Turning Down the Heat: Gradyent's Decarbonization Drive for a Cooler Planet

April 30, 2024

Turning Down the Heat: Gradyent’s Decarbonization Drive for a Cooler Planet

Founded in 2019 by Robert Vrancken, Hervé Huisman, and Freek Smelt, Gradyent is revolutionizing the heating and cooling sector with its AI-driven Digital Twin Platform. The platform enhances energy efficiency, reduces CO2 emissions, and lowers costs by creating a real-time digital model of heating grids for optimal management.

Gradyent’s focus on low-carbon heat sources addresses the significant energy consumption of heating and cooling, which represents half of the world’s energy use. Their technology-driven approach leads to up to a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions and notable cost savings.

Based in Rotterdam with a team of 80+ experts, Gradyent works with leading European heating firms and partners like E.ON and Vattenfall. We spoke to the founders about their technology and future goals.

Can you tell us how and why Gradyent was founded?

Heating makes up more than 50% of the total energy that we use on planet earth – larger than electricity and transport combined! Heating and cooling networks play a crucial role in decarbonizing heating, and we support this transition with our digital solutions.

These networks are becoming increasingly complex due to the addition of sustainable heat sources such as geothermal, waste heat, heat pumps and more, which makes it very difficult for operators to run them in an efficient manner.

Our software fixes this, and serves as an “operating system” for heating and cooling grids. While our vision has stayed largely the same, we have become more ambitious by expanding our business from district heating to include district cooling and industrial heating as well.

Can you share any key challenges you’ve faced?

The extremely high gas prices caused a crisis for our customers and slowed down our sales massively in the winter of 2022. Although, ultimately, high gas prices do support the drive for decarbonization, the sudden increase caused downright chaos at our customers, meaning that digital solutions were not in focus for that period in time.

This situation taught us the importance of patience, maintaining good relationships, and by 2023, those leads returned, and our business is now thriving and has multiplied several times.

What’s Gradyent’s edge over its industry peers?

We have a fantastic team, and our product goes way beyond any other solution available in terms of accuracy, completeness, and overall impact. The magic is in the combination of those things!

What targets have you set for the coming few years?

Our goal is to achieve x10 growth in Europe and branch out into new regions like the US, Middle East, and China, preparing us for x100 growth.

What are Gradyent’s core values and principles?

First of all, we are a purpose-driven company, and everything we do is focused on lowering emissions in the energy sector. We are extremely focused on our customer needs, will do anything possible to drive impact, and are not afraid to tackle really complex challenges, even when the solutions aren’t immediately clear.

What motivated you to join the Rise programme?

We are extremely ambitious as we believe we are pursuing an important cause. As we emerge as a European leader in our field, we’re aiming higher, aspiring to impact on a global scale. We feel this level of ambition is not so common in the Netherlands, and it is extremely inspiring to learn from other scaleups that have succeeded in becoming global leaders in their space.