AMEE, a London based startup with an API which has the grand aim of measuring the world’s energy consumption – and therefore Carbon Footprint – has secured an undisclosed Series A financing from O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Union Square Ventures and UK-based Angel The Accelerator Group.
Launched in 2005, AMEE combines measurement, calculation, profiling and transactional systems, representing emissions data from 150 countries and regions. The idea is pretty simple. Act as a neutral data aggregation platform. Although it has potential competitors in the form of Oracle, SAP, IBM and others, increasingly some are ditching their proprietary front end efforts and just using AMEE’s open source API to build their own tools on top.
The advantages are many. AMEE is a neutral clearing house for data about energy consumption. It anonymizes the incoming data from clients so that others can re-use it imaginatively. The whole project is open source and revenues come from annual or monthly service fee based on varying scales.
As a result, AMEE could be compared to an OpenID system for your carbon footprint. Some have also called it a kind of ‘FireEagle of energy’. There is even a comparison with data portability. So for example in the future you could calculate you carbon footprint on your Dopplr account (which uses AMEE’s API), then sync that with your home energy use on a Google gadget.
This is important as energy and carbon is becoming a global currency which governments and companies are starting to trade on. President Elect Obama’s forward-looking Federal Cap & Trade statements, which cover carbon trading, are encouraging signs and last week the UK put in place it’s own Climate Change Act.
Indeed, AMEE’s platform is already in use by two UK government departments, Morgan Stanley, Google, Radiohead, the Irish Government, Sun Microsystems and a number of others.
And what does AMEE stand for? It’s an acronym for “Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine”.