Ahead of the Curve
By Niki Stojnic
May 2024
When Mark Chung and business partners Jonathan Chu and Thomas Chung founded the energy-efficiency startup Verdigris back in 2011, “we were a technology in search of a problem to solve,” Mark says.
“My co-founders and I took for granted that we built technology, and then people bought the technology because it was cool,” he adds. The technology was indeed cutting edge: smart sensors that use proprietary AI algorithms to enable businesses to know, on a granular data level, where their electricity is going. They can then redirect the energy to increase efficiency and reduce waste. It’s the type of tool that’s a boon for big energy users, such as data centers. But it was also ahead of its time.
“We were trying to figure out how to make people interested in electrical intelligence and open their eyes to what is possible once you understand where your electricity is going,” says Mark. “Can you automate certain things? Can you balance a microgrid? Can you increase the capacity of this data center? These were things that people weren’t thinking about because they didn’t have this capability.”
That has completely changed over the last decade. “[There’s] growing awareness from these Fortune 100 companies that their carbon footprint is really impactful,” Mark observes. “In 2011, I don’t think many people were talking about it, but now it seems like climate is a very big deal — people have felt the effects, they can see it happening.”
"We have sort of been on a lonely island of people shouting in the wind around the importance of energy management."
Today, Verdigris focuses on selling to very large commercial industrial facilities with sizable electrical demands, such as Grand Hyatt, Verizon and T-Mobile. The company is aiming for $7 million in bookings this year, and a larger round of Series B funding in late 2025.
T-Mobile is responsible for Verdigris’ most seismic shift. In 2019, the telecommunications giant adopted the company’s technology across all of its data centers. The deal pushed Mark and his team to sharpen their focus on big enterprise data centers and cull less fruitful ventures such as shopping malls and multifamily buildings.
Less seismic, but also hugely impactful, has been the evolution of Verdigris’ work culture. Mark calls the early years “an engineer’s utopia of flat organization,” with many decisions made by committee or discussion. “It was a bit chaotic,” he recalls. As the company grew, it developed a more traditional organizational structure with managers, team leads and departments, and Mark’s leadership style shifted into a more nuanced business-world way of thinking — where certain decisions are not based on merit, but on experience or intuition.
The Inflation Reduction Act has been transformational for Verdigris, driving a lot of government spending toward infrastructure upgrades for renewable energy and climate. With the rise of generative AI, the number of data centers in the U.S. doubled in the last year. “People have an insatiable appetite for computing power and electricity. That’s propelling a market tailwind behind our solution,” says Mark.
It appears the market has finally caught up with Verdigris’ vision. “We have sort of been on a lonely island of people shouting in the wind around the importance of energy management,” Mark says. “The demand for our product is very high. I feel like we’re finally in the right place at the right time, with the right capabilities to be a very — hopefully — disruptive company.”