• By
  • Alistair Barr
An image from the website of Solve for X, a community of individuals and organizations working to accelerate progress on technology moonshots that is hosted by Google X, Google’s innovation lab.
Solve for X

Many of the long-term, risky projects thought up by Google’s innovation lab Google X are scrapped before they get going, while a fraction become real projects aimed at potential markets, such as self-driving cars.

A third potential outcome has emerged in the form of a startup called Flux.

Flux began life as one of the earliest Google X ideas. It was started about three years ago by a group of Googlers, Michelle Kauffmann, Jen Carlile, Nick Chim and Augusto Roman, who wanted to develop software that helped architects and builders design houses and offices more efficiently, while meeting rising demand for new structures to hold families and workers.

About two years ago, a subset of that Google X team was spun out of the company and formed their own business. That emerged Tuesday as the start-up Flux, which announced $8 million in funding from venture capital firms including DFJ and Borealis Ventures. Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, the VC arm of Google, are also investors.

“The power required to heat, cool, light, and power devices in the places we live and work is responsible for 40% of our carbon emissions,” said Kaufmann, who is co-founder of Flux with Carlile. “Much of this power is wasted due to inadequate design, antiquated technology, and poor construction quality.”

Chim is now CEO of Flux, while Roman is also at the startup, along with about 15 other employees.

Flux hopes its software will handle the complex task of designing low-power, environmentally friendly buildings that meet the business goals of their owners. Flux said its system will use data and algorithms to manage trade-offs between upfront construction costs, operating expenses over the life of the buildings, the experience of the occupants and the impact on the environment. The software will be available publicly in early 2015, the company said.

The real estate, construction and architecture sectors are a large potential market – one of the main criteria for a project to get the go-ahead at Google X.

But other requirements that may not have applied to Flux. For example, a Google X project has to try to fix a difficult technical challenge typically involving hardware, rather than just software.

“One of our earliest project teams at Google (X) explored the area of building design to see if there were ways that technology could lead to improvements in things like speed, cost savings, or even encouraging environmentally friendly buildings,” a Google spokeswoman write in an email on Tuesday. “Ultimately a subset of this team left Google and set up a separate company dedicated to exploring this area further.”

She declined to comment further.

Flux’s funding was reported earlier on Tuesday by Gigaom.


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