Measuring the carbon footprint of ads and AI

How can this software help companies track and lower the impact of their digital processes?

Spotted: While many companies are now tracking their carbon footprint, some types of carbon are much easier to measure than others. For instance, it’s much trickier to know how much carbon is being used by generative AI use, online advertising, social media, and other types of digital activity, than it is for things like transport.

Startup Hiili (which means “carbon” in Finnish) was founded specifically to develop technological solutions to this problem. Its platform combines Internet measurement techniques and AI to make an accurate estimate of the energy consumption of a company’s digital processes.

For advertisers wanting to keep track of the impact of a campaign, they can connect their demand-side platform (DSP), ad server, and social media accounts to the Hiili platform, which calculates energy consumption based on impressions. The platform then offers a grade, which is measured against industry standards, as well as ways to optimise future campaigns. Hiili has also developed a tool to measure the energy consumed by AI tools, including Chat-GPT.

Rubén Cuevas, one of the co-founders of Hiili, told Springwise that the goal is to do more than merely measure carbon use, saying, “We want to serve our customers to measure and minimise their energy consumption (and carbon footprint) across their entire digital activity and not focused in just one vertical business.”

Hiili was founded by researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), and the university is a shareholder of the company. The startup is currently in the middle of its first funding round, which Cuevas says is attracting a lot of interest. The funding will be used to consolidate its offerings in digital advertising and AI and “start the development of products in other verticals such as videoconferencing and collaborative applications.”

Written By: Lisa Magloff