(upbeat music) >> For years on the queue, we've talked about the benefits of the cloud going beyond IT cost savings. Sure. You can move your workloads into the cloud and minimize the so-called undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT equipment and deployment and management. And of course increased agility is often the number one benefit customers site from the cloud. But increasingly, the value of the cloud is being seen as applying that agility to change an organization's operating model. This drives business value that can be orders of magnitude greater than savings on tech labor costs. And one of the more interesting examples we found, is using the cloud, data and software technology to find, and flexibly source distributed energy resources so that clean energy, can be delivered efficiently. Hello, and welcome to the startup showcase on the cube brought to you by AWS. We're very excited to have two exacts on from AutoGrid. Wait until you hear about the innovations that they're driving and the problems that they're solving around, some of the world's most pressing problems. Amit Narayan is here. He's the CEO of auto-graded Rajeev Singh is the chief technology officer gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. >> Okay, so heard my summary Amit. Maybe you could add some color about AutoGrid. What's your story? >> Yeah, I mean, undoubtedly climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time, and we're already seeing extreme weather events whether these are wildfires in California, are extreme cold events in Texas, last two weeks. As we tackle the climate change through renewables, this whole volatility challenge that we are seeing is only going to become even more pressing. So we at AutoGrid provide software that creates, a virtualization layer, just like you doing in the cloud world, with hardware around all kinds of energy assets, whether these are your EVs in the homes, our batteries are distributed solar panels. And then we apply intelligence from software, to coordinate and orchestrate all of these assets. So you can think of us as a autopilot for the grid, and our technology is called virtual power plants. Which allows us to harness, the power from all these distributed energy resources. >> Yeah. I was going to say you're essentially creating, a virtual power plant. That's amazing of aggregating these distributed resources. I mean, it sounds very logical but it also sounds non-trivial, its a transformative idea. What exactly is a virtual power plant? I mean, how does that all work? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about how the grid was designed by Edison and Tesla, they really never envisioned a world where you will have a two way flow of power, not just from generator to the consumers, but potentially from the consumers back to the generators. And certainly they didn't really design the grid to incorporate this amount of renewables, which can be intermittent and volatile. So as we are now transitioning to this new energy world, we have to rethink the entire grid architecture, and reinvent how this control system works. But fortunately for us, unlike Edison and Tesla we have some really powerful tools at our disposal namely the internet and the cloud, and these tools do allow us to rethink how we connect all these different assets and we optimize them. And in a way, we are now rebuilding the grid outside in where if you have a battery in your home, not only can it power your own home when power is out, it can actually provide power back to the grid or to your neighbors. And so with this onslaught of DES, we think that we are living in the most exciting times, since Edison and Tesla in terms of how we are going to transition to a sustainable grid. And we think that our software, can play a foundational role in accelerating that transition. >> Lets stick here the bi-directional flow. It's so simple, but genius. Rajeev, maybe you could talk about the tech behind AutoGrid. I mean the secret sauce, lies I think in that whole flexibility management system but there's data involved, probably a fair amount of computer science. Maybe you could explain it more detail. >> Yeah. just as Amit mentioned now, when we started AutoGrid, we had the luxury of, cloud computing a massive scale, at that massive scale and AutoGrid, what we've been able to do is pull together a cloud native computing. They lost the city, the scale, with cutting edge AI and machine learning, as well as all of the dispatch, and command and control technologies, that are all in one platform. And all of them have to come together, to be able to manage and orchestrate, these a massively distributed energy resources. I mean, these could be small, you know batteries or solar panels, et cetera. So gone are the days of large generators that could be managed with smaller compute now because the sheer number of DER's, you need a new paradigm to be able to manage this. And this is really what is under the hood, that constitutes our virtual power plant. >> Rajeev Can you talk a little bit more about your scale model? I mean, how are you able to do this effectively without imploding, or hitting walls? >> Yeah, so obviously, we've been on AWS for about ten years now. And even prior to that, we had the previous company loaded with AWS. So that kind of gave us a glimpse off the sheer scale of compute, that is available to us on tap, if required. So that was quite comforting, because when we did back one of the calculations on the amount of data, that's coming in through IOT industrial IOT from all the distributed energy resources, the amount of processing required for real-time computing as well as, the sheer variety of the other, we have to tackle in in various geographies around the world. AWS made it happen just because having regions, across the globe, we done in, I believe six or seven different AWS regions. We cover a four continents, twelve plus countries. So just because cloud computing was there, we were able to ramp up the solution, very quickly. Now, one thing we are a big believers in is that you only learn by doing, and the only way to learn, is to run production systems. And when we started, of course we didn't do everything right. But we quickly learned we adapted, we scaled, and we kept on scaling. And this is where we are right now. >> Interesting. That's like Andy Jassy says there's no compression algorithm for experience. We know it well. One more for Rajeev, and I want to come back. With AutoGrid tapping, all these energy sources, you got a pretty major threat surface. How are you dealing with security? >> Yeah, we don't talk a lot about our security posture for obvious reasons. Some of the underlying principles are in reducing the blast radius. It should be quite familiar to people who work in security. The use of wide variety of best of the breed security tools, including, and or the past few years. In fact, past five, six years, AWS itself has rolled out a number of security managed services, which are included. But on top of that views, other solutions as well. And it's all designed in layers, with proper segregation, and we have variety of security certifications. One of the most, the one that we're proud of is we are one of the few if not the only NERC solution SAS solution in this domain on AWS. And it's just a culmination of using security by layers. And reducing the blast radius. >> Yeah. Makes sense. And let's turn to some customer use cases. What are some of the main problems, that your customers come to you to solve? How are you approaching them? Maybe you could address that and add some color. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as Rajeev mentioned. There is a lot of deep tech in the platform, and the optimization complexity, grows exponentially with the number of assets. And as you go from a gigawatt scale power plant and you want to get the same power from Tesla power walls. let's say, for every generator you're replacing it with more than two hundred thousand mini generators. And if the complexity grows exponentially. it's far beyond what the current algorithms can handle. So a lot of customers come to us solve their technical challenges. But even beyond that, the whole complexity of transacting, with small generators is very high, and that our business model issues that we help our customers solve. So the whole energy industry, has been designed to have transactions, between very large generators and utilities, but very few of these transactions. And now when you are talking about DER's, you're having millions of transactions with very small entities and maybe even homeowners, back to the utilities. So neither the utilities, have the capability today, to have these transactions, nor the asset owners, and operators, have the capability to go back and have the transactions of the utilities. So we sort of act as an intermediary, and we provide a one-stop shop, for fleet owners and operators. And we say that if you work with us, we will help you monetize your assets, and get more value from these assets, by interfacing with utilities by interfacing with energy markets which can get very complex. >> I love this. I mean, everybody's winning here. Rajeev. I want to come back to the to the cloud a little bit. You talked about, you've been able to AWS for ten years and then even before that, you've got deep experience. I mean. I can't imagine, how you would do this without the cloud. I mean, maybe it could be a really heavy complicated list lift. I mean, you've seen the AWS cloud evolve over time. It's gone way beyond, of course, compute and storage brought in a lot of machine learning capabilities on and on. And I mean, how are you leveraging that evolution? Those zillion features that AWS puts out every year at reinvent. I mean, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah. So of course, when we started, we used it as an infrastructure provider, you know provided us compute networking, security firewalls, et cetera, just on tap. There's very good. Got us started. Then we started leveraging a lot more managed services, that AWS offered, that allowed us to run. For example, variety of databases right to data stores, in a managed fashion, with a very small startup. You're always, running lean. So that helped us with a small team, of system engineers and engineers, back from engineers to be able to put together and run these systems around the globe, just because enablers was responsible, for managing the services. We always keep an eye on. And one thing we love about AWS is the amount of innovation, that they quickly put into production. So, we're always keeping an eye on, what's coming out. And over the years, it has been quite nice to us in some ways, we directly talk to the solution architects, they tell us what's coming, what should be used, what we should not use in what's in production ready What's not. So that level of kind of deep engagement, really helps us. Kind of keep abreast of the innovations that are constantly being rolled out on AWS. And we keep kind of incorporating those into our platform and making it more and more capable. The one thing I also would like to say, is that to be able to aggregate capacity, from all these DER's, it has to be done in a cost effective fashion. So, this is where AWS helps us with running, last a city at the service level. All the microservices can scale independently. So we don't have to have this massive monolith, and across the globe, we don't need to have, fifty of those to be running. And that's going to add up to a massive cost. So we are able to scale, just the portions of the infrastructure just in time when we need it. And that also helps us greatly, in having a cost effective solution, for our customers. >> That's actually great. That's great. So that granularity is important, for you to have fine grain control of your costs. A lot of people sometimes question that granularity that AWS provides, because it does add a level of complexity, but you guys can deal with complexity. You know, one of the things that we haven't talked about I wonder if we could touch, on it is data. I mean, this is the data flow. I'm imagining the data flow, and the metadata and the decisions that you have to make are are quite complex. Can you address that a little bit? I mean, you guys got to be pretty, sharp data walks. >> Yeah. So the people that we have at the company, including myself have come from a billing lodge, high performance and high large enterprise systems, previously from airlines, Ford motor company or pharmaceuticals. In any system, where we are making a lot of decisions. The first thing you have to do is data integration. And again this is something that you just learn by doing and having done it across the globe with a variety of the DER, systems UVS, you name it. We have to pretty much done one of everything, and of course, and be very quickly abstract and learn, if you do something twice, we abstract it and make it into a library. So that the next time around it's just a simple turn-on switch. So it's no secret sauce there you just learn by doing and you kind of constantly abstract and you expand the solution. >> That's great. let's close. The other thing. We really haven't talked much about your company. Maybe you could, add some. whatever you want to to share, metrics. I mean you must be growing, head count, or whatever you're comfortable sharing. If you could just give us, a little glimpse of of the company. >> Yeah, absolutely. We have been around for close to ten years now. We are based in Silicon Valley. We have multiple locations. Our second primary location is in India. Today We are operating in over twelve countries. We have close to five thousand megawatts of distributed energy acids, that we actively control manage. This includes, everything from a thermostat in the home, to very large scale, wind and solar farms, as well as large scale batteries. EVs as a new emerging category. And, we work with a variety of partners. AWS has been one of our founding partners, on day one, you talked about data. We were the first ones to realize how much data we were going to get from all of these assets. And the current systems will not scale. So we made the decision on day one to be on cloud. And that was foundational year. I just want to say that over the last year or so, we have I think collectively as a society realized how individual actions, impact the overall society. And I think we are really at a great inflection point right now, where if we can harness this newly developed consciousness and awareness to accelerate, our transition to new energy, away from fossil fuel, we can really solve what I think is the biggest challenge that we face as a society going forward. >> Yeah. Micro actions that actually have a huge impact. And so I guess, that's kind of of where you see this heading in the future both the general market, your business. I mean presumably, you've been around a while, maybe you'd welcome competition to really solve this problem. Right? >> I think we are in the same fight. We are all working towards the same goal, of having a clean cheap reliable energy. And we would welcome as much support as we get to build momentum for this absolutely >> Its like the Pharma companies cheering each other on for the, for the vaccine. Again, guys super interesting business solving real problems really thanks gentlemen for coming on the program and we wish you well in the years ahead. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's really been our pleasure. Thank you for watching the AWS startup showcase on the cube. I'm Dave Volante.