Using tech to save the planet

"IF YOU HAD all the energy data in the world, what would you do?" Gavin Starks asked in 2007.

"I was working with various charities," says Starks, who was then managing director of leading online music distributor Consolidated Independent, "and I got involved in how do carbon markets work, and I realised it was not exactly scientific and definitely not Web, so there was a very obvious pattern recognition for me around what I had seen happen in the 1990s with completely new datasets coming to market and new devices and new demands." The collisions between telephone companies and the new Internet world were precursors of what's happening now. "These are collisions between real incumbents like the utilities', networks, telcos, and goverments," he says. "A lot of this is policy-led."

Starks did degrees in astrophysics and electronic music and then worked for a time at Joddrell Bank where, in 1994, he set up its first website. That effort got him a berth in the start-up team at Virgin Net. He put Virgin Radio online and helped set up the first online Virgin Megastore. He founded his first company, Tornado, in 1999 to do media streaming, and sold it in 2003 to Servecast, now part of Level 3. He made CI, which he calls "the DHL of digital music" into a still-profitable company. CI catalogues more than 2 million tracks, and if you've ever bought a song online, be it from Itunes or Emusic, it has probably passed through CI's service.

In 2007, Starks set up AMEE (Avoidance of Mass Extinction Engine) with the UK government as his first client. The goal: to provide a neutral aggregator that could pull together all of the standards, all of the methods used to do calculations, and all of the raw data to provide the most detailed and accurate picture possible of how we consume our planet's resources.

AMEE, he says, has a lot in common with CI: both are data aggregators. They are also both commercial enterprises. "If you're trying to create change on the scale that we're trying to change things, there are two approaches," he says. "You can bash your head against a poorly funded charity and try to make the difference and it's a very hard slog. But why not use the tools we have to make a for-profit to drive change?" To work on a global scale, he says, "you need money and people to grow, and we wanted to create change as quickly as possible. So to grow and drive that there's only one framework that puts you under that kind of pressure and that's venture capital funding."

In December 2008, AMEE secured series A funding from Tim O'Reilly's AlphaTech Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and The Accelerator Group. In the following six months, the company doubled its staff to 18 and its client base expanded to 40 including Morgan Stanley, Logica, various charities, and local councils. By the summer of 2009 it had sent out 500 developer keys to its platform.

The recession, Starks says, "is good for us."

It has gone on expanding since then, A couple of weeks ago, Amadeus Capital Partners led a $5.5m series B financing for AMEE; participants included existing AMEE investors O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, to be used to expand AMEE's reach.

"There's been a sea change in everyone saying yes, we need to be more sustainable." Starks says although the focus is on carbon-trading and, in the UK, the carbon reduction commitment that started affecting thousands of businesses this year, it's not just about being green, but sustainability. "We are heading for peak resource in a number of areas - peak oil, water, copper - there are estimates that we have only 20 to 30 years of copper left." Of course, the supply hasn't evaporated; earth will still have all that copper, embedded in old wiring, for example. The reuse economy and transformation of products and services is part of the change needed. "Part of AMEE's approach is we're talking to the biggest multinationals and the smallest charities - we're democratising the space and lowering the barriers to entry."

These days, AMEE's science team doubles the number of models in AMEE every three months, including codifying all the major greenhouse gas standards, their computational models, and over 100,000 emission factors. The effort has allowed the service to launch a beta search engine to make it easier to find information and apply it.

"We need this to happen on Internet time," says Starks. µ