Buzz Solutions is a company that provides power utilities with a solution to automate visual inspections. Buzz’s solution, PowerAI, uses computer vision and machine learning to remotely identify anomalies like damaged equipment, security breaches, corrosion, structural damages, and vegetation overgrowth. Earlier this year, the company raised $5 million in funding. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Buzz Solutions CEO and co-founder Kaitlyn Albertoli to learn more about the company.
Kaitlyn Albertoli’s Background
What is Kaitlyn Albertoli’s background? Albertoli said:
“I am originally from a beach town in South California and spent all my free time near the water.”
“My hometown, a small community by the beach in Southern California, played an instrumental role in my upbringing and career. I spent all my time near the water, growing a love for nature. In 2013 when the San Onofre Power Plant was shut down for defects, I lived close enough to be surrounded by the discontent in the community. People were upset that the plant, which was responsible for a significant portion of Southern California’s electricity, had radioactive leaks which led to environmental and economic repercussions for the surrounding times.”
“I kept these interests in mind as I navigated college and figured out what I wanted to do. One of my favorite extracurricular activities was running a nonprofit focused on sustainable food, which was fulfilling and taught me how to be a leader. All of these experiences led me to a career in the energy and sustainability space, allowing me to play a role in reducing wildfires, power outages, and shutdowns.”
Formation Of Buzz Solutions
How did the idea for the company come together? Albertoli shared:
“I met my co-founder Vik Chaudhry in a course at Stanford where we all built our own companies from scratch. Vik and I immediately bonded over our shared interest in sustainability and energy and initially paired up to use AI to analyze data for wind turbine inspections. Through a few informational interviews with alumni, we quickly identified a pressing need for AI in the power sector. Vik and I saw a gap in the market and quickly pivoted ideas. Together, we leveraged the Stanford alumni network by interviewing 35 utility companies in the US, learning pain points from firsthand experience.”
“We repeatedly heard that these utilities were capturing 5 to 10 times the amount of visual data than ever before by using new technology. But while their capture process had innovated, the inspection process had not. They were parsing through the data manually, which was both expensive and time-consuming. With the increased volume of data through drones and high-zoom cameras on helicopters, manual analysis was no longer a viable solution. Addressing this pain point became the focal point for our solution.”
“We commercially launched into the market in 2019 and raised our first seed round of $1.2 million in 2020. We’ve been serving many utilities across North America since then, and have built our partnerships with research institutions through the power industry.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Albertoli’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Albertoli reflected:
“One of my favorite memories was a live demo with our competitors. All of us were tasked to perform a 30-minute demo of our respective solutions to process 200 images – a key component of the process of quickly detecting commonalities and signs of potential threats to the grid. Since inception, we’ve taken a strong stance on demonstrating the real power of our AI rather than marketing the potential.”
“A part of this stance is putting our solution to the test and running demonstrations. Amongst all the competitors, we were the only solution to deliver the results within the 30-minute time frame and with 3x the accuracy compared to our closest competitor. This was such an incredible moment I will never forget – knowing that we show our strengths through results and are able to build relationships through trust and credibility.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Albertoli explained:
“Our core capability is using artificial intelligence and machine vision systems for utility infrastructure inspections to help electric utilities fix problems before they even start. As we learned through our informational interviews, the process primarily used today by electric utilities is manual inspections – which are slow, ineffective, costly, and dangerous.”
“Our two core products are PowerAI and PowerGuard. PowerAI is an AI-powered solution with key features of asset anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and seamless integration into existing utility workflows. PowerGuard offers real-time alerting for security, safety, and condition monitoring for substations, addressing the growing need to protect physical power grid infrastructure from man-made attacks and natural disasters.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Albertoli and the team faced in building the company? Albertoli acknowledged:
“As a founder, you are constantly getting feedback from all directions. It’s one of my main responsibilities to take this feedback, digest it, and turn it into actionable items for my team to move forward. Over the years, I have learned how to use patience and resilience in tandem to redirect feedback and use it to make me a better leader and improve the company. This process was more complicated for me, working in a highly male-dominated industry. A key strategy for me as a young female leader in the utility space is to always use data to guide conversations, leaning on facts to make my points.”
Evolution Of Buzz Solutions’ Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Albertoli noted:
“Our tech is focused on taking mass amounts of data and synthesizing it down so a human can assess the facts and take the next step. When we received one of our first datasets, it was sent to us through the mail, on a VHS tape! This was a dataset that had been collected just a year or two prior. In 2017 when we started Buzz Solutions, many utilities were not on the cloud. It’s exciting to see throughout our journey how companies have evolved and we have as well.”
“We are always tweaking and improving our algorithms for the highest accuracy, precision, and detection. Currently, we have a highly accurate image processing solution, over three times more accurate than our closest competitor.”
“In recent years, we launched our PowerGUARD solution, by leveraging the highly accurate technology from PowerAI, bringing it into real-time and creating an on-the-edge solution for substations. With PowerGUARD, we’ve also expanded into security and safety alerting.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Albertoli cited:
“This year in particular has been a period of rapid growth for us. In March of this year, we announced a $5 million round of growth funding which brought our total year-to-date investment to $10.7 million. We’re proud of how far we have come and our ability to continuously show investors our growing value, even as we step outside of the utility realm. We also continue to build out our Buzz Solutions team and in 2023 we scaled to 20 employees.”
“As the global energy industry continues to modernize, we have been expanding our partnerships with companies like Skydio and Esri to expand our solution’s reach. We partnered with Skydio on a Transmission, Distribution, and Substation asset inspection solution that combines our computer vision technology with their fleet of drones. Our partnership with Esri is newer, and we are excited to leverage utilities’ existing investment in Esri’s ArcGIS software to deploy geographically accurate base maps to our utility clients.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Albertoli about customer success stories, she highlighted:
“We began working with the New York Power Authority (NYPA) in 2022 and throughout our working relationship, we have helped with their goal to become the first fully digital utility, with artificial intelligence and machine learning playing a pivotal role. NYPA uses our PowerAI solution to train their drones and inspectors and has been able to reduce the time spent analyzing each image of the inspection data to a fraction of a second. Furthermore, AI automated most of the manual work.”
“PowerAI has a baseline accuracy of over 85%, and enabled NYPA to detect anomalies in the large data sets it collected, allowing them to prioritize critical situations. NYPA’s in-house drone program was significantly improved with our technology as well, and reduced crashes and increased safety for aerial vehicles. It reduced the potential for failure and risk by allowing NYPA to prioritize critical situations, and reduce the analytic load from multiple months to hours or days.”
“Through our work with NYPA, we’ve developed a solution for them that is very scalable to adapt to the changing size of the utility company. PowerAI specifically is essential in allowing NYPA to achieve its fully digital goal by 2030.”
Funding
Upon asking Albertoli about the company’s funding, she revealed:
“In March, we announced a $5 million round of growth funding that was led by GoPoint Ventures with participation from Blackhorn Ventures and MaC Venture Capital. This investment brought our total raised to $10.7 million.”
“Subsequently, this year we have grown our US customer base by 50%, had 100% overall company revenue growth, had 30% year-over-year growth in team size (and still building), and 110% YoY growth in the number of partnerships.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Albertoli assessed:
“Buzz Solutions is targeting a substantial, $20+ billion total addressable market within the utility sector. With the increasing need for reliable grid infrastructure and the mandate for frequent inspections, the TAM includes not only traditional power utilities but also renewable energy sectors like wind and solar. The ongoing digital transformation and modernization of grid infrastructure continuously expands our market size and opportunity.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Albertoli affirmed:
“Buzz Solutions stands out due to our focus on delivering highly accurate and reliable AI-powered analytics for utility inspections, which integrates directly into the workflow. Our technology is built on proprietary datasets collected over the last decade, giving us a significant competitive advantage. We prioritize showing results rather than relying on marketing claims, and our AI’s ability to integrate seamlessly into existing utility workflows makes our solution easier to adopt and more effective from day one. Our commitment to continuous improvement through human-in-the-loop training ensures that our AI remains at the forefront of industry standards and leverages utility subject matter expertise.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Albertoli pointed out:
“Our long-term goal is to safeguard the world’s energy infrastructure. We started with a clear focus within the utility industry, and now are beginning to expand to substation monitoring and inspections. We don’t want to stop there – we see our technology being applicable beyond just the transmission distribution, substation, and utility space. We ultimately want to serve as an infrastructure company, not just in the US, but globally as well.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Albertoli concluded:
“I would like to emphasize the importance of encouraging young entrepreneurs and innovators in the utility and tech industries. There’s a common stigma around being a young founder, but age should not be a limiting factor in bringing new ideas and innovations to the market. We need more young minds contributing to these critical sectors to drive meaningful change and advancements.”
