16Apr

Interview Startup Valley!

Habt Spaß!

If you have problems reading the article in German, here is a review in English:

Introduction of Charlotta Holmquist, Co-Founder of BL!XT

I have now been entrepreneur for 20 years and active in several roles setting up businesses in high tech, ICT and transformative energy. I love entrepreneurship for the opportunity to constantly learn and navigate through challenges and opportunities. On Women’s Day 2019 I was awarded “No 1 Female Entrepreneur of the Year Globally” by the UK rating institute Earlymetrics which is of course a great honor.

My latest venture, BL!XT, is the first and only to develop miniature, solid state circuit breakers, creating the spark for an entirely new shift in energy. Turning the conventional mechanical breakers into digital connected devices completely changes the game. With its strategic location in the fuse box they could represent one of the largest energy savings potentials and pave the way for clean energy.

Why did you decide to start a business?

As a seasoned serial entrepreneur I started learning about the climate crisis and strongly felt I must use my accumulated experience to try to make a difference.

Blixt can play a vital role in the energy transition by providing grid-edge intelligence. With the ability to control loads beyond the meter, such as appliances, heating, cooling and EVs, utilities can shifts loads and increase the proportion of renewables in the energy mix.

What was the biggest challenge when founding Blixt?

Blixt is so far the most ambitious challenge I have ever taken on. On the other hand, our innovations spark for an entirely new energy paradigm. One challenge is to get to down to disruptive price levels by making the current product into a silicon chip, which takes time and costs quite a bit. Moreover, local rules and regulations are not changed over a day, but need time to adapt to new technology in order to facilitate the paradigm shift.

Facing this vast opportunity but also challenges we are very happy to have teamed up with Ulrich Seitz at Baywa r.e. Energy Ventures who is our lead investor. They completely understand the startup world and share our vision with Blixt.

Can you start with an idea if not everything is perfect yet?

Of course, you should start at earliest possible stage. Each hour you spend talking to potential customers at early stage saves months or even years in product development. Before even having our first prototype we talked to several hundreds of stakeholders to understand the problems we wanted to solve.

What is the vision behind Blixt?

Our vision is to create disruptive innovations with significant global impact, while at the same time provide attractive opportunities for investors and benefits to all stakeholders in the value chain. So a true win-win. While legislation, such as carbon taxes, can make a short term push in the right direction, I believe the long term solution must be market driven. Business will be the ultimate platform for change.

What sets you apart from other providers?

My co-founders, board directors and myself have decades of experience from digitization, innovation, energy industry and entrepreneurship. We think differently from current incumbents in the circuit breaker industry who are still focusing their innovation on mechanical products while we work with solid state from day one. In essence we combine the functions of a breaker, remote control and metering in one single device.

Blixt, where is the road going? Where do you see yourself in five years?

Our goal is that our advanced, IP protected designs integrate in millions of electrical devices, fuse boxes, connected cars, industry 4.0 applications, energy generation, storage and charging solutions around the world. We aim to make it a low cost, mass market product and offer it on licensing bases to our customers, including OEM manufactures and energy service providers.

Finally, what 3 tips would you give future founders?

Have fun! Entrepreneurship is tough enough so make sure you always prioritize the fun factor. A customer or investor might be right on the paper but are they someone you can have a laugh together with?

Customer Development! Talk to your customers as soon as possible.

Fail fast! If the path or dialogue you are pursuing doesn’t work, fail fast and change direction. Don’t be flattered by interest from the large companies unless they are willing to pay for your time. Time is the most important you have.

01Apr

Winner of Inission Innovation award

Blixt Tech AB winner of Inission Innovation Award 2019

On Wednesday, March 27, 2019, the winners of this year’s Inission Innovation Award were crowned at Åbymässan in Gothenburg. The first price consisted of development services from Prevas worth 250 000 SEK and production services from Inission worth 1 000 000 SEK.

Three companies were competing in the final. Blixt Tech AB with their solid state circuit breakers, ChromoGenics AB with their autonomous dynamic windows and Labtrino AB with their intelligent water meter system for apartment buildings – three innovations with good innovation height, market potential and news value.

This year’s jury consisted of Maria Månsson from Prevas, Ola Rynge from Almi, Olle Hulteberg and Fredrik Berghel from Inission, Anders Backman from Nordea and Per Danielson from NyTeknik.

Månsson from Prevas announced Blixt as this year’s winner with the motivation from the jury:

“This year’s winner is challenging and developing an entire industry with a pioneering innovation that has great market potential and lifts the electricity grid to a new level without breaking the standard form factor.”

As winner of Inission award Blixt received the prize check of 1 250 000 SEK.

We are of course both honored and happy to win. This is valuable to us in several ways and it comes at the right time. Prevas and Inission can contribute with both development and production services which will allow us to shorten our time to market. We are also impressed by the commitment from the sponsors. They really show a genuine interest for innovation and entrepreneurship, says Charlotta Holmquist, Blixt Tech AB.

The proud winner of this years award from the Audience was Labtrino AB who received a prize check of 50 000 SEK.

Inission innovation award was held for the seventh time. The purpose of the competition is to help entrepreneurs to grow and thrive and to highlight the Swedish industry that manufactures electronics products. Next year the competition will be held again so make sure to visit www.inission.com

01Apr

Interview in Impakter

BL!XT: Innovating Circuit Breakers for Greater Sustainability. Interview with Chairman and Co-founder, Charlotta Holmquist

by Alessandro du Besse’

Circuit breakers can be found in all our homes, electric devices, and cars among many other technologies that we use in our day-to-day lives. Yet the technology behind them has been the same for over 150 years. BL!XT – also spelled BLIXT – aims to be a game changer in this field. How? By producing an innovative Solid State Circuit Breaker that could be crucial to improving the way we use electricity. The most obvious impact of BLIXT’s Circuit Breaker is a reduction in energy consumption, but there are of course other benefits, many of which are outlined in the below interview.

Impakter sat with Charlotta Holmquist, Chairman and Co-founder of BL!XT to find out how this project is becoming reality.

What is your story and how has it influenced your decision to start BL!XT?

Charlotta Holmquist: Twenty years ago when I founded my first start up, I was motivated by the freedom of being an entrepreneur and the joy of turning an idea into a real business. Eventually the hard work resulted in a success and I got addicted to entrepreneurship. As a seasoned serial entrepreneur I then started learning about the climate crisis. Yes, it is a true crisis. I strongly felt I must use my accumulated experience to try to make a difference.

For this to happen at the speed we need, the innovation must have a significant global impact, provide an attractive opportunity for investors and bring benefits to all stakeholders in the value chain. While legislation, such as carbon taxes, can make a short term push in the right direction, I believe the long term solution must be market driven. Business will be the ultimate platform for change.

BL!XT is so far the most ambitious challenge I have ever taken on. On the other hand, our innovations spark for an entirely new energy paradigm. I would never be able to make this journey alone and in BL!XT I have found my dream team. My co-founders, board directors and myself have decades of experience from digitization, innovation, energy industry and entrepreneurship. And not least, we share the same values and vision with BL!XT: That is to Empower the Electric Evolution.

In the Photo: The Evolution of the Circuit Breaker. Photo Credit: BL!XT

Can you please explain what BL!XT is producing?

Charlotta Holmquist: Despite being the entry point to all electricity in a home, circuit breakers are still, after 150 years, mechanical products that sit idle most of the time. With its strategic location it could represent one of the largest energy savings potentials and pave the way for clean energy, but since they are mechanical, they can only serve one purpose: safety.

The new BL!XT Breaker is the first and only miniature solid-state circuit breaker. You can imagine this pure digital device being a smart meter, remote control and a fast breaker all-in-one single device. It can modulate the control from 0-100%, controlling the power just like a water tap, and cut circuits within only 250 nanoseconds.

Since circuit breakers are omnipresent where electricity is being used, the potential use cases are beyond the residential fuse box. Fueled by a global trend of electrification, we currently receive requests from companies around the world, ranging from energy to mobility, aerospace, nautical and industrial 4.0. To manage the vast interest and to allow for the potential customers to try out our technology we will soon start shipping demonstration kits. This will demonstrate the uniqueness with our technology and let the corporates explore the broad variety of use cases for themselves.

When will you be ready to be on the market? How big will be the challenge to enter into a very competitive and traditional field?

Charlotta Holmquist: Our goal is that our advanced, IP protected designs integrate in millions of electrical devices, fuse boxes, connected cars, industry 4.0 applications, energy generation, storage and charging solutions around the world. We aim to make it a low cost, mass market product and offer it on licensing bases to our customers, including OEM manufactures and energy service providers.

We have covered some distance in the technical development but still have plenty of work to do. For example, in order get to down to disruptive price levels we need to make the current version into a silicon chip, which takes time and costs quite a bit. Moreover, local rules and regulations are not changed over a day, but need time to adapt to new technology in order to facilitate the paradigm shift. BL!XT recently teamed up with ABB Synerleap with the objective of co-development and shortening time to market.

In the Photo: BL!XT Team. In the Middle Charlotta Holmquist. Photo Credit: BL!XT

What are your thoughts about SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals)? How do you think your company can give a positive contribution in that sense?

Charlotta Holmquist: UN’s Sustainable Development Goals set the game plan to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. The goals are clearly inter-connected and overcoming the challenges for one goal will fuel the success for other. Blixt, being an enabler for the future energy market, clearly has direct positive impact in the areas of Climate Action and Innovation.

While there is a general clear vision of how the future energy market will look, the big question is ’how do we get there?’ A welcomed mega trend are distributed energy resources, producing renewable energy potentially everywhere there is a need. However, sources such as wind and solar also have highly variable supply. At the same time the growing number of electric vehicles creates new disruptive loads that usually occur at peak hours. The most common solution to handle the fluctuations and peak demand is, unfortunately still, backup forms of power, dirty diesel generators or coal plants.

In this context we see that BL!XT can play a vital role by providing grid-edge intelligence and the ability to control loads beyond the meter. Essentially, we turn the fuse box into a smartphone, collecting and communicating rich, real time electricity usage data as it passes through the circuit breaker. This data is communicated to the energy service provider so that it can effectively manage the future grid. Crucially, the BL!XT Breaker also allows real time, remote control of appliances, heating, cooling and EVs, thereby enabling demand side management.

BL!XT has just started up an impact study, in collaboration with the Swedish Environmental Research Institute and some leading European utilities, in order to quantify the carbon savings that can be achieved through our technology. We expect the results to be significant and a hope for a brighter future.

In the Cover Photo: The Blixit Breaker. Photo Credit: BL!XT

‘https://impakter.com/blixt/

05Nov

Like an Italian BL!XT storm!

November 5, 2018. Working with something you are truly passionate about can consume your hours quickly. This is not only true for me, but for sure my Bl!xt team (and so many other amazing entrepreneurs around the globe). For me, the best way to recharge is on foot, walking through beautiful landscapes until your body aches, while at the same time spending the best quality time with my family. This year the traditional Italian trekk got slightly more adventurous than expected… Storm winds and heavy rain made the grappa taste better than ever 🙂 As a coincidence this week we also got our first article in Italian media! Please enjoy the reading below from Businessandleaders.it

Arrivederci/Charlotta

Blixt, The Green Startup That Is Empowering The Electric Evolution

We had the pleasure to interview Charlotta Holmquist, CFO of Blixt

By Business&Leaders Last updated Nov 4, 2018

Green economy is a very common issue nowadays, but more often than people cannot link this content to a real product. How to make people closer to that? We had the chance to interview Charlotta Holmquist, CFO of Blixt, one of the most interesting green startup based in Sweden, which also joined the Berlin Ecosummit last summer (the aim of this event was to accelerate smart green startups and to connect investors and corporates)

Can you briefly describe your business and your purpose?
We are the first and only company to develop miniature, solid state circuit breaker and multidirectional inverters; critical components that will accelerate the transformation to sustainable, all-electric technologies world wide, on all levels of society, like energy, mobility and industry 4.0.

In essence, Blixt is a Technology Factory for innovations that Empower the Electric Evolution. Our advanced designs are soon to be integrated in millions of electrical devices, fuse boxes, connected cars, industry applications, energy generation, storage and charging solutions around the world. Moreover, they are efficient, affordable and secure. The core is our patented universal hardware and open software stacks, enabling companies to develop solutions and new business areas that enable industry transformation at speed.

Pollution and environmental issues: how can Blixt solvehelp in solving them?
Blixt technologies enables more renewable energy resources and electric vehicles in the existing grid through our load balancing ability. The ability to remotely shut on/off, modulate and monitor enables totally new energy efficiency opportunities on a global scale.

Which target of customers are you getting involved in?
Disruptive technologies creates new business models, not the least for the end-distributor (utility and others). Our business model is based on three pillars: 1) Licensing of production 2) Royalty for each chip shipped 3) Software services for IoT integrations, custom applications, support.

However, our current and future partners foresee lots of opportunities to disrupt their current models the moment our technologies comes online. Ranging from switching from analogue to digital testing in the automotive industry (pilot, planned in 2019) to unlocking the value of connecting Decentralised Energy resources to the energy markets at large.

Which kind of applications will be able on your devices?
Blixt’s revolutionary tech enables a vast range of totally new applications within a implementation areas such as energy, industry, lighting, automotive. All Blixt devices are OTA (Over The Air) enabled which provides the opportunity to continously develop new applications that can be distributed to the local environment, like a Tesla car’s updates.

When do you think we can buy and install Blixt’s products also in Italy?
A solid state circuit breaker based on SOC (System on a Chip) for the fuse box environment will most likely hit the market approximately 3 years from now. The two most time consuming stages for the commercialization is the compliance (all certification globally today is based on mechanical heritage) and design the Blixt technology into a system on a chip (to bring down the production cost to a minimum).

What are Blixt’s products made of?
Purely electronics like micro controllers, mosfets etc.

Do you think that maybe in future are you going to use blockchain in your business?
No, but that will not be up to me to decide. We will license our technologies to multinational corporations that will incorporate Blixt Tech in their products. They will decide. I must say however that I am slightly surprised by the question, mainly because I work with disruption. I tend not to try to find implementation areas for existing technologies (like blockchain), rather identify what you can replace existing technologies with.

Written by Edoardo Leggio