Can you introduce yourself?
Hello, I’m Damien Cuny, CEO and co-founder of Epidherm. Epidherm is a digital platform whose mission is to accelerate the low-carbon transition in building construction and renovation. For those who don’t know you, can you explain how your service offering directly aligns with the Ministry’s public policies?The public authorities are currently in the final phase of consultation on new environmental regulations for buildings. These regulations are expected to come into effect next year and will require construction stakeholders to account for the carbon embedded in building materials. This is a crucial point: in new construction, the production and implementation of materials is responsible for 65 to 85% of a building’s carbon footprint over its entire life cycle. This means that today, it is, on average, less carbon-intensive to heat a building for 50 years than to build it! Epidherm teamEpidherm teamWhat have been your recent successes in implementing your project? Our platform aims to source the most relevant materials from our databases to implement on a building, within the technical constraints specific to each project. We are still relatively new (6 months), but we are very proud to have launched our beta at the beginning of November with around fifty users in the field, mainly in project management and construction (construction). Epidherm teamWhat are the upcoming challenges your startup/SME is likely to face?We are really at the beginning of deploying our vision, and we believe our biggest challenge is to onboard users from our very first developments, delivering value to them right away.
On a technical level, we are encountering
The same challenges as technology companies in other sectors: The efficiency of our tool and the speed of our developments are closely linked to the data infrastructure we use. There is a growing amount of data on building materials. This is great, but this data is fragmented and needs to be organized. We do a lot of cleaning and connecting, which is key for a project like ours. How have you adapted to the current economic and health crisis? Our teams work mainly in R&D and can do so remotely, so we are not really hindered in the development of our product. Moreover, we are fortunate to operate in a sector that receives significant support from the public authorities:The construction industry continues to operate during the lockdown period, and the government’s recovery plan allocates a substantial budget to the sector for the renovation of the building stock.
