Energy, mental health start-ups Orkestra, Sahha raise $3.75m

A start-up which can estimate when investors will see a return on renewable energy projects and a platform that measures mental health using smartwatches have raised new capital.

Orkestra co-founders Chris Cooper (left), Michael Jurasovic and James Allston.

A start-up which can estimate when investors will see a return on renewable energy projects and a platform which can measure a person’s mental health using biosensors from wearable devices and their smartphone have raised a collective $3.75m.

Energy start-up Orkestra, which uses algorithms to determine the costs to set up renewable energy projects measuring multiple outcomes and the use of different renewable energy products, has raised a $2m seed round.

The raise is the second in less than 12 months for the start-up founded by former energy consultants James Allston, Chris Cooper and Michael Jurasovic. Last year, Orkestra raised a $1.1m pre-seed round.

Leading the $2m raise was Tidal Ventures, with some participation from Rampersand, Impact Ventures, Luxem, and climate tech investors Phil Blythe, Danin Kahn, Oliver Hartley, and Andrew Rogers.

Mr Allston, a former energy consultant at Ovo Energy and Siemens, said Orkestra has modelled about 3000 projects since it was founded three years ago, about 2500 of which have taken place in the past nine months.

The platform can consider the use of multiple batteries, different types and sizes of solar panels, return from joining virtual power plants and use of different energy tariffs, he said.

“We’re testing a very large number of permutations of different potential projects for a site, and we’re then able to take the results of that and rank them by net present value or rate of return,” he said.

Orkestra employed 18 staff but would use the new funding to expand its footprint, looking to enter the European market and land local energy providers as clients.

Tidal Ventures general partner Wendell Keuneman said he believed Orkestra had the ability to allow renewable energy providers to scale at speed.

“At the end of the day, we have very few energy experts but there are lots of salespeople, and what Orkestra does is it just unlocks all of these people to be able to do battery, solar and wind renewable modelling at scale,” he said.

“We think Orkestra is a very, very important component in getting the maths done right so that people can also make money off of energy transitions.”

Aleks Dahlberg, the founder and CEO of mental health start-up Sahha.

Sahha, a back-end mental health platform which can, using the biosensors on wearable devices, provide insights into a person’s mental health, has raised a $1.75m seed round.

The start-up, founded by New Zealander Aleksander Dahlberg, 29, plugs into the back-end of different platforms and provides direct insights in relation to mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety my measuring the number of times a person uses their phone as well as data from different sensors on phones and other devices including smartwatches.

The start-up measures data from devices against data it collected in a research project using psychometric testing several years ago with thousands of global participants.

“Our goal was to correlate this type of behaviour with data from the devices we use with what we interpret as behavioural data,” he said.

That data was then used to train algorithms which assess a person’s behaviour on a device and look for similarities.

“The machine learning models eventually found those correlations and provided us with the data that we needed to then turn those outputs into the commercial API that companies can plug into” he said.

The platform can measure things such as sleep regularity and how many times a person uses their phone throughout the night, and what that might say about their mood.

The start-up is garnering interest with insurance providers, employee well-being apps and fitness apps.

Aura Ventures investor Annie Liao said the fund believed Sahha had an innovative approach that would go a long way to improving mental health.

“Our thesis is that the healthtech market will only become more and more fragmented, driven by consumer data sovereignty and the rise of various wearable players,” she said. “Sahha plays nicely into these tailwinds and is set to become table stakes for any company with user health or wellbeing at its core.”

Originally published as Energy, mental health start-ups Orkestra, Sahha raise $3.75m