Qilo
Meet the Qilo team: Dave Brost, CEO and Brett Adlard, Chief Technology Officer
The electric grid is changing. Despite decades of precedent, the way we use electricity is evolving rapidly, from electric vehicles to solar-powered homes. In the vein of sustainability, this shift to more efficient energy is a needed one. However, what does this mean for utility companies that have been doing certain processes for years, and how can they manage the changing ways that we utilize electricity in a way that cuts costs for both the companies and their consumers? Qilo attempts to answer these questions that are imminently facing utility companies in the United States.
“At the highest level, the grid is changing due to heat pumps, solar power, and extreme weather, and utilities don’t know the best ways to spend their time and resources. We see a lot of utilities companies using educated guesses, and they don’t have a data-driven strategy for continuing to provide affordable and reliable power,” Qilo CEO Dave Brost said.
“For example, if someone is charging their electric vehicle when they get home from work, they could be notified that there is a managed charging program or otherwise better way to integrate that EV into the grid, saving money for that person and the utility company,” he said.
With a background in mechanical and electrical engineering, and career experience in power plant training, utility sales, and energy consulting, Brost discovered that he “wanted to do something different.” In Germany, Brost studied Power Engineering, wrote his masters thesis on an “available dataset that electrical companies have in the U.S.” This dataset is what eventually led to the creation of Qilo.
“At the highest level, the grid is changing due to heat pumps, solar power, and extreme weather, and utilities don’t know the best ways to spend their time and resources. We see a lot of utilities companies using educated guesses, and they don’t have a data-driven strategy for continuing to provide affordable and reliable power.”
At its core, Qilo organizes utility data and uses it to suggest solutions and processes with the goal of helping create a more affordable, more reliable power grid.
“Utilities have data coming from meters, and we help them analyze what changes to the grid look like, and the best ways that they can stay ahead of those changes,” Brost said. “Qilo helps these utility companies leverage AMI data, which is data coming from smart meters, and then we highlight the best opportunities for investment.”
Leveraging this data allows Qilo to make suggestions regarding what types of investments utilities can deploy, as well as the most cost effective ways to do so.
“We’re building a ‘Google Analytics for the grid’, where utilities are able to pinpoint the best ways to market different energy technologies in the most cost effective way,” said Brost.
Qilo’s Chief Technology Officer Brett Adlard has a decade of experience in financial data analytics, energy trading, and portfolio optimization. Adlard’s interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence led him to the University of Chicago, where he studied Applied Data Science. Through a mutual friend in graduate school, Brett was connected with Dave, and they’ve been working on Qilo together since.
Brett Adlard and Dave Brost of Qilo at DistribuTech in Orlando, FL
Initially, Brost’s idea behind Qilo began while he was an “hourly pricing” customer living in Chicago. He was not only a consumer through the program, but also an individual with ten years of experience in the electric industry under his belt. Despite these qualifications, Brost still found the hourly pricing program difficult to fully understand. He was perplexed as to how ordinary people and households could switch to this model, even though it was confusing to someone with his level of experience and education in the industry. This question sparked his research for his master’s thesis, which consequently sparked a discovery.
“There was all this data out there and it wasn’t being utilized at all,” said Brost.
“There was this confluence of technology and models that were changing so fast it hadn’t really impacted the grid yet,” Adlard said. “Historically, smart meter data had just been used for billing, but now we have this technology at our fingertips, like analytics and machine learning and AI. Those things should come together within the electric utility space. There is a key point where you are seeing such a rapid adoption of new devices onto the grid, and utilities need help with these different systems and analyzing all this data so that they can actually incorporate it properly into their grid.”
Qilo attempts to solve these problems with foresight, analyzing data that is available now to provide solutions to issues that may arise in the future regarding power grid use.
Though Qilo primarily targets utilities companies, benefits of their services still remain for the average consumer. The data analyzing and organization that Qilo provides to utility companies can allow more bill transparency for customers. For example, customers could have the ability to see, in advance, how much their bill may change if they switch to a different method for heating their home. This model could provide more clarity to consumers who question what exactly they are being charged for, and how much.
Over the last three years, Qilo has made some impressive strides toward its goals. Brost and Adlard participated in the Launch Blue Pre-Seed Accelerator which helped them understand investors’ motivations and craft Qilo's story in a way that resonated. In the spring of 2022, Qilo was accepted into a utility climate tech accelerator program out of Vermont, where the team connected with their first customer and earned a paid pilot that summer.
“From there, we started building our dashboard for utility companies, for which we received a two-year contract this past summer,” said Brost.
“One goal I have right now is talking to utilities around the country,” Brost said. “Even though we’re starting in the northeast and that’s our customer profile, I think it’s important to talk to utilities around the U.S. to ensure that what we’re building also resonates with them.”
Qilo is working to provide solutions and optimization to processes that affect all of us. With our use of electricity constantly evolving, services like the ones Qilo provides are crucial to the success and efficiency of our power grid and, subsequently, our daily lives.
By: MaKenzie Purdom
Launch Blue nurtures promising startup founders and university innovators through intensive accelerator and incubator programs. Its funding partners are the University of Kentucky: Office of Technology Commercialization, KY Innovation, the U.S. Economic Development Administration, and the National Science Foundation.