The Dutch start-up Jungle, which is part of IST Spin-Off community, has raised funding of €1M. The capital raised completes the artificial intelligence (AI) company’s €3.2M seed stage funding. The investment will be used to accelerate the development of Jungle’s AI platform Canopy, and to invest in the company’s expansion, increasing the energy production of existing renewable energy sources.

“This is another important step in our mission to bring solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) to the renewable energy sector! This investment will accelerate the growth of our team, and will allow to get our product, Canopy, into customers’ hands”, highlights Sílvio Rodrigues, MEEC alumnus and co-founder of Jungle.

The company highlights in a statement “in order to accelerate the energy transition and meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals, renewable energy generation needs to be further optimised and industrial processes need to become more efficient”. Jungle’s mission is to develop the world’s most effective tools to resolve underperformance arising from operational complexity.

With Jungle’s Canopy platform, asset managers can increase the output of large-scale wind and solar energy. “It is an AI-based tool that ensures renewable assets, such as wind turbines, are working properly and with the expected performance”, explains Sílvio Rodrigues. It reduces downtime by detecting impending failures ahead of time and increases power output by detecting under performance issues stemming from curtailment, misalignment and miscalibration. The platform creates a deep understanding of asset performance and component health and extends the lifetime of the asset.

Jungle currently monitors several gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy assets for a growing number of customers. “In addition to asset health monitoring and output optimisation, Jungle also provides power forecasting services”, the statement says.

“With this funding we will strengthen our team in several key areas to accelerate the development and deployment of Canopy”, says Arnoud Kamerbeek, CEO of Jungle. “Our technology can be applied to any asset that uses sensorised electro-mechanical components. We are currently developing applications for the heavy industry and high-tech farming sectors as next horizons for the coming years”, he adds.

The Jungle team is mainly based in Lisbon, Portugal. In addition to Sílvio Rodrigues, the team includes more 7 Técnico alumni.