Buildings represent 40% of all US energy consumption and cause 35% of carbon emissions. From office towers and warehouses to small foot-print restaurants and distribution hubs, Engage corporate partners have tens of thousands of buildings. Our partners are looking for innovative solutions in areas like advanced HVAC, onsite energy generation and storage, energy efficiency, sustainable building materials, and automation and monitoring.

Engage corporate partners, like most large enterprises, face a range of operational realities. For example, the vast majority of building stock is already in place so retrofit opportunities are usually much larger than new construction solutions. Smarter building startups whose solutions plug into existing supply chains, budgets, and capital allocation processes usually see faster uptake and adoption than solutions with big “green premiums.” Solutions that impact hundreds of millions of corporate costs or revenue are more exciting than solutions impacting a few million or less.

Our existing investments in smarter building leaders demonstrate Engage’s commitment and experience in this segment. Examples include:

VECKTA helps enterprises identify, design, and procure onsite energy solutions that save money, increase resilience, and decrease carbon emissions in commercial buildings.

Blue Frontier has created a groundbreaking cooling and dehumidification technology that slashes selectricity use and shifts consumption to clean energy generation using embedded energy storage.

Aetos Imaging leverages 3D technology to create a visual experience that unleashes a completely new level of efficiency for the people who run commercial buildings.

GlacierGrid provides industry-leading energy management for commercial cooling; automating operations, ensuring food safety and guest comfort, and reducing energy costs.

Waste reduction is one of the biggest challenges facing our planet today. Businesses account for approximately 25% of the world’s waste. Engage corporate partners consider waste reduction in paper, plastic, and food, both upstream and downstream, to be among their top sustainability and climate tech goals. We are interested in startups delivering scalable solutions in these areas:

• Waste Management and Reduction: Technologies for efficient waste removal and minimizing landfill use.
• Sustainable Procurement: Platforms that facilitate sourcing of eco-friendly and ethical materials.
• Recycling Innovations: Advanced recycling solutions for multi-industry materials that lower costs and increase accessibility.
• Green Products: Products and packaging that increase sustainability, lower costs, and offer sufficient scale to move the needle for large enteprises.

Engage has been actively investing in this innovation area, including:

Paccurate helps shippers identify their perfect mix of carton sizes and gives them complete control over how they’re packed in realtime, which lowers costs, reduces waste, and creates a better customer experience.

LOLIWARE is an award-winning materials tech company focused on replacing single-use plastics with seaweed-derived alternatives that are Designed to Disappear.

The “phygital” world is poised to grow rapidly in the coming years. These technologies benefit both the retailer (40% reduction in eCommerce returns with Phygital interactions) and the customer (nearly 66% of consumers say they would become a loyal customer if a brand/retailer offered a more compelling shopping experience). Our corporates are interested in the convergence of digital / physical and the impacts to personalization. As our world trends toward more omni-channel experiences we are looking at start-ups excelling in:

• Biometrics: Utilizing personal characteristics to help drive secure log in, personalization, and faster operations.
• Innovative Endpoint Technologies: Innovative display technologies that drive better business outcomes for our corporate partners.
• Physical to Digital Interaction Technologies: Technologies that seamlessly integrate physical and digital worlds, allowing for richer experiences for end users.
• Endpoint and Biometric Security: Preventing data breaches and increasing trust in sharing biometric data.

Companies in our portfolio that fit this brief include:

Moth + Flame helps shippers identify their perfect mix of carton sizes and gives them complete control over how they’re packed in realtime, which lowers costs, reduces waste, and creates a better customer experience.

Misapplied Sciences Misapplied Sciences created Parallel RealityTM digital display technology. Parallel Reality allows many people, viewing the same display at the same time, to each see different, personalized content. No special glasses or devices are required – you view the displays with your naked eyes..

As remote work continues to rise (53% of business leaders expect to see a rise in remote work) and employee work styles begin to shift (35-40% of global workforce will be made up of independent contractors by 2025), there will a coordinated push for better solutions to distributed and highly mobile workforces. Our Engage corporate partners are interested in the future of managing, incentivizing, and retaining these workforces from the frontline to the corporate office while improving their well-being and job satisfaction. Primarily, they are looking for solutions in:

• New Sourcing Tools and Marketplaces: Finding “best fit”  workers  (both from a work and culture perspective).
• Reskilling / Knowledge Management: Retaining and retraining better corporate “athletes” who can quickly learn any part of the business
• Digital Benefits: Providing the rise in hourly and trade workers with more bespoke benefits and healthcare options that will improve retention and satisfaction
• Risk Management / Controls: Assuring compliance with corporate rules in a distributed environment to protect their enterprises.
• Onboarding and Offboarding: Innovative tools that will assist in the process of bringing in and shifting out of employees.

Companies in our portfolio that fit this brief include:

Current Examples in our Portfolio include:

Learn to Win builds learning software for results. Our corporate partners use their platform to adapt their training from passive materials to active learning experiences that drive organizational outcomes, and use the data generated by each learner to optimize their training towards maximizing their job performance. 

WorkStep helps manufacturing, logistics, and retail companies hire and retain their hourly workforce. WorkStep uses its network of supply chain-specific talent to match enterprises with great-fit candidates, while also driving engagement and retention initiatives for supply chain-related businesses.

Onwards HR helps HR, legal and IT teams collaborate to simplify offboarding complexity. The compliance platform automates admin tasks, mitigates risk, and reduces timelines and hard costs. With Onwards HR, companies ensure a smooth and compliant exit process for everyone involved.

Our Engage Corporate Partners continue to push for greater operational efficiencies from AI (as 54% of companies are using Generative AI to enhance productivity). As these tools become more embedded in the wider enterprise, they will also become part of the larger “decision-making ecosystem” within companies. Our corporate partners are looking for solutions in:

• AI Productivity Tools for Workers: Tools that will create “superworkers” that can simplify processes, automate tasks, and deliver white space for a wide range of workers in an Enterprise
• Data Tracking and Tracing: Better understanding of where source data is coming from and who owns and delivers those data points

Companies in our portfolio that match this brief:

Fluree supports advanced GenAI use cases by enabling organizations to build secure, trusted, and collaborative data ecosystems for reliable, grounded information retrieval.

Pryon is a full-stack AI knowledge management platform that transforms content from multiple sources into verifiable answers. By weaving an organization’s content into a knowledge fabric, any user can unlock trusted answers derived from complex, unstructured data. Pryon’s no-code technology can be deployed in a matter of days and is scalable enough to meet the advanced needs of multinational companies and the most secure federal government agencies.

Plural is an AI-driven software platform for GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) teams providing  a central, customized system for public policy analysis, risk management, and compliance by integrating artificial intelligence into GRC workflows. Plural helps companies reduce risk, ensure efficiency, report accurately, and operate smoothly.