Founded: October, 2015
Founders: Haggai Hofland, Mike Goldstein
and Noam Noy
Employees: 15
Capital raised: $6.5 million
Artificial Intelligence (AI); we have all heard about it, some of us are excited by its potential applications while others are terrified by the thought of it taking over our lives. The one thing that is shared in our perception of AI is that we don’t think of it as having the potential to save the planet. Well, we are all wrong.
Raycatch (https://www.raycatch.com/), founded by a group of computer scientists, physicists, and electrical engineers, offers an AI diagnostics technology for solar energy, that enables automated and optimized data-driven management of solar assets.
In simpler terms, Raycatch provides solar field owners and operators the ability to maximize the energy yield/ROI from any given plant, and thereby maximize revenues. The potential effects on the environment and the planet’s energy resources are tremendous.
The company is backed by some remarkable investors, including Explore Ventures, Maverick Ventures (Israel), BayWare Ventures, Royal DSM Ventures and Rio Ventures, among others.
Existing management tools for solar energy plants are outdated, relying on decisions to be made by the human eye. The complexity of the processes taking place, together with rapidly changing environmental conditions, lead to noisy data, making the identification of useful operational insights virtually impossible. To tackle this, plant owners and managers resort to pre-scheduled maintenance and cleaning sessions. As well as being highly inefficient, this leads to very low responsiveness to problems that occur in real time.
Raycatch applies AI and signal processing techniques to reduce noise levels in the data, thereby identifying problems and providing actionable insights that are data driven, to the plant owners.
The Raycatch team has developed a set of AI algorithms that run on the existing data of the solar assets. These allow them to understand where the problems are and what needs to be done in order to optimize the plants. They do this using software only, no extra hardware needed, which of course makes their distribution that much easier.
Raycatch has helped solar asset owners boost their plants yield by an average of 3.5%, which might sound like a low number, but in the world of solar energy, is very meaningful.