Othersphere, the pioneering startup specializing in location optimization for zero / low greenhouse gas commodity infrastructure, today announced the successful close of C$3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Active Impact Investments, with additional contributions from Thin Line Capital, KDX, and Keiki Capital.
Othersphere has developed a patent-pending platform to identify ideal locations for commodity production assets based on economics, emissions, and fit with local surroundings. Othersphere initially serves project developers, offtakers, and financiers, beginning with hydrogen and expanding to other physical commodities over time.
Othersphere's core technology indexes the globe based on commodity, human, and environmental system variables, and was made possible by catalytic funding from Breakthrough Energy's Fellows program—a research and development fellowship focused on accelerating the commercialization of potential breakthrough climate technologies. Further support has been provided by Google for Startups.
"We believe that Othersphere will play a meaningful role in scaling the low-emission commodities that will drive the clean energy transition by addressing the massive project deployment bottleneck," said Mike Winterfield, Managing Partner at Active Impact Investments, Canada's largest climate tech seed fund. "Their platform lowers costs for customers while improving yields and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, all of which accelerates the development and adoption of low emissions commodities."
"Companies have to weigh a huge number of factors when deciding where to locate climate technology projects, from clean hydrogen production to direct air capture," said Ashley Grosh, VP of Breakthrough Energy Fellows. "Othersphere will make it easy for climate tech companies to evaluate where they can have the biggest impact, demystifying a complicated process with the potential to accelerate decarbonization."
Currently in closed beta development, Othersphere's initial SaaS product offers multiple benefits:
"Thanks to our investors, Othersphere is poised to accelerate scaling of zero / low GHG commodities, starting with hydrogen," said Othersphere CEO, Robert Murphy. "Our products are designed to reduce project risk and improve stakeholder alignment, to help unlock the trillions of dollars needed to deliver sustainable, equitable global prosperity. This funding allows us to grow the incredible team that will bring our first product to market. We are excited to hear from potential users and stakeholders as we move toward launch, and in particular hydrogen consumers interested in participating in our offtaker survey program."
For further information: press@othersphere.io, Phone: +1 (236) 428-4400
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When assessing data center sites, there can be a balancing act between remote locations and those closer to population centers.
Remote locations can offer clear advantages, including more building space or possibly lower-cost energy. But for AI inference, colocation, and other traditional compute needs, being closer to population centers of end-users is critical.
For data centers, fiber infrastructure plays a central role in that equation. Though factors like access to energy, community sentiment, and the permitting environment are a critical part of site assessments,this infrastructure is only as valuable as the user base it can reach.
To support this decision-making, we recently added a new data layer to inform Othersphere’s data center diligence engine, and we’re excited to share more about this work (to say nothing of the pretty maps).
This new data layer provides an estimate of the population that can be reached from any location within certain latency thresholds. It adds an important dimension to site selection by helping clarify the tradeoffs between locations that may look attractive for different reasons.
This is made possible through our infrastructure analysis methodology, which indexes critical data to millions of locations and models the relationships within and between them. For this population estimate, the calculation begins by overlaying the world’s terrestrial and submarine fiber cable infrastructure on high-resolution population data. We then construct a weighted graph covering the entire globe, where adjacent tiles are connected by edges to calculate round-trip latency. As the signal moves from any user-selected location across on-fiber or off-fiber tiles, varying time penalties are applied. At a global scale, this requires simplifying assumptions on key questions such as available capacity, which we are able to investigate more deeply in each site-specific assessment.
This bottom-up estimate reveals stark geographic disparities. A well-connected tile in Europe (a randomly selected address in Vienna, in this case) can reach hundreds of millions of people within 40 ms, while a tile not far away in a telecom gap may only provide low-latency services to its immediate neighbors.
This data layer powers Othersphere’s understanding of where digital infrastructure creates (or fails to create) meaningful connectivity, and it is now threaded into all of our site assessments and scoring.
Reach out if you would like to learn more, or comment below if there are locations you’d like to see us post about.
When assessing data center sites, there can be a balancing act between remote locations and those closer to population centers.Remote locations can offer clear advantages, including more building space or possibly lower-cost energy. But for AI inference, colocation, and other traditional compute needs, being closer to population centers of end-users is critical.For data centers, fiber infrastructure plays a central role in that equation. Though factors like access to energy, community sentiment, and the permitting environment are a critical part of site assessments,this infrastructure is only as valuable as the user base it can reach.To support this decision-making, we recently added a new data layer to inform Othersphere’s data center diligence engine, and we’re excited to share more about this work (to say nothing of the pretty maps).This new data layer provides an estimate of the population that can be reached from any location within certain latency thresholds. It adds an important dimension to site selection by helping clarify the tradeoffs between locations that may look attractive for different reasons.
Click here to access the Othersphere Data Center Atlas
What does the market view as a good data center location? This is something we can clearly observe based on how data centers are deployed today.
But how will the definition of a successful project evolve over time? And how might this differ across different classes of data centers?
Planning for the long-term, it is important that markets and policymakers are intentional about their expectations and requirements for these assets, as the role of data centers in economic growth, energy demand, climate outcomes, and geopolitical stability will all undoubtedly increase.
Then in the near-term, the risk of data center investment bubbles and market swings appear very high. As such, the ability to target data centers with strong fundamentals that will succeed in both good times and bad is essential.
History smiles on those who build commoditized industrial infrastructure in locations with the best fundamentals, so who will be the 'Saudi Arabia of compute'? The race to acquire power for these information refineries is the dominant narrative today. But when the smoke clears it will be key long-term fundamentals that matter to operators, policymakers, investors, communities, and beyond.
With this framing in mind, this Data Center Atlas is our contribution to inform a more data-driven view of the shape of the global data center fleet today, and how this may evolve over time.
At launch this Atlas includes a sample of the metrics we use to evaluate existing and potential data center locations. Here we highlight trends at the thousands of sites around the world that host data centers today, drawn from the over 180 million locations that Othersphere models worldwide. We are also experimenting with AI-generated/human-reviewed context for each metric; with AI model outputs shaped by the data provided from our backend.
This living document is also a pilot for future report-centric products on data centers and other industrial sectors, helping us understand needs around:
Reach out to learn more or provide feedback, and in the meantime, thanks for reading!
What does the market view as a good data center location? This is something we can clearly observe based on how data centers are deployed today.
Please reach out if you would like to learn more about Othersphere, our products, and opportunities to partner in accelerating deployment of high performance, sustainable infrastructure.
