Salvador Constanza Levicán’s first attempt to commercialize a technological innovation developed in-house failed. That was four years ago. The electrical engineer and her fellow students from the renowned Universidad Católica, the Catholic University in Santiago, developed a warning system for forest fires.
The Andean country is suffering from increasing drought, and fires threaten important agriculture and viticulture. To do this, she and her small team combined NASA satellite images and weather forecasts with artificial intelligence to warn of forest fires with pinpoint accuracy.
The simulation worked – but nobody was found willing to invest in further development. “We developed first and then thought about how we could sell it,” says Levicán. She would do it differently today: “Development, marketing and sales have to take place in parallel right from the start.”
She knows what she’s talking about: With Suncast, she has now founded a start-up that increases the productivity of solar systems through data analysis. It links climate forecasts with the production data of the solar parks in order to be able to predict more precisely how much electricity the modules will deliver every day.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
“When a cloud moves in front of the sun, production falls,” says Levicán. Reliable forecasts are essential for electricity manufacturers. Levicán also uses the rainfall and the amount of dust to calculate when the modules need to be cleaned. With terms of more than 20 years, these are important cost factors.
After two financing rounds with Chile Global Ventures and Fundación Chile, each of which entered with a minority stake, the now 27-year-old has around a quarter of Chile’s solar collectors under contract. Most recently she won a major project with ABB. In addition, Suncast was selected to participate in the Dubai Expo. Your advantage: You are on the move in a real future field in the region. Renewable energies are growing rapidly and the forecasts are bold.
Chile wants to become one of the leading suppliers of green hydrogen worldwide
Chile is using its sunny Atacama Desert and windy Patagonia to soon produce large quantities of sustainable electricity. Chile wants to become one of the leading suppliers of green hydrogen worldwide, obtained from energy for which no greenhouse gases have been released. But Levicán wants more: she already has orders for solar parks in Mexico. Now she is further developing her technology so that it can also be used for wind farms.
Since it mainly works with European energy multinationals in Latin America, it is now expanding to Europe as well. With the Technical University of Munich and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, she is currently adapting her model to European standards in order to better understand this energy market. As a pioneer in sustainability, Germany is a global leader, she explains, explaining her focus on Germany. The founder misses this close cooperation between research and companies, as it exists in Germany, in Chile.
Series: Women Entrepreneurs Worldwide
Israel is one of the countries with the most female founders in the OECD comparison. Eynat Guez is the most successful entrepreneur in the Israeli start-up scene.
>> Read the article here
Levicán is now well known in Chile’s entrepreneurial landscape. She has become an important contact person for the media in the future field of renewable energies. She was interviewed as an expert on the Chilean television channel La Red. She used to be welcomed as an intern rather than an entrepreneur because of her youthful appearance. Because of their popularity, this is seldom the case.
As she herself says, Levicán grew up in modest circumstances. Her father, a philosophy teacher, always encouraged her to think, but could not give her sufficient support. She needed scholarships to be able to afford both the school and the prestigious university.
Especially in the traditionally male-dominated energy industry, the student at the time with a helmet and open notebook caught the eye among technicians and engineers. In the Andean country, women are significantly more represented in the start-up and start-up scene than the average in the OECD countries.
In start-up-friendly Chile, the proportion of women inventors is 27 percent, the highest among OECD countries worldwide. For comparison: In Germany just seven percent of inventions are registered by women.
With a share of 20 percent women, Chile is also the world leader among the solo self-employed. In Germany it is just four percent. This can partly be explained by the fact that single mothers in countries like Chile with a large informal sector become self-employed because they have no other choice to secure their livelihood, explains Levicán. On the other hand, the rate of women entrepreneurs who employ white-collar workers is 2.4 percent, just above that in Germany (2.2 percent).
“Diversity has become everyday life”
The high proportion of women in Chile’s economy is new. Until recently, the country’s entrepreneurship was also considered particularly conservative within South America. “But Chile’s society has made a huge leap in the past few years,” observes Tina Rosenfeld, who sits on several supervisory boards and leads Chile Global Angels, i.e. leads investors who invest in start-ups. When she came to Chile 25 years ago, almost all entrepreneurs were politically right-wing. “It’s completely different today, diversity has become everyday life.”
Levicán himself experienced how strenuous this social change is. She was appointed the youngest member of a state committee by the Ministry of Energy. The members take care of adjustments to the regulation in the energy market. “Every two weeks we went through every point of the set of rules and discussed for hours until we found a consensus.” Many members of the committee would have debated the social dimensions of energy policy for the first time. “Instead of discussing technical details such as cable sizes, we discussed access to electricity for all walks of life,” says Levicán. Meanwhile there is also consensus in Chile that energy policy should not only be discussed technically, but that it should also be about civil rights.
In principle, Levicán has already experienced what Chilean society is currently doing with the constitutional convention: 155 elected people are negotiating their new constitution until at least the middle of next year. Each article must be passed with a two-thirds majority. The pressure to change has built up over the past few years as Chile has become more and more liberal.
For the start-up investor Rosenfeld, Levicán is a representative of the country’s second generation of founders. “I admire her for her openness, that she looked beyond the borders to Europe from the start.” Many representatives of the traditional elite would never get the idea.
For Levicán there is no alternative: Instead of just selling raw materials such as copper, Chile would now have the unique opportunity to export knowledge and services with the energy transition. “We have to seize this historic opportunity.”
More: Kristel Groenenboom: “I didn’t even tell some customers that I was the managing director”