An innovative tech company with roots in science, engineering, and consulting, Envirosuite is a global leader in environmental intelligence, utilising proprietary technology and real-time localised data to help industries grow and communities thrive.
Envirosuite is an ASX-listed company (ASX:EVS) with its origins starting as far back as 1990. The company uses science and technology to deliver software as a service (SaaS) solutions relating to air quality, water quality, noise, and vibration, with a varied list of clients including airports, water, mining and industrial, waste and wastewater. Jason Cooper has 20 years’ experience in the technology sector, and recently took on the role of CEO, replacing Peter White. Mr Cooper speaks to us about the value of environmental intelligence, the market-leading outlook he brings to his role, and the huge avenues of growth that offer a significant return on investments now and into the future.
Helping businesses thrive
“Environmental intelligence first started to make the scene a couple of years ago,” Mr Cooper explains. “It’s how you derive insights from environmental parameters that exist. There has been a considerable emphasis put on how businesses and society interact with the environment.”
This has moved beyond a stage of simple data collection and into the realm of analysis and insights, with many companies now turning that information into goals that can be acted upon for the good of the environment, the communities that surround them and their own operations.
“We look at environmental parameters such as noise, vibration, water quality, dust and air quality, and we take those parameters and then we start to understand how that impacts the society or the asset in which the company is operating.”
For example, a mine site needs to operate within vicinity of a community, and by doing that it understands that there are certain environmental parameters that affect how that community lives and how the site can be safely operated.
“As you can imagine, excess dust coming out of a mine site would have a negative impact on communities. Certain conditions in that environmental intelligence will contribute to how that mine site operates. It’s about giving our customers actionable insights based on those parameters.”
Envirosuite’s SaaS solutions assesses factors such as weather, the existing location, and trajectories, in order to provide the mine operator with predictive insights to ascertain when the company should time certain operations and at which part of the mine.
“We have a fairly large spectrum of customers that we are focusing on. Whilst mining is certainly a strong focus for us – we have some of the largest organisations in the world as our customers – we also have a very strong footing within the waste and wastewater communities. These are companies like Veolia and Suez, who are both our customers.”
Within the wastewater industry, Envirosuite generally helps solve odour problems. Odours at treatment plants originate from the receival of waste and as a by-product of the treatment process. Local weather conditions can intensify the impacts of odours and how far they travel, which impacts the community. The company helps those customers detect the specific type of odour and how it is affecting the community.
“We’re also number one globally within commercial airports, doing noise monitoring. When a plane comes into land, certain planes you don’t really hear, but others may come in too fast, too much of a pitch, so there’s excessive noise created. Our customers are from Los Angeles to Beijing to Heathrow, and certainly very strong in Australia.”
The global shift in corporate mindset around environmental issues means companies around the world are now recognising the importance not only of being seen to be doing good, but also actually doing it. Envirosuite’s vision is to allow businesses to thrive in parallel with growing communities.
“For most companies around the world now, it’s about how they can build a growing and profitable business without having a negative impact on the environment that they live in. There are simple, basic fundamentals for our customers. They know and they recognise that there is a long-term engagement.”
The mine sites Envirosuite works with are situated in mineral-rich locations, where communities are also built. Similarly, some of the company’s customers are ports, which know that the city’s viability depends on ships coming in, to unload containers, and to leave. It’s a part of the city’s economic growth.
The result has been a shift in how these issues are approached. Businesses now come to Envirosuite proactively, with prior knowledge of a problem, and the desire to be able to keep growing and engage with the community. Envirosuite’s solutions help industries to optimise operations, while strengthening their social licence to operate by building trust with communities and satisfying regulators.
“A big part of our solution here is how our technology enables a business to recognise how it’s performing, how they then communicate that to the community, and how the community then feels engaged in jointly solving this problem.”
There have already been several new executive orders signed by US President Joe Biden around these issues, one of which is designed to secure environmental justice and spur economic growth. This is to encourage businesses working in a particular area not to have a negative impact on lower economic societies.
“If you look at the water situation globally, we know that it is a very scarce resource. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in water-stressed areas. There are certain reports that estimate by 2030, around $1.9 trillion needs to be spent to address global water infrastructure. What we’re doing is playing a pivotal role in enabling this transition.”
Market-leading outlook
Having recently taken over as CEO of Envirosuite, Mr Cooper is looking to make positive change. He reminds us that he is first and foremost an engineer, having spent many years working for Siemens. He calls Siemens one of the world’s greatest engineering firms, and says this experience taught him to take pride in market leadership.
“Siemens had a perspective that they wanted to be number one or two in any of the markets they operated in,” he says. “I really am taking that same approach here, which has helped us narrow our focus into the markets that we want to pursue. We want to be one or two in any of the markets we play in.”
Mr Cooper has recently returned from three years immersing himself in the machinations of California’s Silicon Valley, where he worked in high growth companies and gained an understanding of what corporate greatness really looks like.
“We operate now in very much a globalised world, and competition comes from every corner of the planet. You have to have the right strategy; you have to have the right product-market fit; you have to have the right team around you to achieve that. I think it’s having that big global picture about what does breed success – invest into those parts.”
A big part of his focus recently has been on product strategy. The company already has a strong product-market fit, but the aim is to invest further into building world-class software platforms based on scientific fundamentals, which the company has been built on.
“A key part of our challenge is to take incredibly complex scientific models and to distil that into easy-to-understand information. [The key is] to simplify that message into something you can translate, and take meaningful action.”
Customer engagement is a fundamentally important area in building out the company, and Mr Cooper is putting a renewed focus on that. The company already has a strong global reach, but the aim is to build a truly world-class customer acquisition team, as well as closer relationships with customers.
The company currently offers three products; first is noise monitoring in commercial airports; second, the industrial platform focusing on dust and water quality monitoring, as well as odour monitoring; and its new product, EVS Water, helps design, optimise and improve biological, industrial, water and wastewater treatment infrastructure.
“With our airport product, we’re already number one in that market. What we will see there is continued growth. We are starting to see an increase in air traffic, and that will continue. The world post-COVID will be very different for airports, but a large amount of that will be around that community engagement piece. We do see a strong airport growth.”
There is also some strong new product innovation coming through in the airport market, with continued investment into technology driving deeper into operations within the world’s leading commercial airports.
“Within the industrial platform, we are going to be focusing on mining, and waste and wastewater. We have a strong global footprint here; we have some of the world’s biggest customers. Our focus now is to broaden our penetration for some of these global accounts, to drive greater market adoption. What we’re looking to do now is to build a market, not just chase revenue.”
The final product, EVS water, is very new, having only been brought to market in the last three months. This targets water treatment facilities and other utilities. It combines artificial intelligence and digital twin technology to predict and avoid water quality incidents, while identifying process improvements and cost savings for facilities in real-time.
“This is around providing a return on investment,” Mr Cooper says. “We’ve seen within a short space of time absolute market validation. I see this as a huge growth potential for Envirosuite. We’ve got product-market for it, and we know where we’re going to be accelerating. It’s now just working out what is the best go-to-market strategy to actually get the shareholder return. In the short term, I see growth above 20%, and then beyond that there will be significant upside in the coming years.”
Mr Cooper is a big believer in purpose-driven companies, and in this respect Envirosuite is a great company to get behind. What is most noteworthy is that this is Australian technology being taken across the world.
“To be number one globally, based out of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, is a fantastic example of true R&D, true ideation, and executing on it. We will be growing significantly over the next couple of years. We want to be on people’s radar, so for those people who believe in helping the environment and investing in technology, we’d love for people to come and talk to us about joining us on this journey.”
With a focus on helping businesses do the right things for the right reasons, and continued impressive growth, Envirosuite (ASX:EVS) is certainly one to watch out for in 2021 and beyond. Find out more about Envirosuite by visiting envirosuite.com.