Anticipate and prevent extreme climatic episodes to avoid power outages and floods. It will soon be possible. This is what the young Montreal startup Jakarto has set itself the goal of getting its hands on the geomatics specialist Anagraph.
Jakarto’s acquisition of Anagraph allows the company, which now has close to 50 employees, to expand its digital offering and acquire customers in the insurance and telecommunications sectors. It is therefore close to the break-even point. The company, whose turnover has tripled in the past three years, expects to generate positive cash flow – and, therefore, to have more income than expenses – from 2024.
However, its target market remains that of the public sector. In addition to municipalities, electricity distribution networks are in its sights. This includes Hydro-Québec, back home, and its counterparts across the continent. Jakarto has also recently opened an office in Florida to integrate the American market.
“The data that we produce makes it possible to quickly visualize the state of an infrastructure,” explains Nicolas Delffon, the founder of Anagraph, which is, with seven employees, under the aegis of Jakarto. “Jakarto had been our client for the past five years and when they told us where they wanted to go, we accepted their offer. »
GreatGoogle!
Nicolas Delffon defines the two companies in a somewhat caricatural way, as an improved version of Google Maps and Google Street View which mainly target municipalities and public services. Their technology helps governments and utilities prepare, at little cost, for severe weather events that seem to be happening more and more often across the province and beyond.
Many of the many power outages that occurred during the ice storm earlier this spring, the losses suffered by affected households and the high cost of repairs could have been avoided with a tool like his, says Félix Laroche, p .-dg of Jakarto. “Our model can anticipate in which region the trees and branches that clutter the power grid need to be pruned more often than others,” he illustrates.
In the case of floods such as those that occurred again in southwestern Quebec last month, Jakarto’s digital modeling technology helps prioritize cities, neighborhoods and even buildings that need to be adapted more quickly in order to minimize the damage. “We can calculate up to the height of the threshold of the doors and see who will be most affected by a flood”, says Félix Laroche.
digital twin
The technology developed by Jakarto fits into an emerging technological niche known as the “digital twin”. It involves recreating a real environment in a virtual way from data combining both video images captured by drones and millimetric measurements taken by more specialized equipment.
According to the start-up, its technology can reduce by more than 60% the costs related to the logistics and travel required to supervise and maintain municipal infrastructures such as road signs, fire hydrants and others.
Félix Laroche gives the example of a digitization project for the city of Longueuil of some 2,000 kilometers of roads, which made it possible to list more than 80,000 billboards in just a few days. “Doing that manually would be endless,” he says.
Such a register then makes it possible to better manage the municipal inventory. Let’s think of all those orange cones that seem to have been forgotten for months along the roadside all over Quebec. “It’s also a way to reduce the effect of the labor shortage on the road network. They can do more with less,” concludes Félix Laroche.