Snowfox.AI: Helping businesses reduce their carbon emissions with artificial intelligence
About Snowfox
Snowfox.AI has transformed the way large companies process their purchase invoices using artificial intelligence (AI). The company is also helping organizations reduce their carbon emissions with its financial carbon accounting AI, Carbonfox, to track, analyze, and display carbon emissions automatically from business-relevant data in real time.
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Contact usSnowfox.AI turned to Google Cloud for a scalable, cost-effective solution to develop Carbonfox, its innovative financial carbon accounting AI.
Google Cloud results
- Greater scalability enables Snowfox.AI to onboard new customers more quickly and cost effectively
- Moving away from a monolithic system gives the development team greater flexibility
- Application built using Firebase sets up and manages new customers, moving tasks from developers to non-technical staff
Profits increased 10X since move to Google Cloud
The world emitted 36.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2021, and as global temperatures continue to rise, the call for governments and businesses around the world to address global warming grows louder. Consumers want to see businesses take responsibility for their carbon footprints and make real progress on reaching net zero.
Many businesses now face stricter requirements for reducing their carbon emissions. To ensure that they meet these requirements they need real-time and actionable data on their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across their whole supply chain. That's where Snowfox.AI comes in.
Snowfox.AI is a Finnish company, founded in 2018, that has built its reputation through its pioneering invoicing system. Designed to help companies cut the considerable costs of manually handling invoices, Snowfox.AI's system uses artificial intelligence to process them, and automates the posting and routing of those non-PO invoices that don't already have automation rules within an accounts payable software. Snowfox.AI developed its plug-in system using Google Cloud solutions.
With the success of Snowfox.AI, the company discovered that the data it got from every invoice could actually help companies track and analyze their carbon emissions. They began work on a new tool called Carbonfox, and once again, Google Cloud has been integral to its development.
Employing AI to calculate carbon emissions
When Snowfox.AI began its journey as a startup, it used an alternative cloud provider, but it quickly realized that it needed more power, more scalability, and greater cost efficiency. Most importantly, it wanted a cloud provider with a genuine commitment to sustainability, a real passion of the Snowfox.AI team. So the company soon switched to Google Cloud. "I could see that everything had become a little too complicated," says Ville-Veikko Laukkanen, CEO, Snowfox.AI. "We had to simplify things, so our Development team suggested the move to Google Cloud. It was their first choice."
The team started from scratch after the move to Google Cloud, not retaining a single line of code. They wanted to build their new accounts payable invoice automation (APIA) solution from the ground up using Google Cloud technology. The APIA was created when the Snowfox.AI team saw a real need for greater automation in the traditional finance processes of companies.
"I could see that everything had become a little too complicated. We had to simplify things, so our development team suggested the move to Google Cloud. It was their first choice."
—Ville-Veikko Laukkanen, CEO, Snowfox.AI"With our previous cloud provider, we used containers, and we managed everything ourselves," says Markus Paaso, CTO, Snowfox.AI. "With Google Cloud, it's mainly serverless, so there's a big difference in the architecture compared to our previous architecture."
As the team developed the APIA solution, they also realized that the data in each supplier's invoice that was processed using APIA could be used to calculate a company's carbon emissions. The Snowfox.AI team started to develop Carbonfox, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to trawl through a company’s purchase invoices for all the necessary data for calculating emissions.
Once the AI model is trained, Carbonfox calculates emissions from invoices received in real time. AI uses emission factors to calculate the level of GHG emissions that have been created across the entire global supply chain. And the AI continuously learns, so the accuracy of its calculations improves with new data. This was a big step for Snowfox.AI, which built Carbonfox using Google Cloud solutions.
Boosting scalability to bring in new customers
The company's SFTP (secure file transfer protocol) server was set up in Compute Engine. But the company's main architecture runs on Cloud Functions. Snowfox.AI has approximately 200 unique Cloud Functions running. This allows the team greater flexibility during the development of the system.
Using Cloud Functions allows the team to deploy only one cloud function at a time. This means the developers only have to focus on each part they're working on. Before, using a monolithic system, they would have had to worry about the whole system as any changes could have possibly broken it. "Cloud Functions is really cost effective, scalable, and robust," says Paaso. "And it makes our developers' daily lives really enjoyable."
"Now we are calculating the costs of the AI model and its accuracy. And from that, we can calculate the profit that each AI model provides. Using this method, we have calculated that we have increased our profits tenfold since we moved to Google Cloud."
—Markus Paaso, CTO, Snowfox.AIThe company keeps its data in BigQuery and Cloud Storage. BigQuery has built-in capabilities that ingest streaming data and make it immediately available to query. And Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is where Snowfox.AI trains the AI models that allow Carbonfox to calculate an organization's greenhouse gas emissions.
The company has created 400 different AI models for 70 customers. The team set up an automated data science process called hyperparameter tuning. This allows you to pick the AI model and then the hyperparameter tuning algorithm. Letting the algorithm know which parameters it should optimize can help measure the effectiveness of the AI model. "Now we are calculating the costs of the AI model and its accuracy. And from that, we can calculate the profit that each AI model provides," says Paaso. "Using this method, we have calculated that we have increased our profits tenfold since we moved to Google Cloud."
The major benefit that Snowfox.AI has seen from changing its cloud provider to Google Cloud is significant scalability. Prior to the move, Snowfox.AI had to build a new system for every new customer. But Paaso knew this approach simply wasn't scalable or sustainable. With Google Cloud, the onboarding process is a lot simpler. "Now we don't have to do any development work," says Paaso. "We've built an application using Firebase that is used to set up and manage new customers. So we are moving things from developers to our non-technical staff. And that truly allows us to scale up."
Customers gaining competitive advantage
One of Snowfox.AI's forerunner customers, iLOQ, is leading the technological revolution in the digital locking industry. iLOQ is committed to taking a holistic approach to sustainability, looking at all the environmental, social, and governance factors in their daily operations across their entire supply chain and throughout the lifecycle of their solutions.
This approach requires access to detailed data in real-time and in a transparent manner. Making emission calculations by hand once a year at the end of the fiscal year would be clumsy, laborious, and expensive. iLOQ needed to get a complete picture of its overall climate impact, and they partnered with Snowfox.AI. "Using artificial intelligence, we are able to obtain a comprehensive and continuously updated view of our supply chain carbon footprint and use this data to manage the reduction of our value chain carbon emissions," says Timo Pirskanen, Chief Financial Officer, iLOQ.
This is an entirely new approach for iLOQ and a strategic investment. With Carbonfox, their reporting and planning activities will improve, giving them a significant competitive advantage.
Going global with Carbonfox
Moving to Google Cloud has given Snowfox.AI the ability to grow and develop Carbonfox, and the company is now making it a key part of its business. It's why Google Cloud's commitment to sustainability makes it such a great match for Snowfox.AI. "We were excited to hear about Google's sustainability plans at the Google Next conference," says Laukkanen. "Together with Google, we are outstanding in solving compliance and security requirements, which are so important today, and this is helping take Carbonfox further. We want it to go global."
"We were excited to hear about Google's sustainability plans at the Google Next conference. Together with Google, we are outstanding in solving compliance and security requirements, which are so important today, and this is helping take Carbonfox further. We want it to go global."
—Ville-Veikko Laukkanen, CEO, Snowfox.AITell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Snowfox
Snowfox.AI has transformed the way large companies process their purchase invoices using artificial intelligence (AI). The company is also helping organizations reduce their carbon emissions with its financial carbon accounting AI, Carbonfox, to track, analyze, and display carbon emissions automatically from business-relevant data in real time.