An Edinburgh-based company whose AI software helps energy and infrastructure planners choose the best route for power lines, cables and pipelines.
Continuum Industries makes software for planning big energy and infrastructure routes. Its product, Optioneer, helps power, utility and renewable energy companies decide where to put overhead power lines, onshore and offshore cables, and pipelines that might carry hydrogen, water or carbon dioxide. Normally engineers look at a handful of options over many months. Optioneer uses artificial intelligence to search through millions of possible routes and produce a short list of workable ones within hours, which people then review. The company says planning that would take 12 months can be done in as little as eight weeks, with less impact on the environment and on communities. That is a company claim.
The company grew out of the University of Edinburgh's Hyperloop team, a student group of around 150 people that built the UK's first hyperloop prototype vehicle and entered competitions run by SpaceX and Virgin Hyperloop One. The founders met there in 2016 and set up Continuum in 2018. They are Grzegorz Marecki, the chief executive, Emil Hansen and Adam Anyszewski. Mr Marecki said the hyperloop project showed him how valuable infrastructure is and how hard it is to move projects from idea to reality. He points out that nine in ten infrastructure projects run late or over budget, and that construction productivity has barely improved in thirty years.
Continuum is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The pages we read say it has customers in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and the United States, and name UK grid and energy companies among them, including National Grid, SSEN Transmission and National Gas Transmission. We did not find a list of other offices. Mr Marecki called the work an "exciting and important opportunity to accelerate the march of the infrastructure industry into the digital age". The company was planning to double its headcount in the year after the article we read, with a focus on engineering and product roles, but we do not have a current staff number.
Information about the day-to-day culture is thin. The story of its start, a group of students building a hyperloop vehicle for fun and for learning, suggests a team that likes hard engineering problems and building things. Its own claim is a mission to speed up the move to clean energy by making it quicker to plan the grid and pipelines that clean energy needs. Treat this as the company's own framing.
The jobs at Continuum include software engineers, machine-learning and optimisation specialists, geospatial and data engineers, civil and electrical engineers who understand how routes are designed, product managers, customer success staff and sales teams. Degrees in engineering, computer science, maths, physics and geography feed into this kind of work, and the Edinburgh location means close links with Scottish universities.
Website: www.continuum.industries
PURPOSE helps school and university students explore 62 sectors and over 1,000 entry-level careers in the UK, then connects them directly with employers.
Explore PURPOSE