"Commercial and residential buildings are responsible for 40% of the U.S.’s total energy use, and electricity contributes 61% of that total in commercial buildings. Verdigris, founded in a garage in 2011 and now operating out of NASA’s Ames Research Park, is taking square aim at shrinking that figure. Verdigris hooks into a building’s electricity mains and then sends the data it gathers to the cloud, where its artificial intelligence tech monitors the energy usage. The aim is to identify problems and help find more systemic solutions—which can result in huge savings. The W Hotel in San Francisco says implementing the technology is now saving it $13,000 a month, thanks to insights like discovering that a heater for the kitchen dishwasher was running overnight when the kitchen was closed. The company is seeing success in the hospitality industry—Hyatt, Starwood, and Marriot are among its customers—and it raised has about $15 million as of early 2017. "