 For years on theCUBE, we've talked about the benefits of the cloud going beyond IT cost savings. Sure, you can move your workloads into the cloud and minimize the so-called undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT equipment and deployment and management, and of course, increased agilities, often the number one benefit customer site from the cloud. But increasingly, the value of the cloud is being seen as applying that agility to change an organization's operating model. This drives business value that can be orders and magnitude greater than savings on tech labor costs. One of the more interesting examples we've found is using the cloud data and software technology to find and flexibly source distributed energy resources so that clean energy can be delivered efficiently. Hello and welcome to the startup showcase on theCUBE brought to you by AWS. We're very excited to have two execs on from AutoGrid. Wait until you hear about the innovations that they're driving and the problems they're solving around some of the world's most pressing problems. Amit Narayan is here. He's the CEO of AutoGrid and Rajiv Singh is the chief technology officer. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you for having us. You're very welcome. Okay, so you heard my summary Amit. Maybe you could add some color about AutoGrid. What's your story? Yeah, I mean, undoubtedly climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time and we are already seeing extreme weather events, whether these are wildfires in California or extreme cold events in Texas of last two weeks. As we tackle the climate change through renewables this whole volatility challenge that we are seeing is only going to become even more pressing. So we at AutoGrid provide software that creates a virtualization layer just like you do in the cloud world with hardware around all kinds of energy assets whether these are your EVs in the homes or batteries or distributed solar panels. And then we apply intelligence from software to coordinate and orchestrate all of these assets. So you can think of us as an autopilot for the grid and our technology is called virtual power plants which allows us to harness the power from all these distributed energy resources. Yeah, I was gonna say you're essentially creating a virtual power plant. That's amazing of aggregating these distributed resources. I mean, it sounds very logical but it also sounds non-trivial. It's a transformative idea. What exactly is a virtual power plant? I mean, how does that all work? Yeah, well, I mean, if you think about how the grid was designed by Edison and Tesla they really never envisioned a world where you will have two-way flow of power from not just from generator to the consumers but potentially from the consumers back to the generators. And certainly they didn't really design the grid to incorporate this amount of renewables which can be intermittent and volatile. So as we are now transitioning to this new energy world we have to rethink the entire grid architecture and reinvent how this control system works. Fortunately for us, unlike Edison and Tesla we have some really powerful tools at our disposal namely the internet and the cloud. And these tools do allow us to rethink how we connect all these different assets and we optimize them. And in a way, we are now rebuilding the grid outside in where if you have a battery in your home not only can it power your own home when power is out it can actually provide power back to the grid or to your neighbors. And so with this onslaught of DERs we think that we are living in the most exciting times since Edison and Tesla in terms of how we are going to transition to a sustainable grid and we think that our software can play a foundational role in accelerating that transition. It's taking advantage of the bi-directional flow. I mean, it's so simple but ingenious. Rajeev, maybe you could talk about the tech behind AutoGrid. I mean, the secret sauce it lies I think in that whole flexibility management system but there's data involved probably a fair amount of computer science. Maybe you could explain in more detail. Yeah, so just as Amit mentioned now when we started AutoGrid we had the luxury of cloud computing, massive scale at that massive scale. And at AutoGrid what we've been able to do is pull together cloud native computing the elasticity, the scale with cutting edge AI and machine learning as well as all of the dispatch and command control technologies that are all in one platform. And all of them have to come together to be able to manage and orchestrate these massively distributed energy resources. I mean, these could be small batteries or solar panels, et cetera. So gone are the days of large generators that could be managed with smaller compute now because the sheer number of DERs you need a new paradigm to be able to manage this. And this is really what is under the hood that constitutes our virtual power plant. Rajiv, can you talk a little bit more about your scale model? I mean, how are you able to do this effectively without imploding or hitting walls? Yeah, so obviously we've been on AWS for about 10 years now and even prior to that we had in the previous company we had kind of early doctors at AWS. So that kind of gave us a glimpse of the sheer scale of compute that is available to us on tap if required. So that was quite comforting that because when we did backup the amount of calculations on the amount of data that's coming in through IoT, industrial IoT, from all these distributed energy resources the amount of processing required for real-time computing, as well as the sheer variety of DERs that we have to tackle in various geographies around the world. This was, AWS made it happen just because having regions across the globe we run in I believe six or seven different AWS regions. We cover four continents, 12 plus countries. So just because cloud computing was there we were able to ramp up the solution very quickly. Now, one thing we are a big believer in is that you only learn by doing and the only way to learn is to run production systems. And when we started, of course, we didn't do everything right but we quickly learned, we adapted, we scaled and we kept on scaling and this is where we are right now. Interesting. It looks like Andy Jassy says there's no compression algorithm for experience. Exactly. Right small, we know it well. One more for Rajiv and I want to come back to Amit. With Autogrid tapping all these energy sources you got a pretty major threat surface. How are you dealing with security? Yeah, so we don't talk a lot about our security posture for obvious reasons. Some of the underlying principles are reducing the blast radius which should be quite familiar to people who work in security. We use a wide variety of best of the breed security tools including and over the past few years. In fact, past five, six years AWS itself has rolled out a number of security managed services which are included but on top of that we use other solutions as well and it's all designed in layers with proper segregation and we have a variety of security certifications. One of the most, the one that we're proud of is we are one of the few, if not the only NERC-SIPA tested solution in this domain on AWS and it's just a culmination of using security by layers reducing the blast radius. Yeah, makes sense. I mean, let's turn to some customer use cases what are some of the main problems that your customers come to you to solve? How are you approaching them? Maybe you could address that and add some color. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as Rajiv mentioned there is a lot of deep tech in the platform and the optimization complexity grows exponentially with the number of assets and as you go from a gigawatt scale power plant and you want to get the same power from Tesla power walls, let's say for every generator you are replacing it with more than 200,000 mini generators. And if the complexity grows exponentially it's far beyond what the current algorithms can handle. So a lot of customers come to us to solve their technical challenges but even beyond that, the whole complexity of transacting with small generators is very high and there are business model issues that we help our customers solve. So the whole energy industry has been designed to have transactions between very large generators and utilities, but very few of these transactions. And now when you are talking about DERs you're having millions of transactions with very small entities and maybe even homeowners back to the utilities. So neither the utilities have the capability today to have these transactions nor the asset owners and operators have the capability to go back and have the transactions with the utilities. So we sort of act as an intermediary and we provide a one-stop shop for fleet owners and operators and we say that if you work with us we will help you monetize your assets and get more value from these assets by interfacing with utilities, by interfacing with energy markets which can get very complex. I love this, I mean everybody's winning here. Rajiv, I want to come back to the cloud a little bit. You talked about you've been AWS for 10 years and then even before that you've got deep experience. I mean I can't imagine how you would do this without the cloud. I mean maybe it could be a really heavy complicated list lift. I mean you've seen the AWS cloud evolve over time. It's gone way beyond of course, compute and storage, brought in a lot of machine learning capabilities on and on and on. I mean how are you leveraging that evolution, those a zillion features that AWS puts out every year at re-invent? I mean maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so of course when we started AWS had, we used it as an infrastructure provider, provided us compute, networking, security, firewalls, et cetera. Just on tap, it was very, very good, got us started. Then we started leveraging a lot more managed services that AWS offered that allowed us to run, for example, variety of databases, variety of data stores in a managed fashion with a very small, as you know, the startup we're always running lean. So that helped us with a small team of system engineers and engineers, platform engineers, to be able to put together and run these systems around the globe, just because AWS was responsible for managing the services. Then as, and we always keep an eye on, and one thing we really love about AWS is the amount of innovation that they quickly put into production. So we're always keeping an eye on, okay, what's coming out? And over the years, AWS has been quite nice to us in some ways by, we directly talk to the solution architects, they tell us what's coming, what should we use, what should we not use, what's in production, production ready, what's not. So that level of kind of deep engagement really, really helps us kind of keep abreast of the innovations that are constantly being rolled out by AWS and we keep kind of incorporating those into our platform and making it more and more capable. The one thing I also would like to say is that we have to be able to aggregate capacity from all these DERs. It has to be done in a cost effective fashion. So this is where AWS helps us with running elasticity at the service level. So all the microservices can scale independently. So we don't have to have this massive monolith and across the globe, we don't need to have 50 of those to be running and that's gonna add up to a massive cost. So we are able to scale just the portions of the infrastructure just in time when we need it. And that also helps us greatly in having a cost effective solution for our customers. So that's actually, that's great. So that granularity is important for you to have fine grain control of your costs. A lot of people sometimes question that granularity that AWS provides because it does add a level of complexity but you guys can deal with complexity. You know, one of the things that we haven't talked about, I wonder if we could touch on it is data. I mean, this is a data flow. I'm imagining the data flow and the metadata and the decisions that you have to make are quite complex. Can you address that a little bit? I mean, you guys got to be pretty sharp data wonks. Yeah, so it's again, as we have our, the people we have at the company, including myself have come from a building large, you know, high performance and high large enterprise systems. You know, previously from airlines, photo motor company, pharmaceuticals. So in any system where we're making a lot of decisions, the first thing you have to do is data integration. And again, this is something that you just learned by doing and having done it across the globe with a variety of DR systems, EVSEs, you name it. We have pretty much done one of everything. And of course, and we really quickly abstract and learn. If you do something twice, we abstract it and make it into a library so that the next time around, it's just a simple turn on switch. So it's no secret sauce there. It's just, you just learn by doing and you kind of constantly abstract and you expand your solution. That's great. Let's close the other thing. We really haven't talked much about your company on it. Maybe you could, you know, add some, whatever you want to share metrics. I mean, you must be growing, you know, headcount or whatever you're comfortable sharing. If you could just give us a little glimpse of the company. Yeah, absolutely. We have been around for close to 10 years now. We are based in Silicon Valley. We have multiple locations. Our second primary location is in India. Today, we are operating in over 12 countries. We have close to 5,000 megawatts of distributed energy assets that we actively control and manage. This includes everything from a thermostat in a home to very large scale wind and solar farms as well as large scale batteries. EVs is a new emerging category. And we work with a variety of partners. AW has been one of our founding partners on day one. You talked about data. We were the first ones to realize how much data we are going to get from all of these assets and the current systems will not scale. So we made the decision on day one to be on cloud and that was foundational here. So yeah, so I mean, I just want to say that over the last year or so, we have, I think collectively as a society, realized how individual actions impact the overall society. And I think we are really at a great inflection point right now where if we can harness this newly developed consciousness and awareness to accelerate our transition to new energy away from fossil fuel, we can really solve what I think is the biggest challenge that we face as a society going forward. Yeah, micro actions that actually have a huge impact. And so I guess that's kind of where you see this heading in the future, both the general market, your business. I mean, presumably you've been around a while, maybe you'd welcome competition to really solve this problem, right? I think we are in the same fight. We are all working towards the same goal of having a clean, cheap, reliable energy. And we would welcome as much support as we get to build momentum for this, absolutely. Yeah, it's like the pharma companies cheering each other on for the vaccine. Again guys, super interesting business, solving real problems really. Thanks gentlemen for coming on the program and we wish you well in the years ahead. Our pleasure, thank you for having us. It's really been our pleasure. Thank you for watching the AWS Startup Showcase on theCUBE, I'm Dave Vellante.