The software industry has a time-tested tradition of proving a new program’s viability with a simple code input and a simple text output: Hello World.

Hello World has been with us for decades, and it is the sign that “your code compiles, executes, and consistently produces the desired outcome.” Since the 1970s, it has also come to mean something more – it indicates that a program can do something useful for a much bigger group of people than just those who are building it.

Hello World is more than a phrase – it is a moment.  It is a moment that anyone reading this will have felt in consumer technology: the first time you encountered a Macintosh four decades ago (if you are of a certain age) or YouTube (if you are a bit younger).  For some, myself included, that encounter continues through today’s artificial intelligence.  It’s this last moment that leads me to a hello world of my own: Halcyon.

Halcyon is an information platform for professionals seeking faster, better-informed decarbonization business decisions.  It is AI-powered, fast, flexible, and built on the most authoritative information available.  It is designed to supercharge the critical information, analysis, and planning work of anyone who spends hours and days reading energy dockets, or parsing through comments, or running their own version control against integrated resource plans. We hope that Halcyon becomes a critical instrument for speed and scale, the two priorities of developing and deploying world-changing climate-positive solutions.  

I am incredibly lucky to be working with a founding team of tech entrepreneurs, machine learning experts, and deeply experienced builders and operators. When I met Bruce, Alex, and JL, I found kindred spirits thinking about decarbonization challenges with a shared lens.

Halcyon is equally lucky to have outstanding investors on board for our seed round. Obvious Ventures, Congruent, and Overture Climate VC are renowned investors with many decades of climate experience between them. They are ideal partners, and an integral part of our building process. 

One motivator for anyone building our future infrastructure is the need for more of everything. More clean electrons, more electric vehicles, more clean molecules – but also more transmission capacity, more climate and market data to process, and more business model innovation. After almost no growth in electricity demand for the last 15 years, the US is racing into a new era of demand growth.

Globally, we need just under $200 trillion or so invested in the next three decades to reach net zero emissions by mid-century. In 2023, we invested $1.8 trillion.  Deploying that money is obviously a capital markets challenge, but it is also a technical challenge, a business strategy challenge, a planning challenge and a policy and regulatory challenge.  There is a through-line upstream to every one of those challenges: access to information. And Halcyon is attacking that information access challenge head-on.

One example, of many, gives a sense of the problem and the opportunity within it as well. Last month, the US Internal Revenue Service held a hearing on the “Section 45V” credit for clean hydrogen created by the Inflation Reduction Act. The proposed rule is 36 quite dense pages of the Federal Register, totaling more than 39,000 words - quite a lot for any one analyst to sift through. Beyond the proposal language itself, however, the IRS requested public comments on its rule-making for clean hydrogen – and received 30,000 of them! That’s more than any person could read, but it is not too much for machines that have been tuned with the right information approach.

Today’s information landscape is opaque, fragmented, noisy and ever-expanding.  That is a source of intense frustration – just ask any analyst in a strategy or policy role – but with emerging artificial intelligence capabilities, it is also an opportunity. AI is part of a technology approach to information that can supercharge human inquiry, and enables analysts and executives alike to do what they do best: think, decide, and act faster, with better information.

AI is only part of what Halcyon offers. Search infrastructure and a custom knowledge graph streamline discovery and research. A natural language interface makes it easy to define scope and layer additional context while interacting with information, and a transparent document library with customizable search filters offers precision and control.  The result, we hope, allows a whole new level of what design and innovation researcher Jan Chipchase refers to as delegating human effort to technology. And in the process, making humans that much better at their crucial work of raising capital, siting assets, and building.  

I have almost two decades building information and insight offerings for clean energy developers, strategists, investors and planners. There has never been a better time to build technology to serve these key players.  Today’s technology, too, is just the start of what is possible and just the beginning of what we will be able to offer.

It is an exciting moment, and an important one too, when new technology meets a market that is ready to use it.  It is all the more important when that market really matters. We are excited to launch, and we look forward to building for you and building with you. Hello World.