Amidst a worldwide wave of company pledges to decarbonize or attain net-zero emissions, a system for verifying precise greenhouse fuel reductions has by no means been extra vital. Context Labs, based by former MIT Sloan Fellow and serial entrepreneur Dan Harple SM ’13, is rising to fulfill that problem with an analytics platform that brings extra transparency to emissions information.
The corporate’s platform provides context to information from sources like tools sensors and satellites, offers third-party verification, and data all that info on a blockchain. Context Labs additionally offers an interactive view of emissions throughout each side of an organization’s operations, permitting leaders to pinpoint the dirtiest elements of their enterprise.
“There’s an previous adage: Until you measure one thing, you may’t change it,” says Harple, who’s the agency’s CEO. “I consider what we’re doing as an AI-driven digital lens into what’s taking place throughout organizations. Our aim is to assist the planet get higher, quicker.”
Context Labs is already working with a number of the largest vitality corporations on the planet — together with EQT, Williams Corporations, and Coterra Power — to confirm emissions reductions. A partnership with Microsoft, introduced ultimately 12 months’s COP28 United Nations local weather summit, permits any group on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to combine their sensor information into Context Lab’s platform to get a granular view of their environmental impression.
Harple says the progress allows extra knowledgeable sustainability initiatives at scale. He additionally sees the work as a technique to fight overly obscure statements about sustainable practices that don’t result in precise emissions reductions, or what’s often called “greenwashing.”
“Simply producing information isn’t adequate, and our clients understand that, as a result of they know even when they’ve good intentions to cut back emissions, nobody goes to imagine them,” Harple says. “A method to consider our platform is as antigreenwashing insurance coverage, as a result of in the event you get attacked on your emissions, we unbundle the information prefer it’s in shrink-wrap and roll it again by means of time on the blockchain. You may click on on it and see precisely the place and the way it was measured, monitored, timestamped, its serial quantity, every part. It’s actually the gold commonplace of proof.”
An unconventional grasp’s
Harple got here to MIT as a serial founder whose corporations had pioneered a number of foundational web applied sciences, together with real-time video streaming expertise nonetheless utilized in functions like Zoom and Netflix, in addition to a number of the core expertise for the favored Chinese language microblogging web site Weibo.
Harple’s introduction to MIT began with a paper he wrote for his enterprise capital contacts within the U.S. to make the case for funding within the Netherlands, the place he was residing together with his household. The paper caught the eye of MIT Professor Stuart Madnick, the John Norris Maguire Professor of Data Expertise on the MIT Sloan College of Administration, who instructed Harple come to MIT as a Sloan Fellow to additional develop his concepts about what makes a robust innovation ecosystem.
Having efficiently based and exited a number of corporations, Harple was not a typical MIT pupil when he started the Sloan Fellows program in 2011. At one level, he held a summit at MIT for a bunch of main Dutch entrepreneurs and authorities officers that included excursions of main labs and a gathering with former MIT President L. Rafael Reif.
“Everybody was tremendous enamored with MIT, and that kicked off what turned a course that I began at MIT known as REAL, Regional Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab,” Harple says. REAL was finally absorbed by what’s now REAP — the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, which has labored with communities all over the world.
Harple describes REAL as a framework automobile to place his theories on supporting innovation into motion. Over his time at MIT, which additionally included collaborating with the Media Lab, he systematized these theories into what he calls pentalytics, which is a technique to measure and predict the resilience of innovation ecosystems.
“My sense was MIT must be analytical and data-driven,” Harple says. “The thesis I wrote was a framework for AI-driven community graph analytics. So, you may mannequin issues utilizing analytics, and you should use AI to do predictive analytics to see the place the innovation ecosystem goes to thrive.”
As soon as Harple’s pentalytics principle was established, he needed to place it to the check with an organization. His preliminary thought for Context Labs was to construct a verification platform to fight pretend information, deepfakes, and different misinformation on the web. Round 2018, Harple met local weather investor Jeremy Grantham, who he says helped him understand a very powerful information are concerning the planet. Harple started to imagine that U.S. Environmental Safety Company (EPA) emissions estimates for issues like driving a automobile or working an oil rig have been simply that — estimates — and left room for enchancment.
“Our method was very MIT-ish,” Harple says. “We stated, ‘Let’s, measure it and let’s monitor it, after which let’s contextualize that information so you may by no means return and say they faked it. I feel there’s a number of fakery that’s occurred, and that’s why the voluntary carbon markets cratered within the final 12 months. Our view is that they cratered as a result of the information wasn’t empirical sufficient.”
Context Labs’ resolution begins with a expertise platform it calls Immutably that constantly combines disparate information streams, encrypts that info, and data it on a blockchain. Immutably additionally verifies the knowledge with a number of third events. (Context Labs has partnered with the worldwide accounting agency KPMG.)
On high of Immutably, Context Labs has constructed functions, together with a product known as Decarbonization-as-a-Service (DaaS), which makes use of Immutably’s information to offer corporations a digital twin of their total operations. Prospects can use DaaS to discover the emissions of their belongings and create a verification or certificates of the quantified carbon depth of their merchandise.
Placing emissions information into context
Context Labs is working with oil and fuel corporations, utilities, information facilities, and huge industrial operators, some utilizing the platform to research greater than 3 billion information factors every day. As an example, EQT, the most important pure fuel producer within the U.S., makes use of Context Labs to confirm the carbon depth of its operational belongings and refine its general GHG emissions mitigation technique. Different clients embody the nonprofits Rocky Mountain Institute and the Environmental Protection Fund.
“I typically get requested how huge the overall addressable market is,” Harple says. “My view is it’s the most important market in historical past. Why? As a result of each nation wants a decarbonization plan, together with instrumentation and a digital platform to execute, as does each firm.”
With its headquarters in Kendall Sq. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Context Labs can also be serving as a check for Harple’s pentalytics principle for innovation ecosystems. It additionally has operations in Houston and Amsterdam.
“This firm is a residing lab for pentalytics,” Harple says. “I imagine Kendall Sq. 1.0 was manufacturing facility buildings, Kendall Sq. 2.0 is biotech, and Kendall Sq. 3.0 shall be local weather tech.”
