An Egyptian infrastructure management platform for emerging market water and energy utilities, Pylon has received a seed round of $19 million.
Pylon, which has operations in Egypt and the Philippines, will use a portion of the initial investment to grow into additional emerging regions, such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. This is the company’s first venture round of investment, as Pylon has been bootstrapped since 2017.
According to the CEO, Pylon solves several problems for water and distribution firms.
- For starters, they have a high percentage of unpaid debts and consequently lose out on money.
- Second, they pay a lot of money for energy and deal with water theft.
- Third, technical failures occur on the grid and network, whether due to a lack of maintenance or law enforcement.
These three challenges combine to cause these businesses to lose 40% of their income and prevent them from upgrading their solution or implementing an intelligent infrastructure due to expensive expenses.
Pylon creates solutions for these water, electricity, and power distribution firms to help them become more efficient and stop the bleeding – the company estimates annual losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars across emerging nations. It’s a huge potential to boost those utilities’ total revenues and top line by 50%.
Pylon’s software collects data from the grids, analyzes it, and pinpoints where supply chain theft and losses occur. It then automates the firms’ invoicing procedures, much like telecom providers in these regions have done in the past.
Pylon claims it can assist utility businesses cut losses by 8% while increasing their bottom line with no upfront expenditure. According to the company, customers are not charged an upfront fee for the gear. Its smart metering-as-a-service (SMaaS) approach, on the other hand, makes it simple for cash-strapped utility firms to install its solution on a large scale.
