As we discussed our blog post about Social Impact, ESG Investments have been attracting our attention for more than 5 years. Society is more conscious about environment as “E” one of ESG now. Environmental concerns are taken seriously and some entrepreneurs have already started to take step to solve environmental problems of our planet. With the advancements in technology such as the ones in IoT and machine learning, we, as human beings, are much more powerful to tackle this issues than ever. Breeze Technologies from Germany is a technology leader for air quality sensors, air quality data and air quality analytics software. The company leverages the internet of things and artificial intelligence to help cities and businesses create better clean air action plans and a more liveable environment. Breeze Technologies was founded in 2015 and has been recognised as one of the most promising European startups by the European Parliament and the European Commission. Breeze's founders have been listed as Forbes 30 Under 30 and received numerous awards, including from the German Federal President. Co-founder and CEO Robert Heinecke told us about their pathway.

Tell us about your team.
Robert Heinecke, CEO, was an international strategy consultant and had the idea for Breeze when working in Istanbul during a period of heavy smog. He regularly speaks on the topics of smart cities and air quality.

Sascha Kuntze, CTO, had four years of experience in IT consulting and lead development before co-founding Breeze.

Haris Sefo, Head of Science, has an extensive network in the international research community and has been conducting environmental research for more than five years.

Hannah Bettenhausen, Head of Operations, has been working with GIZ and the German federal ministries and has extensive experience in international governmental collaboration.

The rest of Breeze's team comes from diverse backgrounds ranging from engineering to arts and design. Robert and Sascha are both Forbes 30 Under 30.

When and why did you found your startup?
In winter 2014, Breeze Technologies co-founder Robert Heinecke was exposed to heavy smog for the first time while working in Istanbul. Suffering health impacts like headaches, a burning throat and watering eyes himself, he studied current strategies cities use to measure and mitigate urban air pollution. Soon a picture became clear: Today's decision makers do not have enough data to both track air quality extensively enough, as well as to judge the effectiveness and efficiency of mitigation strategies. The idea for Breeze Technologies was born: low-cost sensors combined with a smart data platform automatically analysing the gathered data. Breeze Technologies was then founded in February 2015.

What are your key and unique features?
Thanks to Breeze Technologies' proprietary cloud calibration technology, the startup is able to provide air quality data 1.000X cheaper than current industry solutions with comparable data quality and accuracy. They are able to measure and provide indoor & outdoor air quality data in a combined solution; generating additional insights and data. Breeze not only measures air quality, but also automatically recommend the most efficient and effective clean air actions from a catalogue of more than 3.500+ solutions, based on AI.

Tell us about the numbers that matter to you.

Breeze Technologies combines data from more than 13,000 global air quality monitoring sites in their Environmental Intelligence Cloud, and makes this data also available to be integrated into other business solutions. For instance, Finnish Proximi.io uses data from Breeze's platform to provide a navigation app for citizens to get from A to B and expose themselves to as little pollution as possible on the way.

What are your plans for next year and next 5 years?
We believe that distributed networks of small-scale environmental sensors can enable a fully-new approach to understand our environment. We are the first company to facilitate the full lifecycle of environmental analytics: with our own air quality sensors, a cloud platform for data assessment and action implementation and a partner network able to conduct the necessary interventions to sustainably improve indoor and outdoor air quality.

Based on this data, we will enable a completely new hosts of applications and business models based on environmental data.

More about Breeze Technologies
Co-founder: Robert Heinecke
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