[Egypt] Infrastructure and sustainability platform, Pylon, announces $19m funding round

Pylon, the infrastructure management platform transforming electricity and water companies in emerging markets, announces a $19 million seed funding round.  
 
The seed round for the rapidly-growing startup - which is profitable and grew by 3.5x in 2021 - began with initial funding from US technology startup accelerator, Y Combinator, and attracted a diverse group of investors from North America and MEA.  
 
This funding round, comprising equity and debt, was led by Endure Capital, which is backed up by CDC, the UK Government’s Development Finance Institution. Also participating were Cathexis Ventures, Khawarizmi Ventures, Loftyinc Ventures, and various high profile angel investors. 
 
Proceeds will accelerate Pylon’s growth via expansion into other emerging markets (South-East Asia, Africa, Latin America) and advance engineering and product development. The startup is already working with multiple companies across two continents who have deployed more than one million end points of Pylon’s smart grid technology, across 15 distribution companies. Pylon’s goal is to increase its smart metering points to three million by 2023, which would represent 4x year-on-year growth.
 
Pylon does not charge utility companies an upfront cost for its hardware, but its model, Smart Metering as a Service (SMaaS) makes it easy for cash-conscious utility companies to deploy its solution at scale. With no upfront investment, Pylon can help utility companies increase their top-line by up to 40%, just by signing up.
 
Pylon democratizes smart grid infrastructure to energy and water distribution companies in emerging markets enabling them to capture up to $400 billion of losses and uncollected revenue. Pylon’s platform uses data and artificial intelligence to improve revenue collection, reduce losses and achieve a more efficient environmental footprint. 
 
Pylon is saving the planet, one metering point at a time, as smart electricity grids can reduce utilities’ carbon emissions by 25%. Another of Pylon’s goals is to achieve 1 Gigaton of total CO2 emissions reduction by 2035. Water losses in emerging markets also reach over 45 million cubic meters/day. Pylon can reduce this by up to 22%, potentially providing enough water to serve over 40 million people.