SAN FRANCISCO — Amit Chatterjee worked for three Silicon Valley start-ups and software company SAP, but he was growing increasingly intrigued by global warming and climate change. The more he delved into the issue, the more he became convinced that there was a way to use software to help tackle the problem.
His idea -- to help companies track and manage their use of energy, water and other resources -- drew the backing of the valley's most prominent venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Today, thanks to Kleiner's $6-million investment, Chatterjee unveils his latest start-up, Hara, which monitors and manages companies' water and energy consumption, and helps them plan ways to mitigate their environmental effects.
Hara's arrival, after operating quietly for the last year and a half, shows how the tech wizards behind many Internet companies are now hard at work building digital solutions to save water, money, energy and maybe even the planet. Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ted Schlein, a Hara board member, calls it "the greening of IT," saying that large corporations are ready to use information technology to make their businesses more eco-friendly because it's the right thing to do and it can save them money.
Venture capitalists, big companies including Cisco Systems Inc. and General Electric Co. and private equity firms have been pumping money into a variety of green IT initiatives, said Ron Pernick, co-founder and principal of Clean Edge Inc., an environmental research and consulting firm. A major push includes an effort to make the nation's power grid "smarter" by using sensors and networking technology so companies can track their electricity use.
These initiatives look at the demand side -- figuring out how people are using energy -- rather than the supply side, such as solar power, to replace the type of energy being generated.
Hara's innovation, CEO Chatterjee said, is giving companies an "organizational metabolism index," much like a fitness trainer gives someone a body mass index. It measures the fossil fuels, water and waste at a company and calculates how to save money.
In the absence of a good software program, companies have been trying to get on top of this by manually entering data into Excel spreadsheets or other systems, said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst for Enderle Group. Or they pay large fees to consulting companies to analyze their carbon footprints.
