This is the twentieth in our “8 Questions” series — in which we sit down with founders in the Playfair portfolio who share their entrepreneurial journey.
We first invested in Continuum Industries, an AI driven, cloud-based optioneering platform that dramatically accelerates the development of linear infrastructure, in 2020. Since then, the company has built and deployed Optioneer across numerous large scale infrastructure projects for asset owners/operators. Optioneer has also become the go to software for utility companies and nationalised infrastructure operators to increase their transmission capacity to hit ambitious net zero targets.
Today, we sit down with co-founder and CEO, Grzegorz Marecki, to hear his story from the beginnings of Continuum Industries. We hope this can help other founders and aspirational entrepreneurs in their own ventures.
1. What inspired you to be an entrepreneur?
My dream was always to design the big systems that make the modern world run, such as roads, railways, electric grids and entire cities. I have huge respect for things that are so well integrated into daily life that we end up taking them for granted.
This led me to become a civil engineer. However, when I started working in the industry, I quickly realised that I would have to spend 20 years designing small elements like bridge foundations, individual columns, or drainage ditches before ever getting to lead large-scale projects. While these small elements are incredibly important, it was the big picture that I was excited about.
During my university years, I had loads of fun at a student society called HYPED, which built hyperloop prototype vehicles for Elon Musk’s competition in California. I wanted to ride on the hyperloop as soon as possible, and this experience made me realise how much could be done to improve the process of planning and developing physical infrastructure.
It was an interesting moment — we saw a problem in the industry, we were surrounded by some of the smartest and most driven people I had ever met, and we happened to run into people who were further down in their careers and were willing to take a bet on us. I had also just graduated so launching Continuum Industries became the only logical thing to do next.
I now get to develop tools other engineers and planners use to design the physical infrastructure that makes the modern world turn. Instead of working on one project every few months, I arm engineers and planners with tools to do a 10x better job on dozens of projects.
2. Can you take us back to the beginnings of Continuum Industries?
Continuum Industries was inspired by a dream of making a 1000 kph travel a reality.
That ‘moonshot’ forced us to think about infrastructure planning and design from the first principles to speed up the project development process.
However, we pretty quickly realised that no one is actually building hyperloop lines just yet, so there would simply be no market for us.
While hyperloop was far off, we realised that the transition to net zero is going to require millions of kilometres of new infrastructure built really quickly to connect renewable energy to centres of demand. And because it currently takes 12 years on average to take an electric transmission line from concept to operation in a country like the UK, the industry has been actively looking for ways to speed things up.
It took us multiple iterations in terms of market, customers, product and business models, but we have found our niche, and we are now taking Continuum Industries global.
Our tool, Optioneer, has been used to assess over 30,000 km of options of linear assets to date — while that’s a long distance, it’s still only the beginning of Continuum Industries.
3. What is the hardest lesson learned since day 1?
That we live in a world that often offers no perfect options, and we need to embrace this to move forward and achieve whatever it is we’re chasing.
This is true in terms of our product and industry — our customers often have to choose between achieving long-term decarbonisation goals or avoiding shorter-term localised environmental and social impacts.
The same applies to building a company — it’s often more important to make decisions quickly and learn from them rather than dwell on issues for a long time.
4. What has been your strangest day as a founder?
I struggle to single out any one day as the strangest because each day is full of swings. On the one hand, you feel like you’re on top of the world and winning, but on the other hand, loads of things just keep falling apart, and you have to help keep the rocket together. I think the tweet below captures that feeling pretty well. haha
https://twitter.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1490895277540012036
I think that spring 2020 was one of the strangest times for us — we closed our £1.5m fundraise with Playfair in March, and literally a week later, the world ground to a halt. So while we were hiring and extremely excited about what was next, we struggled to reconcile our excitement with what was happening around us.
5. What have you learned from your investors since you first fundraised?
When we started Continuum Industries, I had little sales experience beyond selling outrageously expensive rickshaw rides around Edinburgh. I was able to make as much as £800 per night on the rickshaw, but that was nowhere close to what running enterprise sales is like.
During a board meeting about two years ago, our investors helped us realise that while we were getting promising traction with a few customers, we weren’t engaging with enough new customers to support our growth plans.
This was a very tangible input that led to us recruiting our first sales development rep and enabled us to grow sales 7x in the past year.
6. As a founder, what is your proudest achievement to date?
Being able to work with amazing people to help build a machine that consistently creates value for its customers and the wider society.
The bottom line for Continuum Industries is whether we are helping to move towards decarbonisation — we haven’t yet quantified our impact in terms of carbon reduction but we know that our customers were able to bring their renewable energy project programmes forward by as much as 8 to 12 months. For utility-scale wind farms and electricity transmission projects, the impacts are huge.
We’ve even seen target dates for new network operations accelerated by as much as 3 years after work was carried out using Optioneer. There is still a lot of work to do, but this is already huge and extremely tangible.
Our technology’s impact on fundamental issues facing humanity attracts exceptional people to our team, creating a flywheel effect. The more great people we have, the more value we can create for our customers and society.
7. Crystal Ball: What are your plans for the future?
The next 30 years are going to be critical when it comes to dealing with climate change — we basically have to double the size of the electricity grid globally by 2050. It’s not a challenge the industry will be able to tackle without fundamental changes to how things are done.
Continuum Industries will play its part by unlocking faster development of new transmission infrastructure, which is critical to make the energy transition possible.
Our vision is to build the go-to operating system that helps developers take their project from a concept to a permit as fast as possible and at the lowest possible risk.
8. #1 piece of advice to an aspirational founder?
I tend to sign up to the saying that ideas are often cheap and execution is what matters the most.
After moving from Poland to the UK ten years ago, I often found myself with no more than £20 in my account at the end of the month.
Fast forward a few years, and we now have a brilliant team of 30 people who play a critical part in developing infrastructure worth billions of pounds.
I would say that just continuing to push forward consistently over time will help you get to places you wouldn’t have thought were available.
