Bio

“Arnau is the co-founder and CPO of Phare Labs. He is a London-based designer and engineer working in consumer technology, systems, and innovation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design Engineering, an MA from the Royal College of Art and an MSc from Imperial College in Global Innovation Design.

Before founding Phare Labs with Daniel McBride he had worked as a lead industrial designer at a Barcelona-based startup, developing consumer hardware, and as a UX Designer for the Volkswagen group, part of the Digital Design Team. He has also been a visiting lecturer at the Beijing University of Technology; NTU Singapore; and visiting tutor for MSc and MEng programs at Imperial College London.”

One sentence pitch

Phare Labs is on a mission to make 1 billion buildings around the world safer places to live and work. Fires are still the single largest cause of insurance losses around the world, and smoke alarms are part of the problem. Phare is a fire alarm that uses a patent-pending combination of chemical and spectral sensors together with AI to detect fires earlier and more accurately, as well as monitor common air pollutants – pollutants that make indoor air 2-5x dirtier than outdoor air – to keep our customers safe from both acute and chronic threats, like fire and air pollution.

Industry/Sector

IoT / Proptech / Insurtech / Health & Wellbeing / AI

Company Investment Stage

Pre-seed – $325k from a fund and angel investors. Looking to raise a seed in Q1 2024

Company Location

London, UK

Pitch Deck

Problem

Fires remain the single largest cause of insurance losses worldwide, and smoke alarms are partly to blame. Based on technology barely changed since 1973, they miss over 40% of fires and have an 89% false alarm rate. The bottomline is that these devices put the very people they claim to protect at risk.

Solution

Phare detects fires early and accurately, increasing fire detection sensitivity by over 50%, decreasing false alarms by 98%, and detecting fires over 50 seconds earlier to prevent losses and save lives. The way we achieve this step-change performance is by using an array of chemical sensors and spectral sensors to sense what is happening in the room and use AI to make sense of it. Doing so Phare looks for the chemical signatures of fire, shortening response time, spotting fires that produce little or no smoke and separate different types of fires from one another.

Business Model

“We’re going to market in two stages.

Stage 1 is about building the base: getting Phare into as many homes/buildings as possible, as quickly as possible. To do that, we’re using a B2B2C model, working with retailers and partners in the property sector to distribute Phare across the US and UK from day 1. The more Phare devices installed, the more data we collect from them to train our AI model, and the greater our ability to leverage those devices to create value for insurers.

Stage 2 is about leveraging the base of Phare devices. First by introducing low risk customers to property insurers, and second by providing ongoing risk monitoring. For the former, we’ll charge insurers 10% of the first year’s premium. This will typically be c. £120, vs. the £350 to £700 they typically pay for customer acquisition. For the latter, we’ll charge £50 per home per year – providing insurers with:
(a) ongoing monitoring that Phare is installed, operational, and protecting homes from fires, and
(b) a credit-score-like risk grade to enable them to monitor risks in their portfolio and make informed underwriting decisions when renewing policies.

The combination of these two features saves insurers an estimated £104 per year for the average policy by helping them prevent and mitigate losses from fires (again, one of their largest sources of losses).”

Competition

Smart smoke alarms claim to be “smart” but they are just connected: their functioning principle is basically the same as the one used in the 70s. Air quality monitors, on the other hand, are good at sensing but bad at making sense, they aren’t able to provide actionable insights to induce real behaviour change. We disrupt this broken status quo and look at safety and health in a much more holistic way, protecting our customers from acute and visible threats like fire, and chronic and invisible threats like air pollution.

Traction

Over the past 2 years, we’ve worked hard to make Phare a product you can trust your life to. In 2022 we piloted Phare in homes across the UK, US and the EU. Through our pilot program, we gathered over 100 Million Data points to train our fire detection algorithm and fully validated our fire sensing technology. Earlier this year we raised a pre-seed round that helped us grow our team and patent our technology. We are now moving from pilot to sales, applying the lessons we learnt to engineer the mass-production version of Phare in preparation for it’s launch in 2024.

Looking For

We are looking forward to meet angel investors, VCs and family houses towards our seed round in Q1 2024.

Social media links

LinkedIn
Instagram