Sintropy.ai, a start-up specialising in energy efficiency for the food and non-food retail sectors within the agri-food industry, has announced that it has closed a €1 million seed funding round. The round was led by Maia Ventures, with participation from the investment firm FPR.
Energy is now one of the fastest-growing cost items for those managing networks of retail outlets or production facilities. For a restaurant chain or retail brand with dozens of locations, every increase in the energy bill means a margin that is quietly eroded, month after month.
Sintropy.ai tackles the problem with an approach designed so as not to require any operational changes on the part of the customer. Technicians install the company’s proprietary, wireless and non-invasive sensors on existing air-conditioning systems and kitchen equipment. From that point onwards, the AI platform continuously monitors energy consumption, identifies waste and inefficiencies, and automatically adjusts how the systems operate. The customer doesn’t have to do a thing: the system works on its own, 24 hours a day. Sintropy.AI now has over 20 active customers, including Barilla, KFC, Yamamay, Miscusi, and WAO, who have recorded results showing a reduction in energy consumption of between 15 and 20 per cent.
“The world of energy saving today is a broken system: too many steps, too many players, too much complexity. With us, you don’t pay less for energy; you simply use less: we come round, install the system, and it runs itself. For our customers, we’re talking about a reduction in energy consumption of between 15 and 20 per cent for air conditioning and cooking, without them having to assign a single person to the task.” “This round of funding enables us to further accelerate the ease of adoption and ongoing optimisation of our proprietary sensors and algorithms,” said Andrea Codini, CEO and co-founder of Sintropy.ai, in a statement.
Sintropy.ai was founded in 2024 by five people who had previously worked together at the Santagostino Medical Centre. Andrea Codini (CEO), Karim Kassem (CTO), Piertobia Laporta (COO) and Luca Savastano (CDO) (pictured together) come from the engineering and technology team, where for years they designed and managed the technological infrastructure of one of Italy’s leading providers of accessible private healthcare. They were joined by Luca Foresti, as co-founder and strategic advisor. This experience, gained by working within a real-world network with stringent operational constraints, has been brought by the team into the retail and industrial sectors.
The funds raised will be used to accelerate the technological development of the AI layer that will enable anyone to achieve energy savings through natural language, with the aim of consolidating the company’s position as an industry leader in Italy within the retail and food retail sectors, and laying the foundations for European expansion. To support this growth, the team, currently comprising 12 people, will be expanded to around 20 people by 2026, with recruitment focused primarily on tech roles.
“At Sintropy.ai, we have found a very strong technical team, a product that has already been validated by the market, and a value proposition with a directly measurable impact on the bottom line. Our investment will enable the company to scale up its operations, bringing its value proposition to the food retail sector (restaurants, canteens, large-scale retailers), the retail sector and agri-food production facilities. With Sintropy.ai, energy efficiency is transformed from a complex project into an automated, scalable and easy-to-implement solution,” says Andrea Galassi, founding partner of Maia Ventures.
“Managing a network of restaurants means having hundreds of air-conditioning and kitchen systems running for many hours every day. Energy efficiency is becoming an increasingly important issue, but traditional solutions require significant time, resources and investment before measurable results can be seen. “With Sintropy.ai, installation was quick and we started seeing tangible results in terms of energy consumption straight away, without having to change our operational routines in the stores,” says Marco Spadoni of KFC Italy, one of the first companies to implement the solution.
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