IBM SmartCamp Finalist Profile: ConnectM — Sensing Opportunity In The Towers

If you’ve ever been to India, you could drive yourself crazy trying to count the number of cellphones (although you could count the traffic lights in Bangalore nearly on one hand!).

Vivek Khemani, CFO, ConnectM delivers his company's pitch for remote sensing analytics for the telecommunications industry during the IBM Smart Camp Global Finals.

India’s telco deregulation in the late 1980s helped the Indian telecommunications industry leapfrog traditional wireline phone infrastructure, and instead you now have 350,000+ cell phone towers spread across the span of the sub-continent.

IBM SmartCamp Finalist ConnectM has a vision for better utilizing all those towers: To become a leading energy management solutions provider, leveraging business intelligence and analytics across the telecom tower and building infrastructure.

The company’s offering provides a remote monitoring and energy management solution for energy spend optimization, operations and management, asset management, and revenue assurance.

Sounds mundane? Well, the market for solutions that manage and optimize energy alone is an estimated $16B worldwide, and ConnectM is utilizing its current leadership position in India, with an installed based of over 5,000 cell sites, to build a scalable and profitable business.

Before it even reached the IBM Smart Camp finals, ConnectM delivered annualized energy savings of over $4 million US to its current customers, including both India and India-based multinationals, demonstrating well before it came to requesting venture capital money, that it was already making money.