Clean Data, Clean Energy: How enSights Is Fixing the $Trillion Performance Gap in Renewables

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:01.024) Welcome back to the Winner Circle. I am here with ALON from enSights and they are a new energy management platform specifically building around the renewable energy sector. This is a huge industry coming into America and they are tackling it with a software first approach and we are so excited because they are a 2026 Big Innovation Award winner. Congratulations and welcome to the Winner Circle. Alon Mashkovich (00:01.526) you Alon Mashkovich (00:23.522) Thank you very much. Very excited to be here, honored. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:27.648) Yeah, and why don't you give us a little bit of background about yourself and a little bit of background on insights. Alon Mashkovich (00:33.548) Wow, where to start from? So happy to be here. My name is Alon Moskovich, one of the co-founders and CEO of Nsightz, married with three kids that are my life, eventually bringing all the happiness and the purpose to building Nsightz. Nsightz, we are an energy business management solution. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:36.578) Yeah. Alon Mashkovich (00:58.414) And here in order to make sure that all these renewables that are, we see them growing everywhere will and produce all this energy and won't miss all this energy that today got lost. So we've got started building the business out of our own pain in order to solve these problems and to make it very easy to use and easy to solve. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (01:21.334) Well, yeah, I was doing a little bit of research on insights and kind of the market that you guys have. And it's really interesting because it reminds me of the cable TV market back in the sixties and the seventies and the eighties, where you had all these kind of local disparate cable TV franchises and nothing was standardized. Everybody was popping up everywhere. You kind of had corporations running cable. You kind of had mom and pops running cable. And it seems like the renewables kind of a very similar in a kind of a similar state. You've got kind of fragmentation everywhere and just somebody said you know millions or billions of businesses in the US that are doing this. Alon Mashkovich (01:56.842) you Alon Mashkovich (02:01.55) It's a good analogy. think I will use it. Definitely. So yeah, we see that this market is definitely based on legacy products and different legacy solutions out there that making the life very hard for asset owners and renewable energy assets to really make what they should make. And the grid is also a bit broken, let's say, to be honest, that is not here to support all the new innovative solutions that are going live. So definitely this is what we see. And here in order to provide an innovative approach and bring them to reality as they should be, because they are an active creatures that say hardware components that are spread across and they are operating. based on our weather, if you have sun, so they are generating. If you don't have, we're losing, so we have storage. And again, based on legacy, it is not capable to support all these innovative solutions. So I like your comparison, definitely. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (03:10.094) Yeah, well, took a lot of &A to kind of get cable shaken out just in time for them to kind of reimagine their business as the video kind of dies. Well, it's super interesting. So how did you spot this problem when you started to develop insights? What did you see out there? How were you involved in this? Alon Mashkovich (03:18.124) Hahaha Alon Mashkovich (03:26.604) you Alon Mashkovich (03:35.114) So I've been working over a decade as an energy business consultant and together with my co-founders, we have been struggling by doing all these manual work. you said, eventually we had an analog TV. Today we have streaming, it's different play. And so we have been analyzing tons of data manually. basically based on different CSV files, Excel's, and we said it is impossible to scale and continue to do all this manual work. So we've started to look into a solution that will make our life easier. and we didn't found something that was really accessible and easy to use. Before entering to the energy space as a consultant, I have been working as strategic business consultant and they taught me that everything you do, you should kiss, kiss, kiss and keep it simple, let's say. So this is what we tried to do. And energy is far beyond simple. And so we started to look into things, didn't found something. We had tons of data. Data is not a problem, but clean data, good data, this is the problem. So it came out of our own pain. We started to develop something very small to solve our pain. And today it became insights in order to make sure that all this data is clean enough, especially when we're coming to the AI era. that everything based on AI, but if you have not good data, the AI won't be good. So all these data that we're gathering, prioritizing and providing to our partners and customers in order to make their life easier, enabling their scale and making more energy out of it. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:30.625) So, so just to kind of step back, I'm a, I'm an asset owner, which means I've got either fields or, you know, rights to a field or rights to rooftops. And I've got deployed solar, know, solar panels all over those. I've got an energy, you know, supply coming in. And so I hook into your system and it's monitoring, you know, all of those assets and then all of them together as kind of, as my portfolio, it sounds like. So it's almost like you're, you're Salesforce or something. for your operations. So how did you know how to plug into all the different platforms that are out there? I mean I imagine there's homegrown stuff, I imagine kind of like you're saying there's CSVs and APIs and now MCPs. So how did you start tapping in and figuring out you know which systems you needed to connect with? Alon Mashkovich (06:04.107) Thank Alon Mashkovich (06:20.238) Customer-centric, very focused on our customers and on the brands and vendors that are out there. You mentioned monitoring, so maybe it's important to say that the challenge is not only the monitoring of all these assets, it's really maintaining the decisions and the confidence across these decisions as this complexity across all these vendors. increases. So for example, as you mentioned, the asset owner who owns dozens, hundreds and thousands of assets, probably back then, 10 years ago, maybe even less, you had one, two, three leading vendors. So we've started out of the large vendors out there based on our customer base. And we have grew it as our customer grew. So we started off the common one, expanded it and the integrations are easy at first maybe with the most common APIs, but it's not the real life scenario and it's not how it works in scale. Actually, we have served many of these vendors as a design partners supporting their different APIs in order to make sure that they will survive the scale. So when you are tapping into 10 assets, fine, 50, okay, you need to struggle, but 100, 1000, 10 thousands, it's a different play. So I hope it answered your question. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:46.977) Well, yeah, mean, you're talking about kind of managing these things and monitoring and doing the analysis as you kind of tap into that customer and they kind of sign off and you kind of give them that month end report or three months report. What are they shocked by having come from this kind of disconnected world into this new connected world? What is their first kind of experience? Alon Mashkovich (08:11.918) And you touched about a very painful point, reports, which takes to average company around two weeks every month to generate reports until it gets to the executive level, it is outdated. So the gap is pretty long. And we are shortening the cycle by integrating insights with a click of a button, you generate. reports to all of your stakeholders with enriched data based on clean data and standardized one. So I think one of the shocking facts that we have witnessed is one customer that has not a big portfolio around 50 sites and we have identified around 30 % of his portfolio underperforming for a long, long, long time. And it's pretty... Russ Fordyce 🏆 (09:05.11) Hmm. Alon Mashkovich (09:09.454) Not so common. It's pretty common that we've done a research that we have done three times year over year. And we've discovered that over 70 % of systems are not meeting the planned outputs. It is insane because everyone losing energy and losing money. And then they are surprised where this leak is coming from. So I think these facts are fascinating that today still you are losing and you cannot identify where from. So I think this point pretty pretty strong. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (09:46.903) So you're now going to be a great source of kind of, I guess, industry data. You're going to have all these platforms plugged into your system. And it'll be interesting to say, hey, maybe you could tell us now what percentage of assets are underperforming these days. Alon Mashkovich (10:04.814) You are definitely right. We have on the back end pretty interesting data that we see in some scenarios which vendors are providing the most best outcomes and where you should put them and which one you should prioritize and maybe think twice before you install them because the installation cost will be higher because of the equipment. is a bit complex on the other side of things. We have also a lot of data that we use in order to make comparisons and then also to provide peripheral data and provide more actionable insights. So even if you're taking into consideration weather, irradiance and other metrics, it is much more powerful when you are seeing how your environment behaves. So I think this is the way to go. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:58.4) Now I know you guys are bringing AI, we touched on it earlier. I imagine that your customers, as you deploy AI into these situations, your system's already been kind of looking back and saying, hey, this is how it performed, this is my, you know. what you might do and you kind of give that consultation to your client. I would think with AI you now move from that kind of reactive mode into proactive mode going like, hey, you should double the size of that field because that one's performing. I would imagine it gives you some real new capabilities. Alon Mashkovich (11:35.522) Definitely, but you should be very, very, careful by using AI because if the data is not good and not structured, so AI only accelerates the decision, but only after you really can trust the data. So the data source is the first step. Yes, AI accelerates many different things. And usually I start by saying that I wish that our industry we'll use at least 10 % of what we have already before moving to AI, but we need to keep the pace and be innovative. So yes, the AI definitely accelerated and we see a lot of impact when it comes to attaching storage assets, not only solar. Solar are pretty easy to handle, let's say, in comparison to storage. When it starts with integration of storage and taking into consideration Not only how the system should perform, make different ancillary services, arbitrage and others, but you also need to make sure that you are not killing the battery, that you are using with the battery in the right resources and not pushing the hair to the edge. Batteries are pretty gentle. So definitely AI helps in it, but the foundation must be very, very, very robust on data and trust the data. And because if the foundation will be noisy and inconsistent, so AI simply accelerate this inconsistency. we use it. Yep, exactly. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:01.152) Right. makes the problem bigger. It's the ripple. Yeah. So you keep talking about data and the cleanliness of data, and I'm a big believer in that. It's interesting, even in your own data that you think is super clean and perfect, you kind of start digging in and you're like, well, that's not right, or the system misinterpreted that. What are the biggest challenges that you see from a data side for these systems? What's the errors? Alon Mashkovich (13:14.808) Thank Alon Mashkovich (13:26.584) Thank you. Alon Mashkovich (13:30.894) you Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:32.969) you know, what are you having to clean out? Alon Mashkovich (13:35.66) Wow. You're touching a very sensitive point. Definitely it's the feedback loop. The feedback loop is very, very, very important because we're building our own modules based on this data. So before we release everything, we're trying to do everything we can and also to better test it with hundreds of use cases that will be able to provide us with a feedback loop in order to make sure that what the AI is suggesting or providing will be trustful. So a lot of it around the data cleaning and enrichment, because this is the basics. And then the recommendations. So we have on our platform, many different functionalities, which allows a full cycle of management, starting from the basic data acquisition, but going through the whole life cycle, including ticketing and providing a troubleshooting agents and a report and more. So closing all these loops and getting. the feedback from the end user to make sure that what we are suggesting is real and good. This is the main challenge. There are people that are very, let's say want to keep their old secrets to themselves. So we have separated tenants in order to make sure that things are not going to other ways. So I think these are the two points making sure that everyone gets what they want. but also making sure that no one got getting false positive, let's say, and false positive is something that we're really trying to eliminate. So I think these are the main two things if we're talking about the AI enrichment and the data. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (15:04.236) Great. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (15:15.074) Yeah. Well, now you mentioned the big trend of solar moving to the storage platforms. And you guys are doing a lot of work there, too. And you think about it. You think, oh, you just start making solar energy, and you put it into the grid, and everything's good. And you're like, no, sometimes you've got to store it and sell it. It's like gas, right? They're moving in ships and everything else. Alon Mashkovich (15:23.63) Thank Alon Mashkovich (15:36.044) Hahaha Russ Fordyce 🏆 (15:40.266) What are the challenges facing those teams as storage becomes kind of a bigger part of the solution? Alon Mashkovich (15:41.614) So, yeah. Alon Mashkovich (15:49.016) think one thing is evaluating what should be the best size and use case of the storage to be attached for solar or storage standalone. And no one knows additional revenue streams that can be attached to it. So really choosing the best size, the best product that will be there as you scale, and also choosing the right partner that will enable it to happen. Again, storage is a new to the market. We have so many data centers coming live. We have so many use cases, the prices. So really to understand how you design the best use case and also be able to forecast what you will be, what you will need to do in the future in order to support in new use cases around the storage. Yeah, I think these ones. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:41.474) So what percentage of an investment, when you're building one of these fields, these renewable energy fields, what percentage of your investment is locked up in storage, versus the solar panels and everything else? Alon Mashkovich (16:59.22) Wow, it seems that all the industry is shifting from solar to storage. It seems that the main growth is going to come from the storage and the need is there. So the grid is not capable to support all these high demand and all these infrastructure is not ready to that. So storage definitely very high percent. I think on every call that I have today with partners, Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:19.093) No. Alon Mashkovich (17:28.43) and colleagues, everyone talk about it. And I think that... Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:33.345) Yeah, people don't realize that there's a, there is a, a, well, maybe they do. There's, there's a fight for energy right now between EV makers and, EVs and the, electronic vehicles and then the huge data center deployments, you know, I was in that business for a long time and, know, you had entire countries who were banning data centers. Singapore, for example, was banning data centers because they didn't have enough energy. And what, what the amazing thing that happened is when Singapore did that, what happened is. you had all those businesses start up right outside Singapore because there was energy in the countries surrounding. And so there's this massive glut. And you see all the data center providers spinning up nuclear facilities that have been dormant for 30 years. And the latest one was... Alon Mashkovich (18:05.485) Please. Alon Mashkovich (18:12.636) you Alon Mashkovich (18:20.759) Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (18:24.034) And I joked with a Navy SEAL about this about a year ago of digging up old nuclear submarine assets and redeploying them as nuclear energy depots. And so there's this massive strain on the energy business as data centers are consuming more and more. Alon Mashkovich (18:44.878) And then the next point is the cybersecurity around it because it's becoming a very, very, very important point that you need to make sure that is over 100 % protected. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:00.106) Yeah, I mean, we're seeing the impact of energy politics, right, all around the world. And it's of national interest. So what you guys are doing is very interesting, kind of bringing this all together and giving us kind of that centralized view of it. Yeah, what does success look for a customer after six months or 12 months of being on the platform? Alon Mashkovich (19:05.315) Yep. Alon Mashkovich (19:18.833) you Alon Mashkovich (19:25.806) And I will quote one of our first ones back, I think, two years ago here in North America that said that whenever you're trading, I know that I can trust you that you can bring me an umbrella. So it was really attaching because we know that a company that handles hundreds of sites until now, the assets were there. but no one know if they're good or bad. And eventually we came in and providing him with the ability to really measure the performance and make sure that they're hitting their targets. So I think this is why we're here, in order to make sure that these assets are performing at maximum capacity all the time. It impacts everyone. So I think these effects the most and a success with a customer looks like that, yeah. He implements our solution. have a plug and play. So after he started to work, when he gets his, let's say keyboard on it, or he's enters to the platform and sees, and we see the impact very fast because this is why we're here, to make it easy, fast and simple. I think this is a success. Making sure that their assets are performing and performing perfectly. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:41.27) Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:46.388) And if you had one thing to tell these kind of renewable operators as they start to look to scale, if you could tell them one thing to remember or to know or a tip, what would you tell them? Alon Mashkovich (21:00.404) haaaannn Alon Mashkovich (21:07.318) I think that the most important thing is to control the data. So you are the owner of the systems. You need to control the data without other lockings. And it's not about innovation in energy and technology. It's about really restoring confidence in making these decisions that are based on data and a good data. So I think this is the most important thing that we need to make sure. that the customers need to make sure that the parties, that all the owners, that they control the data and are able to really trust it. Because we're hearing so many disappointments about all this performance and everything going back to the beginning. Good data, good structure and building everything on top of it. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (21:56.514) And as you guys are looking out kind of 12 or 18 months at this market, what excites you most? Alon Mashkovich (22:03.662) I think that today we are in a point that finally the industry understands that they need to make sure that the assets are performing and not only trust the incentives and flip them from one to another, but really I think the winner will be the one who makes sure that the assets are at maximum performance. And this is an exciting moment because we see it, we see the performing, we know that it is capable to do more. And finally, when the asset owners understand that and starting to shift into really focusing on it, I think this is the most important and for sure the storage stuff because storage is going to be a game changer in the industry. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (22:46.882) It's super interesting market. I never realized it was this big of a market. You drive around and see solar installations. I don't think anything of them. I usually think they're municipality owned or something, but they're not. So super interesting market. You guys are right in the middle of it. Congratulations on the win and all the success. And we look forward to seeing what you guys will do next. Alon Mashkovich (23:07.854) Thank you very much. I appreciate it a lot.