Tobias Engelmeier is well aware that “keep it up” doesn’t work. The global community must change course: towards economically, socially and ecologically sustainable development. With his start-up Village Data Analytics (Vida), Engelmeier wants to help achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that the UN member states set themselves in 2015. The tasks are enormous: These include ending hunger and poverty, health, climate protection, clean energy for everyone, including the developing countries. According to the UN, the world should be a better place than it is today by 2030. But the implementation of this ambitious agenda is progressing slowly, it should be faster, says Engelmeier: “The developing countries are far behind when it comes to electrification, for example.”
So a few years ago, the young entrepreneur was traveling with his family through the villages of Asia and Africa; two of his three children were born in India. Equipped with a pen and a questionnaire, he and his colleagues wanted to find out how remote villages could be supplied with electricity. The independent local power grids are called mini-grids and are intended to bring modest progress to people far from the big cities. They are mostly powered by solar energy. But the work was difficult.
In Papua New Guinea, for example, 40 decentralized power grids were to be created together with the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank. The research took eight months and cost around 250,000 euros. But the result was unsatisfactory. Back in Munich, Engelmeier had a thick wad of paper on the table with information that wasn’t precise enough and often couldn’t be assigned to the right place. The power grids would not be built where the population needs them most. It would be more expensive than necessary. And it is possible that companies, schools or health centers would accidentally not be connected to the power grid.
“We noticed that this manual process doesn’t work and we need digital technology to be able to plan faster and better,” says Engelmeier. “It’s not enough to build just 40 networks to achieve the development goals, there have to be thousands in many countries.”
A mini-grid in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – a solar-powered small power grid.
(Photo: Vida)
The turning point came by chance in 2014: Engelmeier had returned to Munich from his travels. The European space agency ESA sought to talk to the start-up entrepreneur. It had invested many billions of euros to launch its own fleet of earth observation satellites as part of the Copernicus project. “ESA was looking for fields of application for their data – and we had them,” says Engelmeier. The space agency made its satellite data available free of charge, while commercial providers such as Planet or Maxar Technologies would have charged a lot of money for it. Suddenly, inexpensive research into countless remote villages was possible without having to travel to them.
“We then teamed up with Applied AI, an initiative by entrepreneur TUM whose task it is to anchor artificial intelligence in the German economy,” says Engelmeier. This is how the business idea came about: Algorithms from the field of machine learning should help to analyze the satellite images so that they could be used, for example to plan mini-grids. Village Data Analytics was founded. That was three years ago. The software has been on the market since February 2021. “Since then, our business has grown insanely.”
Companies, NGOs or states use information about settlements around the world to find out how many people live there, whether they are already connected to an electricity grid, what the energy requirements are, where roads are located, whether there are conflicts or quiet is. All of this can be read from satellite data. “This is information that developing countries often don’t have,” says Engelmeier. “Investors or planners don’t know where the networks are, they don’t know where people live.”
You can imagine it like a Google Map – only with power grids instead of restaurants
Pakistan, for example, wanted to know how best to plan its power grid. Sierra Leone wants to find out where it could build health centers. And in Mozambique, the question is where to build schools. In addition to governments, Vida’s customers also include organizations such as the World Bank, state banks such as KfW, companies such as the manufacturer of mini-grids, Power-Gen, and many more. Vida has now analyzed 20,000 villages in 22 countries. 1.5 billion dollars have been invested using the software so far.
And the treasure trove of data continues to grow. In addition to the satellite images, there is data from customers, for example from sensors or intelligent measuring systems (smart meters), results from surveys, photos, drone images. All of this information is packed into the digital maps that are the core of Vida. You can imagine it like a Google Map, except that you don’t necessarily search for restaurants and gas stations, but for power grids and settlements. “We believe that we can greatly accelerate the entire development process with our technology,” says Engelmeier. ‘As new satellite images become available all the time, it can also be used to measure the progress that is being made over time.’ This is new and a big step in development policy.
At the same time, there are numerous commercial applications for Vida: coffee companies who want to know which of their small farmers most urgently need help from agronomists in the fight against climate change; real estate developers who want to have an overview of their portfolio; or an oil company that operates several thousand gas stations and small shops in Africa and wants to know which goods sell best there.
So far, Vida has been financed from its own sales, ESA funding and a co-investment from Applied AI, which in return will share in future profits. Now the Vida team is about to take the next step: “We want to build the best technology in order to have the greatest possible effect. We also need commercial markets for this,” says Engelmeier. He sees many new fields of application – from agriculture to the real estate industry to municipalities in developed countries. “We have a lead here that we want to use and expand further.”