Clean energy specialist, Solarvest Holdings Bhd has today announced six winners under the Seed Fund round of its inaugural start-up programme, Solarvest Innovation Lab. The programme is set up to unearth transformational ideas with the potential of sparking exponential growth as well as alleviating climate change.
Group CEO of Solarvest, Davis Chong said, “We are pleased by the quality of participants who exhibited firm grasps of the latest technologies while also demonstrating strong commercial potential in real-life applications, particularly pertaining to climate change mitigation. Recently, we had witnessed flash floods at an unprecedented scale which affected regions like the Klang Valley and six other states. To date, more than 125,000 people have been affected along with an unfortunate death toll of some 50 people. Thus, we are encouraged by noble efforts by start-ups who are tackling social and environmental concerns as such. One of which is developing a flood monitoring system with the potential to reduce flood-inflicted injuries and deaths in future events.”
“Meanwhile, another start-up is attempting to put the country’s food wastage issue under control via its new platform. Malaysia is estimated to be generating around 17,000 tonnes of food waste per day, with food ending up in landfills creating harmful greenhouse gases.”
“Moving on, a couple of winners have demonstrated compelling uses of drone technologies. One of them is developing a software platform centred around aerial imagery solutions to conduct site surveys for both solar rooftops and solar farms. There is obvious synergistic capacity here with a technology that could enhance the efficiency of the maintenance process in our field. We believe it could eventually be integrated into our operations and maintenance business and improve value creation for our customers. The other candidate is using similar technology focusing on water- quality monitoring in the aquaculture industry. We see good potential in this given Malaysia’s goal to attaining food self-sufficiency.”
“To attain a net-carbon goal by 2050 in Malaysia, purely increasing renewable energy (“RE”) generation is insufficient. In fact, we believe a complete ecosystem for the RE industry is needed to see real progress. One of the shortlisted candidates is using blockchain technology for the tokenisation of RE assets and contracts, which encourages more transactions and ultimately incentivises higher production and consumption of RE. Further, we also have a start-up that is building an electric vehicle charging system, something that is in line with the Government’s incentive to encourage green vehicle adoption under Budget 2022.”
“In the next six months, we will be working closely with the winners as well as providing them adequate resources to bring their innovative ideas to the next step. The potential of investing in these companies is in line with our efforts to reposition Solarvest from a pure-play solar photovoltaic solutions provider to a clean energy specialist,” Mr Davis concluded.
The winners will each be receiving RM10,000 in cash as well as other perks such as special business workshops, business coaching, and physical workplaces. Start-ups that manage to show a proof-of-concept will be eligible to pitch their ideas in the Accelerator Fund round in June 2022.
The Accelerator Fund round is also open to new participants that already have a proof- of-concept. Shortlisted applicants could potentially get RM100,000 in cash along with other benefits with the goal of taking their ideas to market.
More information about the programme is available here: http://innovationlab.solarvest.my/
