Forbes: Let everyone know what air they breathe. Startup Agdata offers hyperlocal air quality measurement

Agdat's expansion of the business with the new Agdata City service was greatly helped by the september entry of investors in the form of Garage Angels in Brno, of which jiří hlavenka, for example, who joined the group of Czech billionaires after a successful exit from Kiwi.com. Further money for the startup from Přibyslav was brought in by an increase in the share of the Pale Fire Capital Group. As a result, agdat's trio of founders received tens of millions of crowns for the development of the company. "It untied our hands. In addition to projects for agriculture, we can also focus on other areas that we find interesting in the long term," says Jiří Musil,founder and ceo of Agdat .

And they can also be interesting for the management of towns and villages, and therefore for their inhabitants. If a locality is suffering from poor air quality today, the local authority often does not have many options to find out for acceptable money the exact current data with which it could subsequently work in some way. Measuring stations of the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute are far from everywhere, and the acquisition of its own measuring station for municipal registers represents an investment in the order of lower millions of crowns, which is too high a sum for smaller and medium-sized municipalities and towns.

Agdata, on the other hand, offers them a variant where their equipment, which monitors the amount of airborne dust, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and tropospheric ozone, costs the municipality four thousand a month, or even cheaper if it orders measurements of only selected pollutant. The system then makes the detected data available immediately and anyone can access it via the Internet, for example through the website of the specific municipality where air quality monitoring takes place.

Agdata also builds on the new service on knowledge of the environment in which they move. "It tells us that in villages, farmers using our services are often members of councils. They know our agricultural solutions and it is easier for us to sell them a system for measuring air quality. Thanks to the fact that we are often in contact with them, we know that this is a topic that they have to deal with especially during the heating season," explains Musil.

This is confirmed by the mayor of Petrovice in karvinsko, where there are less than fifteen hundred inhabitants. "We are in a region where we have long-term problems with air pollution. And as a community, we want to keep track of what the real current situation is. Based on this, we can inform both our residents, as well as primary and nursery schools, that it is not advisable, for example, to go out or exercise outdoors at the moment," says Marian Lebiedzik.

This year, his municipality acquired three measuring stations, from which the measured values are transmitted online to the municipal website, where not only up-to-date measurement results are displayed, but it is also possible to view the long-term development of the air based on the data collected. It is the long-term monitoring that gives councillors and councillors the opportunity to adopt solutions that will actually help to solve the problem. In Petrovice, for example, they have gone down the path of contributions and loans for those who decide to replace old coal boilers with more modern and cleaner heating methods.