Sparrow Analytics meeting Growing Demand for Environmental Data

After working together on several projects, founders Elshad Hajiyev and Maxim Interbrick teamed up to analyze the movement patterns of vehicles in the city, particularly taxis. The idea was to use a special algorithm to read the accelerometers of mobile devices to calculate the standard deviation of vibrations and thus measure road quality according to the International Roughness Index (IRI).

Surprisingly, the taxis covered the whole city in a remarkably short time and provided enough data to create a map of the roads with the exact GPS location of the irregularities. After contacting MIT, EPFL and other academic circles, it became clear that as well as road quality, air quality, noise exposure and other climate parameters could also vary from street to street, and that there was no way of ensuring compliance without continuous scanning. It was decided to create a network of multi-micro mobile sensors to scan the city and process the data to create high-resolution temporal and spatial maps. Using AI, it is possible to teach machines to track pollution as well as many other parameters, detect possible sources and help the relevant agencies to eliminate them before they have a major effect on human life. This is how the idea of collecting and analyzing Sparrow data came about.

Paid pilots, pre-seed round, grants and loans 

Since its creation in March 2021, Sparrow Analytics is on the fast track. The company has already run more than 10 different paid pilot projects in Switzerland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States. To create a first-class device, the team needed to set up its own office with a laboratory. For this reason, and to grow as fast as possible, Sparrow was able to raise CHF 550,000, as a pre-seed round, from a member of the SICPA family. Between 2022 and 2023, the start-up received over CHF 350,000 in grants and loans from the Canton de Vaud.

As a result, Sparrow has built the most comprehensive, its patent-pending apparatus, laboratory, and algorithms to transform environmental big data into a true analytical product across a wide range of industries: healthcare, insurance, sport, real estate, geo-mapping, engineering, etc. Today, in January 2024, the team has proven its technical and commercial capabilities, as well as its ability to deliver high quality data recognized at the government level as Maxim Interbrick explains:

"From the beginning, ensuring the delivery of reliable data has been a top priority for Sparrow. Unlike some other companies in the microsensor and data delivery space, we have taken significant steps to validate our approach. Our devices and data undergo a rigorous validation and acceptance process alongside government reference stations, which reduces the risk associated with Sparrow's data and ensures that KPIs are properly achieved."

(ES)
Photo: Elshad Hajiyev, CEO (left), and Maxim Interbrick COO