BreezoMeter has developed a platform for mapping and analyzing outdoor air pollution in real-time, at the resolution of a city block. The company uses air quality data, weather patterns and other factors to produce an analysis that is actionable, intuitive and tailored to the customer’s specific needs. This empowers individuals with the data to know the exact quality of the air they are breathing, and make informed decisions accordingly, whether it’s day-to-day tasks, like finding the right time to go for a run, the right place to go out for a walk with the kids, or larger life decisions, like deciding where to buy an apartment. The company offers its data integration services to governments and municipalities through an API for various applications or as a software as a service package. The company employs 15 people, and is co-headquartered in Israel and San Francisco.

Entrepreneurs’ short BIO

an Korber, CEO – B.Sc. environmental engineering from Technion. Ran has over five years of experience as the head of environmental management in one of the country’s largest chemical companies. In his work with BreezoMeter, he combines the computer programming skills he acquired in Mamram, the central Israeli Defense Force IT unit, with his passion for improving environmental quality.

Emil Fischer, CTO – B.Sc. software engineering from Technion. Emil has acquired over seven years of diverse experience in companies ranging from start-ups to large corporations and the defense industries, that help him lead the technology side of BreezoMeter’s business.

Ziv Lautman, CMO– B.Sc. summa cum laude environmental engineering from Technion. Ziv interned at the Ministry of Environmental Protection in the deputy director of planning and policy department, as part of the Milken Institute Fellows Program. He brings to his role a deep knowledge of environmental engineering, business development and passion for improving the way we see air quality.

Complimented by a committed research and development team: environmental and software engineers with 100+ years of accumulated experience.

What platform does the product run on?

The product runs on the Google Cloud Platform. In order to give the user real-time data of air pollution levels, we use proprietary big data analytics to process several different data sets. Our analytics must perform billions of complicated calculations, repeatedly, in cycles of less than one hour.

Thanks to the computing power and the unique capabilities that the Google Cloud Platform provides, we are able to meet this difficult challenge. Part of our success can be attributed to the fact that we were able to quickly and easily integrate the Big Query Service into our system.

Previously, these capabilities were only available to security agencies and large research institutions. In addition to making this software accessible to the general public, Google Cloud Platform staff provided the support to back it up – answering any question that emerged.

The motive

Ziv Lautman, BreezoMeter’s CMO: “While I was interning with the Ministry of Environmental Protection, as part of the Milken Institute Fellows Program, I got a phone call from a good friend and colleague, Ran Korber, now BreezoMeter’s CEO, who had a problem: he wanted to buy an apartment for his family in the healthiest and clean place in the Haifa area, in northern Israel, an area notorious for its pollution. As environmental engineers, we learned a lot about the link between the environment and our health, so it was clear to Ran that he would live only in a healthy place in a healthy environment. The Reason Ran called me was because government own a lot of environmental that is available online but often not really understandable or actionable, meaning it’s inaccessible. Especially to the layperson. This got us thinking – why shouldn’t everyone have access to this data? How could we break it down so that the average citizen could understand it?

This need to better understand our environment and present data in an intuitive, actionable way, is how BreezoMeter was born. We realized that there was a lot of information regarding air pollution on the internet, however, this information was neither accessible nor clear, and wasn’t actually useful to the citizens.”

A bit about the technology

BreezoMeter’s software platform combines cutting-edge data analytics technology with existing environmental science technology. Although pollutant dispersion models existed already in the 70s, the understanding of how air pollution spreads has improved over the years both on theoretical and model and algorithmic levels. The problem we faced was that the technology previously used to calculate these models hasn’t changed much and it is not suitable for real-time or high-resolution calculations. We still encounter municipalities and governments that run older contaminant transport models on their private servers or computers – calculations that not only take days or even weeks to perform, but also provide very low-resolution outputs.

BreezoMeter’s technological innovation has two aspects: First, we used existing dispersion pollutant models, but improved and altered them to calculate real-time pollutant dispersion while adding layers of additional updated information such as weather data and historic air quality data. Second, we use the cloud, to perform our calculations, which allows us almost unlimited computing power. By combining the two, we are able to calculate the air quality for an area as small a city-block, in real-time. We are able to provide users instant, location-based air quality, information on pollution sources, predicted pollution dispersion, anticipated health effects on different populations and more.

It is essential to emphasize that this huge leap forward in technology couldn’t have happened without the unique multi-disciplinary combination of environmental, algorithm and software engineers. We live in a world where people live in the here and now and expect updated, reliable, accurate and personally tailored information – air quality analytics must rise to that challenge.

We now hold several patents in the field of air quality big data analytics, and have data for 28 countries and over 7,000 cities. Nobody has done that before.

Operating costs

Emil Fisher, BreezoMeter’s CTO: “Nir Chinski, Shira Kimchi and Google’s cloud team have guided us through the process of choosing the right architecture and ensuring that we were operating at the most cost-effective level for our company. Today our architecture is efficient and scalable. Thanks to this, we can continue to expand our services to cities and data integrators, calculating over 2 billion pollutant concentrations of various pollution types around the globe every hour. Moreover, because we are using Google Cloud Platform managed solutions, we are free to focus only on delivering value to our customers rather than dealing with DevOps, maintenance and scaling issues”

Market Share

We recently launched our data in 28 countries. We have long been able to analyze and provide data to users in China, the US, Israel, Hong Kong, Finland, Ireland, England, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico and South Korea. In the coming weeks, we will make the service available in all other countries. At present day, over 50 million people, as well as several companies and municipalities worldwide use our service every day. We will continue to expand our reach with the help of our partners and customers such as AccuWeather and LifeMap Solutions, which just launched its Asthma Health app in England, Ireland and the United States. Our goal is to reach the over 3.5 billion people living today with air quality that harms their health, through working with governments and data integrators to provide the information they need to improve air quality.

Funding

To date, we have raised 1.8 million dollars. We have offices in Haifa, Israel and in San Francisco. We are currently raising a Series A round of funding to assist our global expansion and in expanding our product to new markets.