Urbio is an EPFL spin-off developing software to help energy providers plan the energy transition globally. Its product, based on EPFL research, generates highly customized proposals for individual buildings or entire cities and streamlines collaborative design processes. The company says its software reduces ten-fold the time spent on design tasks compared with current manual workflows that rely on scattered data and spreadsheets. Urbio targets building-scale and city-scale planning, addressing fragmented tools and manual processes used today. The team plans to use new capital to grow the team, reach customers faster, and deliver a stronger product to support the energy transition. The company recently closed an oversubscribed funding round to support that growth. Urbio develops the first "generative design" software for planning and designing efficient energy technologies for buildings, blending human analytical strengths with advanced AI algorithms. The platform generates optimized plans using hundreds of criteria such as CO2 emissions, technical parameters for renewables, renovation rates, energy prices, and stakeholder costs. Initial applications show design time can be reduced by a factor of ten while improving solution cost and carbon-efficiency by about 15%. Urbio streamlines data reconciliation, automated system design, and feasibility evaluation for individual buildings or entire municipalities in a single platform. The technology was developed from two doctoral theses at EPFL and, since its 2020 founding, has been applied in eight commercial pilot projects and has received multiple grants and awards. To support rapidly growing customer demand and consolidate its Swiss market position, the company has secured external funding and plans to hire additional staff soon. The team of three co-founders combines expertise in human-computer interaction, computational methods, energy planning, and large-scale energy project management.

Total raised

$2M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Sep 2021