June

A smart little IoT device that tailors your energy bill, June reduces the price you pay for energy by automatically changing energy suppliers.

The client

June constantly looks for the best market prices and automatically switches you between energy suppliers. Based on your personal preferences and consumption this smart energy solution advises on the best investments to improve your home energy management while saving you money on your energy tariff and your home energy management. The energy market is going through a transition from centralized to decentralized and sustainable energy systems. June wants to accelerate the energy transition through engagement with the end consumer, creating products and services addressing their needs while improving the way the current energy system works. The goal is to prepare the market for a 100% sustainable energy market, without leaving anyone behind.

June needed a full-service partner that could provide end-to-end solutions for their kick-off. From marketing material to hardware design and development, intense product management, business model design and the best user experience both on and offline, it was all needed to get them started. With our versatile team and expertise in IoT we were able to be a one-stop-shop for June in the first years of their existence. We aimed to be as flexible, available and reliable as possible, which is needed when your client is a startup.

The challenge

With their smart energy solution, June wanted to be able to track energy use in real-time and visualize it in a user-friendly way for their users. In the back, they wanted to compare the offers different energy providers had on the market and give their clients the opportunity to switch to a more optimized one for their profile. All of this needed to have a very high level of user comfort, automation and foolproof-ness so that they could attract a lot of clients, keep engagement high and scale up at the same time.

The solution

June’s smart energy solution now consists of a meter reader (hardware), a software platform, an application and a website.

Hardware :

We designed and developed a smart meter reading device (patent pending) that optically reads any analog energy meter with advanced OCR recognition and sends the data to the cloud over a LoRa network. This is combined with a connected communication device that talks with both the meter reading device and the June platform to visualize all the real-time data in an insightful way for the end user. In the background, this information is crawled by our algorithms to identify opportunities for clients to switch to a better tariff and also make that switch in an automated way.

Software, online platform :

Users can benchmark their consumption with June community members, people like them and their friends. A visualization of the energy savings per day, week and month is available and personal preferences can be consulted or altered. This dashboard is also available as an application.

Lesson learned

Every member of the Verhaert Digital team played a significant role for this client. So the credit for this project goes out to the designers, developers, consultants, product designers, product developers, engineers, project managers and the whole management layer for being at June’s back and call for the last 2 years.

This was so much fun! Being able to guide a B2C startup from its very beginning is a super experience. It requires an open mind and flexible planning, and it challenges almost everyone in your team which makes the group effort all the more fun. Also, there is a lot to learn from the June business model, they combine sustainability and technology in a financially healthy way that benefits the end-users (and their wallet), so it’s a win-win-win-win-… model. What’s not to like?

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