Paul Sizaire
Paul Sizaire

As organizations around the world increasingly prioritize sustainability initiatives, heavy industries face significant challenges. According to the International Energy Agency, they're responsible for a quarter of all global energy-related CO2 emissions, and their decarbonisation efforts are moving slowly.

This is because companies in heavy industries must account for significant established infrastructure, demanding inordinate time and resources just to determine the best path toward reducing emissions. And if they choose poorly? These organizations will pay a heavy cost as they scramble to pivot their billion-dollar facilities in another direction.

As co-founder and head of product at Sesame Sustainability, Paul Sizaire is building a solution that empowers heavy industry companies to simulate complex infrastructure scenarios, identifying potential pathways for decarbonisation at faster speeds without sacrificing thoroughness.

The Technical Foundations of Sesame Sustainability

Sesame Sustainability can trace its origins to a student collaboration at one of the world's most prestigious engineering schools. Initially, it took the form of the MIT Energy Initiative's SESAME, a student research group led by principal research scientist Dr. Emre Gençer.

Sizaire's work with SESAME focused specifically on hydrogen supply chains, building models that could quantify the impact of emissions across industrial scenarios. His work was featured in published studies and a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy on Harnessing Hydrogen, but it also laid the technical foundations for Sesame Sustainability.

The next evolution of SESAME was software that could analyze heavy industry supply chains from a cost and emissions perspective. In doing so, it was able to provide insight into different configurations of technologies that would result in lower emissions.

After discussing the software's potential for real-world applications, Sizaire, Dr. Gençer, and fellow student Jim Owens spun the initiative out into Sesame Sustainability.

The Sesame Sustainability Promise: Smarter, Faster Energy Planning

Sesame Sustainability takes Sizaire's initial work and boils it down to a niche use case: a software platform that helps industrial companies simulate the emissions, cost, and supply chain impacts of configuring their physical assets.

Traditionally, companies in heavy industries looking to optimize their energy efficiency must first conduct full-blown engineering studies that can take years. But with Sesame Sustainability, that timeline condenses greatly.

"My team and I take great pride in having built a solution that enables these companies to perform tens of analyses in a matter of weeks," Sizaire says.

The algorithm he built integrates energy and emissions data, infrastructure requirements, cost assumptions, and technology performance metrics, factoring each data point into a rich simulation that mimics an organization's environment with pinpoint accuracy. Users can then test scenarios by changing energy inputs or processes — like using green hydrogen instead of natural gas — to see the impacts and trade-offs these changes would have on their entire ecosystem.

Key to the platform was creating an intuitive yet powerful user experience that would empower non-technical users to simulate their infrastructure without compromise. The models had to be usable and readable by these stakeholders, so Sizaire taught himself Figma and designed an interface that would allow non-tech-savvy users to easily interact with the optimization model, get clear results, and see their potential impact on emissions.

"We package and abstract away the complexity of these industrial processes and provide our users with a very intuitive interface," he says. "We present results in a digestible format despite the large amount of data. This empowers planning and strategy teams, unifying the analyses around a standardised methodology and vetted results."

The result: faster decision-making, greater strategic alignment, and the potential for meaningful energy impacts — all while minimising the risks of large-scale decisions with unexpected consequences.

In its first year, Sesame Sustainability raised a $2.4 million seed round from investors like Flybridge and Powerhouse Ventures. Since its launch, industry heavyweights like Chevron and JERA have signed on to speed up their decarbonisation efforts.

Scaling Impact and Shaping Policy

Looking ahead, Paul Sizaire envisions an even broader future for Sesame Sustainability. While heavy industry is the platform's current focus, new verticals may enter the equation, potentially expanding the software's impact and further powering the world's decarbonisation efforts. Of course, with that ambition comes the need and ability to layer in more datasets to improve the precision, flexibility, and speed of its modelling — but Sizaire is up to the challenge.

Then there's the policy side of the equation. As national and regional governments require more credible and actionable pathways to decarbonisation, tools like Sesame Sustainability could inspire smarter planning and regulatory strategy.

"The power of software is becoming increasingly obvious to me," Sizaire says, optimistic about his potential to drive industry-wide change with his startup. "Leveraging it to accelerate the energy transition seems like the right mission."