
• Product stage: Prototype
• Founders: Pavel Stanek and Ankit Jagannath
• Capital raising: We raised 50k in funding with Artesian and recently secured the JobsNSW MVP Grant. Currently, we are looking to raise our second round of funding. Please contact us if you would like to learn more about us and our raise.
• Company mission: It’s our goal to mitigate carbon emissions by 500 million tonnes.‍

‍Why the team wants to solve this problem:‍

Originally, like many others, Pavel and Ankit weren’t aware of the danger that data posed to the environment. Initially, Fasade was created to combat the inefficiencies created by poor data management, and it was only later that they realised it was more than just inefficiency - it was actively causing harm.

The digital world has become intertwined with our own, with its positive effects often highlighted - we’re more connected than ever, productivity has increased, and the standard of living has become higher - but it has also accelerated the rate of climate change. Data has become the new oil in that it is mined because it’s useful and incredibly valuable, but carries a cost that the environment shoulders.

The bigger contributors to climate change are being addressed already, and it’s not for a lack of awareness or innovation when action isn’t taken. The smaller contributors - like data - are now the ones that need to be tackled, and being informed is one of the first steps in that. As the growth of data continues to explode, it’s our hope that in the long term both individuals and businesses will take a responsible approach to managing their data.

What other climate tech companies we admire: (Optional)

Cecil | Carbon collaboration

Cecil has designed a platform that helps to better manage nature-based projects

ClimatePartner and Ryte‍

This isn't a single company, but ClimatePartner and Ryte have collaborated to design a solution that first calculates the carbon footprint of websites, and then helps to offset it. This is really interesting, because it combats part of the problem we’re addressing -- the transmission of data.