Pylon wins Egypt entrepreneur award

Ahmed Ashour & Omar Radi, Founders of Pylon - the infrastructure management platform transforming electricity and water companies in emerging markets through improved efficiency - have been awarded an Egypt’s Entrepreneur Award for Technology & Innovation.

Established in 2021, the awards honor Egypt’s brightest entrepreneurs across various industries. The Technology & Innovation award rewards entrepreneurs offering innovative technology services delivering business value, either creating competitive advantage, optimizing business processes, enabling growth, or improving customer relationships.

Pylon’s Smart Metering as a Service (SMasS) platform reduces energy and water inefficiencies and CO2 emissions by democratizing smart grid infrastructure to distribution companies in emerging markets. This enables them to capture up to $400 billion of losses and uncollected revenue. Pylon’s platform uses data and artificial intelligence to improve revenue collection, reduce losses, detect theft, and achieve a more efficient environmental footprint. 

Ahmed Ashour, co-founder, and CEO of Pylon, commented:

“We are delighted to be named as a winner of Egypt’s Entrepreneur Awards for Technology & Innovation. As a solution developed in an emerging market for emerging markets, we are thrilled our efforts to improve the utilities sector in Egypt and beyond are being recognized and that our hard work is paying off. We are driven to continue to develop our technology to eradicate inefficiencies and help support a more sustainable option for businesses and consumers.

“We look forward to continuing to generate a positive and sustainable impact in the future, via our continued expansion into new markets, including Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Our goal is to increase our smart metering points to three million by 2023, which would represent 4x year-on-year growth.”

The Pylon platform does not charge utility companies an upfront cost for its hardware, but its AI-driven subscription business model makes it easy for cash-conscious utility companies to deploy its solution at scale. With no upfront investment required, Pylon can help utility companies increase their top-line by up to 40%, just by signing up.

Pylon’s focus is on creating sustainable solutions for the planet and to achieve 1 Gigaton of total CO2 emissions reduction by 2035. Smart electricity grids can reduce utilities’ carbon emissions by 25% and reduce water losses in emerging markets (over 45 million cubic meters/day) by up to 22%, potentially providing enough water to serve over 40 million people.

Pylon announced a $19 million seed funding round, led by Endure Capital, and supported by CDC, the UK’s Government’s Development Finance Institution. Proceeds are being used to accelerate Pylon’s growth via expansion into other emerging markets and advance engineering and product development.