Concrete and steel create a lot of buildings--a lot of CO2, too. Now, new EU regulations require builders and developers to disclose just how dirty their building materials are. Many contractors don’t have a clue. Enter Lisa Oberaigner. She’s the cofounder of Emidat--a software start-up that helps manufacturers measure--and reduce--the environmental harm of building materials. To do so, Oberaigner measures the carbon emitted from creating the building materials, and next identifies how and where in the supply chain a manufacturer can reduce it. Her software uses AI to quickly and accurately create these reports. “What we offer today is a platform where the manufacturer can automatically feed in this data from their systems, then the declarations are autogenerated,” she said. “It shortens the time from roughly a year to a week.”
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0:00: Lisa explains her background in climate tech since 2018.
3:00: Explanation of embodied carbon: emissions that happen before using or operating something, like a smartphone's manufacturing energy vs. charging energy. Focus on high mass construction materials (steel, concrete, glass, facades, roofing, flooring).
5:00 The pivot from planners to manufacturers
7:00 How AI is used in Emidot's platform
9:00: Differences in markets (US vs. Europe): Europe has more regulatory pressure and mindset awareness, while the US has been more focused on the "carrot" approach (government funding). Mentions how this is changing.
11:00: What's next for Emidot: Sharing data with customers more easily
12:00 Lisa's perspective as a young founder in the industry: It fits their brand as something new in the industry, but it can also be challenging in a male-dominated space.
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0:00: Lisa explains her background in climate tech since 2018.
3:00: Explanation of embodied carbon: emissions that happen before using or operating something, like a smartphone's manufacturing energy vs. charging energy. Focus on high mass construction materials (steel, concrete, glass, facades, roofing, flooring).
5:00 The pivot from planners to manufacturers
7:00 How AI is used in Emidot's platform
9:00: Differences in markets (US vs. Europe): Europe has more regulatory pressure and mindset awareness, while the US has been more focused on the "carrot" approach (government funding). Mentions how this is changing.
11:00: What's next for Emidot: Sharing data with customers more easily
12:00 Lisa's perspective as a young founder in the industry: It fits their brand as something new in the industry, but it can also be challenging in a male-dominated space.
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com
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Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.
Category
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00The moment that manufacturers actually reduce in the real world, in the long run what happens
00:04is that we actually help create a competition that is based on better environmental data.
00:14Hi, we are here with Lisa Oberajne, the co-founder of EMI.DOT. Thank you so much for joining me today.
00:19Thanks for inviting me. So I'm super excited to talk about everything you're building with this
00:23company. You are in the social impact space, the environmentalism space. Can you give me like a
00:2830-second rundown of who you are and what you're building today? Yeah, so Lisa, as you said, we're
00:33building in the construction material space. We're selling software to construction material
00:37manufacturers. So all things cement, concrete, steel that go into building. And they right now get a lot
00:43of requests from their customers to deliver environmental data on their products. And what
00:48we do is essentially we help them feed in their primary data, we call it. So raw materials, plant
00:53level data like energy use, we do an LCA calculation, life cycle assessment, and then they can use this
00:59to show their customers how the environmental performance of the products is. That is super
01:03interesting. And I feel like so many companies are just recently starting to understand the importance
01:08of all this sort of data. How did you get into this space? Why did you realize that this is something
01:12that companies are looking for today? Yeah, so I've been in the climate tech space since 2018 roughly,
01:19and seen it from different industries and angles. But when you look at all the global greenhouse gas
01:24emissions, then actually buildings and construction is huge. It's like almost 40% of global greenhouse
01:30gas emissions in comparison, like the whole air traffic industry is about 2%. So it's really a huge
01:35lever that we have there. And when we started out, what we found really interesting was that there was a
01:40lot of focus on the operational carbon side of things. So reducing heating, cooling, electricity in
01:46buildings, which makes sense, because that's also cheaper than right, but not so much focus on the
01:51embodied carbon. So all things materials and reducing those emissions. And we thought there must be a
01:56business case because this alone is like roughly 11% of CO2 emissions, CO2E to be precise. And there was still
02:05like I could count the companies in the space probably on one or two hands worldwide. And we saw that there's a lot of
02:11regulation coming up, especially in the European Union, but also a lot of pressure that is on this
02:16embodied carbon junk. Because imagine if you put a building there, the embodied carbon emissions,
02:22so all things material production, transportation, this all happened already. You can still reduce
02:28operational carbon if you reduce the like, for example, coal use in the energy that you're that you're
02:34using in the operational building, but the embodied carbon piece is done. Yeah.
02:38Yeah. So yeah, we found that topic really interesting. And then we just deep dive.
02:42For people who have not heard of embodied carbon before or are not familiar with
02:46carbon sequestration or other parts of this like, very complex carbon environment,
02:52how do you describe embodied carbon to them? It's essentially just if embodied carbon is in
02:56everything, and it just means all the emissions that happen before you start using or before you start
03:02operating something. Okay. So if you take an analogy like a smartphone, you have some energy used when
03:09you charge the smartphone over the lifetime, but the most energy in this product actually comes from
03:15before it's used. So all production of the raw materials essentially that went into this product.
03:21And it's the same with building materials. So an accumulation of all, everything that was used to
03:25create these products. Essentially, yeah. What are the products or the materials that you are really
03:29tracking today? So we're focused on construction materials, especially the high mass and like
03:36heavy construction materials, like for example, steel, concrete, glass, but also like all things,
03:43facades, roofing, and a bit of flooring. And this is also where the highest emission lie
03:49in the building. So this is where you find the highest embodied carbon and where the pressure is first,
03:54of course, as well. How did you turn this into a business from like an idea or these questions that
03:59you were having to yourself about the industry? What were those steps to then turn this into a company?
04:05Yeah. So yeah, we started really high level with just this hypothesis of, okay, 11% of greenhouse gas
04:11emissions globally are quite a bit and we're reducing. So probably some business case will be there.
04:16And then we just went out and I mean, we prototyped pretty soon, but we just talked to a lot of people.
04:22In the end, I think it was over 400 people that we had conversations with. And I still remember
04:26this first time that I tried finding on LinkedIn people who were in my network in sustainable
04:32construction. And I was like searching for keywords. And it was, I think like three or four.
04:37And what year was this? That was in 20, end of 2022. Has this changed since then? Because that's
04:44relatively recently to have, you know, almost no one working on this. I mean, it was more about my
04:48network. Yeah. So my network was just very tiny in this space. I'm like also the people or amount
04:54of people working on this has increased drastically because there's so much demand. But I was just not
05:00very much in this network. So we just had to start out building this network in this space and even
05:04understanding what are the problems. And we talked to a lot of different people along the value chain,
05:10because you could also tackle this problem from an architect side where the building is only being
05:17planned. And it took us roughly five months to go from this first initial idea of architects and
05:24planners towards manufacturers. So that was a long, well, it was not that long, but it was a discovery phase
05:31until we ended up at our current business case. And what was that pivot to show you guys you should go to
05:35the manufacturing kind of point in the chain? Yeah. So we started out with, as I said, with the planners,
05:40with the hypothesis that in the early planning phases of a building, you have a bigger impact.
05:46Because if you choose, am I building out of concrete or out of wood, you have a much bigger lever as
05:51compared to do I build out of this concrete or that concrete. So we thought this is where the biggest
05:57pressure and the biggest willingness to pay also lies. And we talked a lot of them and it was more nice
06:02to have. So we said, okay, this is not it. And we shifted to a pitch where we said, okay, we just
06:08aggregate all the material data out there, all the environmental material data, and we make it
06:12available via API. So we were selling to software providers in the construction industry, we always
06:17had this embodied carbon in construction focus. But we were then trying to pitch that to them. And this
06:23was the first time early 23, where we felt a bit of a pool, and they really wanted to like integrate the
06:29data and use it for their customers. But with the software providers who we're talking to,
06:34they still, for them, it was still an exploration kind of thing. And the willingness to pay was always
06:39dependent on their customers paying, obviously, right, it's also a tiny market. But what we did learn
06:45when we pitched this was that a lot of manufacturers started approaching us. And they said, first, how do I
06:50get my data in there, because I want it to end up at my customer. And even more important, how do I even
06:55create this data? Because currently, it's a huge pain. And when you're in this exploration phase,
07:00and you hear huge pain, that's exactly what you're searching for. This is where you drill down.
07:06And so what exactly do you guys offer to these clients and customers today?
07:10Yeah. So initially, we just started out with them saying it's a really lengthy process. They
07:16currently take six to 12 months to get a verified environmental product declaration. That's the
07:23the term for it, EPD. And it takes them a long time. But it's also really expensive,
07:28because there's a lot of different parties involved. So usually, they collect the data,
07:32the manufacturer themselves, they give it to an external consultancy,
07:35they then create the declaration, this declaration is then signed off by a third party verifier, and
07:40that is then published by yet another so called program operator. And along this value chain, you lose
07:45a lot of time and money. And now what we did, or what we offer today is, we built a platform where
07:51the manufacturer can automatically feed in this data from their systems,
07:55then the declarations are auto generated. So the consultants role changes a little bit,
08:00they help the manufacturer feed in data, but they're not involved in the creation of the
08:04declarations anymore. And this is also the only way that you can do this for large product portfolios.
08:09And then this piece is like the whole platform is being verified. So it's not one by one product
08:15anymore. But instead, the the tool is verified. So we can immediately output verified data. And this
08:20then shortens the time from roughly a year to a week. And it's much cheaper as well. So for the
08:26manufacturer, the pitch is just it's cheaper and faster. Yeah, definitely. So you are working on
08:31making this faster, more efficient, ultimately cheaper for your clients. How does AI come into play?
08:37Because I know the AI is a big component of the platform that you're building. So can you walk me
08:41through that a little bit? Yes, it's actually I mean, it's helpful, but it's not the main component
08:46yet. I think there's a lot of opportunities there. But the main or the core piece of what we're doing
08:52is taking this data from the manufacturer, like recipes of products, supplier data, and also their
08:59energy and water use in the plant. And we match this with so called background data. So this piece is
09:06still like very much human owned, and it's really hard to automate with AI. But there are a couple of
09:10pieces along this chain where it can help. So one is this data collection piece, there's large
09:15amounts of unstructured data where you can use AI to structure it better in the way that we need it
09:20for creating the LCA lifecycle assessment, which is part of then this verified document. And then
09:25you can also use it on the data user side. So for example, if you get a building plan, like a 3D
09:32building model, then you can match the material list with the environmental data of the specific
09:37product. And then the step in between of where you can like this EPD is still a very text heavy
09:43document. So creating this text is AI supported. But the biggest piece I would say is really making
09:49use of the existing data, there's roughly 150,000 EPDs on the market at the moment. And it's really
09:55helpful to extract the data from that because it's usually PDFs. And then for example, build industry
10:02benchmarks, make it easy to understand how many declarations are in each product vertical. So
10:08this is what we use it mostly at the moment. That totally makes sense. You mentioned at the
10:12beginning that there were some regulations that you were seeing, you know, that that might make
10:15something like this useful. I think that and as we've been talking about, there's been so much kind
10:20of movement in this environmentalism space. Why is what you're doing so critical today? Like when
10:25you're either pitching to investors, pitching to clients, pitching to people that you meet,
10:29what is your why of why Amidat is so critical right now?
10:33Yeah, I mean, that's always a big question in the environmental space, right? And initially,
10:37we're really frustrated. Because selling to project developers, it felt like we're trying to push
10:43something into the market that is actually not like urgent or demanded. It's more like a, yeah,
10:48I know, I need to do this is kind of annoying. With manufacturers, it has really shifted because they
10:54get this request not from regulation, but from their clients. So for them, it's really a selling
10:58point, they get this request from the planners who choose the material. And then they want to see
11:03environmental data for the products, usually because they have some kind of interest, either
11:08they get more favorable loans, or credits, credits, sometimes they want to achieve voluntary building
11:15certificates to then sell their building more expensively. And sometimes they're within countries
11:20like Norway, UK actually is quite, quite ahead here. And they set upper limits for CO2 emissions per
11:26building already. And then the developer, the planner needs to get this data from the manufacturer.
11:32And the manufacturer just sees, oh my god, I have like this six digit deal that I want to close,
11:40and I need this data to be able to do that. So they have an urgency and a willingness to pay for it.
11:45So from your guys, and this is really something that you are helping clients in other ways, and
11:50almost like as a result of it, you're helping the environment as well, correct?
11:54Yeah, I mean, the result is, the result is really because always, if you sell a software solution,
12:00you're not solving the core problem directly, because the core problem is a physical one,
12:06we're trying to reduce an atom in the air. So that's not something you can solve with software,
12:11really. But what we do is, or what our key argument also was to be passionate about this,
12:18is that the moment that manufacturers actually reduce in the real world,
12:22they should also be able to show this to their customer, and right now charge a green premium,
12:27so get a bit of support to actually implement these changes. And in the long run, what happens
12:33is that we actually help create a competition that is not only based on price, but also on
12:39better environmental data. And this is what we're achieving, really.
12:43Totally. You have spent time in Boston at MIT, you've been around Europe, different places,
12:49either living or working. What would you say is the difference in these different markets of how
12:54adaptable people are to these new technologies, the environmental missions that you guys are on?
12:59How have these different markets kind of received what you guys are building today?
13:03Yeah, so both my co-founder and I were in the US. And it would have been a pretty clear option for us to also,
13:10I started Emidat when I was still in Boston. And we decided against it, actually, although it's a super
13:16favorable startup ecosystem, because the pressure and also the awareness, I think, is a bit higher in Europe
13:23at the moment. It's, of course, regulatory pressure that is driving it, but also a little bit
13:27the mindset of the people. So very often we talk to manufacturers where it's not regulation that is
13:33pressuring them. It's just the managing director who has their kids at home who are like, what are you
13:38doing for the environment? You're in one industry where you have one of the largest impacts. So what are you
13:43doing? And then they just set this as a strategic goal. And I think this is a bit different in the US right now.
13:49It's very much driven by whenever you're trying to reduce carbon emissions, it's like a carrot and stick
13:55problem. And in Europe, we're doing both, I would say, but more on the stick side. And in the US,
14:03the approach has been very much on the carrot side. So you could, for example, get government funding
14:08if you would do environmental data for your products. This is now obviously also changing. So
14:13there's still some states like California, also the Boston area region that is driving this. And it's
14:19also big tech really driving demand. So Microsoft, Google will go out there and say, if I put my data
14:25center here, then I want to have environmental data for the materials that I build in. And this is
14:31mostly the driver. But this is, of course, only working for the for the for the companies that are
14:37thinking ahead and not so much for this long tail of the whole industry. And in Europe, it's pretty
14:43similar, only that this thinking ahead piece is probably already a bit bigger. But yeah, you have
14:504.6 million in funding, correct? Roughly, I think it's 4.5. Okay, okay. So you have 4.5 million in
14:58funding. How did you sell this to investors? I mean, investors like revenue. That's, that's a short
15:04answer. So it's really just proving when we started out in this space. And with our first angel round,
15:10it was 2023. It was horrible funding environment. And then we went in with we do sustainability construction.
15:16I had people telling me sustainability and construction doesn't work like nobody cares,
15:21forget about it. And we thought there needs to be something because it just doesn't match up
15:26the targets that we set ourselves and then the where we are currently. So something obviously needs
15:32to happen here. But eventually now for the bigger seed round, it was really just being able to show
15:39that where we thought there was a business case, there is actually a business case and manufacturers are
15:44willing to pay for this. Definitely. What is next for emidat? What are you guys working on right now
15:48that you're excited about for 2025? Yeah, so I mean, initially, we started out on creating the data
15:54because we realized there is not enough of it. Now, the interesting question is, what do you now do with
16:00this data? So one piece that I've, I've mentioned is sharing the data with the customers. So there's many
16:06different ways that customers want to see it. For example, if it goes to project specific declarations,
16:12it almost becomes like a like an environmental offer, environmental quote next to the financial
16:18quote. So this is something that we're really excited about making it even easier to use on the
16:23customer side. But then also internally, because the moment that you realize, well, okay, now I have
16:29this data use, you also see the levers where you can reduce and we have like our forward thinking
16:35customers, they really start using this data to also improve their products. And that's really cool
16:41because in Europe, it's already on the horizon when they need to report. So they often work with us
16:47to say, okay, I now want these two, three years before the regulation kicks, where I can still
16:52improve my product. And then when I need to make it completely transparent, I want to be the best in
16:56the market. And this is where we're working on quite heavily right now. So they can actually start
17:02using this data and improving their products. That is super exciting. There is so much that you guys
17:06have to look forward to. My last question for you is as a young founder in this space,
17:11what do you see as what do you see your age meaning right now? Is it a benefit to be young? Is it a
17:16disadvantage? How do you go about you know, these conversations that you're in these pitches that
17:20you're in the brand that you're building knowing that you are one of the young ones in the industry?
17:24Yeah, that's definitely correct. It's actually when you when you're at these manufacturer conferences,
17:30is actually a big topic for them, because they don't get young people excited about their products.
17:37Who in our age wants to join a concrete manufacturer where it's dusty and dirty?
17:44And that's kind of a pity, because it's super exciting. And I love our customers,
17:49but they're often not the youngest. And they're struggling to find people who are younger joining
17:55their companies. So I would say it's for our brand, it fits quite well, because we come in with this
18:02new topic that is pretty big at this point, which is sustainability and construction materials.
18:07We also come in as a woman. So very often, you know, it's a room of old white guys.
18:14Yeah. And then it's just it fits the brand of okay, we're now doing something new. And this will
18:20like be a big part in the industry. So let's talk. So I don't perceive it as a disadvantage.
18:25But it's also not easy sometimes, because this bro-y, okay, now let's drink until four in the
18:30morning and make deals, that is just different. And part of it is also finding people who then
18:37like bond with different people. But luckily also on the manufacturer side. So in our customers,
18:42a lot of the sustainability initiatives are led by younger people and by women. So there in our
18:50customer base, I would say it's almost 50 50. So there you you do see that I can like I connect
18:57with some customers and then my team connects with other customers. So it's actually it's actually good.
19:02That's super cool. I'm so excited to see all that you guys continue to do in this space. Thank you so
19:06much for sitting down with me today. Thank you.