Achieving Greater Efficiency: Sustainability in Elaia's Portfolio
As part of the 2024 Elaia Sustainability Report, we’re featuring startups from the portfolio that stand out for their commitment to ESG. Next up, those focusing on doing more using less.
Dive into the full 2024 Sustainability Report at elaia.com/esg.
The simplest way to reduce total human impact is by making current operations more efficient. Some technologies we invest in extend humanity’s technical capacity, enabling us to do more. Others, either by design or by consequence, allow us to achieve the same outcomes using fewer resources. Partnering with companies that meet the demands of the modern economy more efficiently can be the best first step towards sustainability.
Portfolio Case Study: Greenbids
Greenbids is transforming digital advertising by optimising real-time bidding processes to enhance efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. Their AI-driven platform intelligently selects which ad auctions to participate in, minimising unnecessary computational load without compromising campaign performance.
Digital advertising has a significant environmental footprint across Europe, where billions of automated ad auctions take place every day. The energy required to serve, process and bid on these ads contributes considerably to data centre emissions. This invisible infrastructure consumes vast amounts of electricity, often powered by non-renewable sources, making programmatic advertising a notable contributor to digital carbon emissions across the continent.
Greenbids’ technology addresses this by filtering out low-value or low-probability bids before they reach energy-intensive data centres. This approach not only conserves energy but also helps advertisers reduce the carbon footprint of their campaigns.
Portfolio Case Study: Alice & Bob
Alice & Bob is developing a new kind of quantum computer using “cat qubits”, which are specially designed to avoid common errors. They will combine these with a smart error- correcting method called low-density parity-check codes, allowing them to build powerful quantum computers using less parts.
This approach could be more energy-efficient than today’s conventional supercomputers. For example, simulating quantum systems on classical supercomputers can use over 5 megawatts of power, whereas quantum computers are predicted to perform these simulations using significantly less energy. Additionally, current quantum processors have demonstrated the ability to solve certain specific problems dramatically at orders of magnitude faster than classical computers, adding weight to the hypothesis that they may reduce energy consumption by completing tasks more quickly.
Alice & Bob aims to perform computations that might otherwise require millions of qubits, cutting energy and cooling needs hundred folds. This makes future quantum computing not just faster, but potentially greener too.