Meet Shyam Srinivasan & Evan Murphy, Founders of Zitara Technologies

Invest in startups like Zitara Technologies alongside Climate Capital here.

Founders: Shyam Srinivasan & Evan Murphy

Motto: To enable a renewable energy revolution, powered by safer batteries, at a lower cost, with less waste.

Year Founded: 2019

Stage: Series A

Location: San Francisco, CA

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Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?

Shyam:  Cell, module, and pack suppliers in the battery industry are in hot demand today.  Manufacturers give very limited information on how batteries will perform in a customer’s application - especially across age, temperature, and loading condition.

This creates major uncertainties - whether you are procuring cells for your own design, or purchasing finished battery-powered assets like EVs or stationary storage assets.  What will your battery be capable of when it’s old?  When it’s cold?  When it’s used in a different way?  What will the impact be on your asset’s lifetime value, operational reliability, and safety?

Climate Capital: What are you building?

Shyam: We're building two products: Studio and Live.  Zitara Studio models your batteries and runs simulations so you can actually understand their capabilities. After deployment, Zitara Live uses those same models to automatically track what's happening inside your batteries to help avoid costly operational and safety risks, while continuously enhancing performance and maximizing profitability.

Climate Capital: What is next?

Shyam: It's taken a lot to get to where we are today.  We've served customers across verticals - EVs, consumer electronics, drones, satellites, all the way up to grid-scale stationary storage assets.  We've learned hard lessons along the way about the state of software on batteries today - and eventually realized we'd have to integrate onboard assets to realize the full potential of advanced battery management software.

Zitara's willingness to integrate our algorithms directly onboard assets has been the best decision we've ever made.  We're directly in the loop with asset controls, so benefits from adopting Zitara Live are realized automatically for our customers.  The data we get back is controlled by us, and is therefore allowing us to build a much more valuable data moat than vanilla ""garbage in / garbage out"" battery analytics software.

Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?

Shyam: Our core principles are Shared Reality, Solidarity, and Motion.

At Zitara, Solidarity is all about belonging and bonding, kindness and support. We hear all voices, get buy-in, and commit. This is in service of us having an extremely high bar in the face of big challenges. Our mission requires both support and challenge.

We believe we can only achieve our Zitara mission from a place of Shared Reality: in an ocean of questionable claims and miracle battery solutions, we strive to a bastion of transparency and honest in reporting the performance of our models and algorithms.

Motion at Zitara is all about iteration. It’s about progress, learning, and evolution. It requires space to be human and make mistakes, and then learn from those mistakes. Our blind spots will be revealed, but we will be wiser and more capable for it, increasing our capacity to take on larger and more challenging problems. We will evolve and find a way to move forward, together.

Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?

Shyam: We actually didn't realize how bad the state of the world was in battery software.  With battery supply chains and technologies changing so quickly, people aren't getting the basics right.

For instance, we've found that State-of-Charge software on multi-billion dollar grid-scale LFP storage assets can commonly have 20-30% error.  To learn more, check out Zitara’s blog. This leads to ongoing challenges with cell balancing and unexpected shutdowns - typically assets go through a painful ""teething period"" for 9-12 months after commissioning where they limp along uptimes of at 50% or worse.

We're here to help and have developed drop-in Zitara Live retrofit solutions that can alleviate these surprising difficulties.

Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?

Shyam: Connect to communities. The network effects of working with communities like the one Sundeep and Climate Capital have built have an extraordinary, multiplicative power to help you grow your team, customer base, and perspective on your industry.

Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?

Shyam: If you work with batteries, work with Zitara.  If you're designing, deploying, financing, or operating ESS or EVs - reach out!  We'd love to show you how we can make your batteries more reliable, more profitable, and safer.