About

Currently, most organisations operate in a linear way (take – make – waste), without considering the finite nature of resources and being responsible for nearly half of the emissions that cause climate change and biodiversity loss. Such linear operations result in billions of dollars of value wasted in raw materials and energy, not sufficient utilisation of assets, and disposal costs. Linear businesses have higher risk of default on debt, and less attractiveness for investment. Sustainable development and, in particular, circular management of assets reduce this risk, increase attractiveness for further investments and contribute to a regenerative ecosystem where businesses, people and the environment can thrive. To this end, ZELUS aims to provide consulting services and deliver digital tools to help organisations better understand their impact, design their circular strategy and manage their operations and their associated resources in a sustainable, circular way.

Solution & Product

We deliver hands-on training sessions to assist stakeholders in understanding risks and sketching a solid path to capitalise on arising opportunities. We, also, assess organisations’ circular capabilities, by identifying the gaps and the potential within their business and value chain for circular service and product design, operations, and business models. Our offering is complemented with the digital bank of goods (products and components), a smart visualisation toolkit that enables monitoring and analysis of the organisations’ sustainability practices and drives continuous awareness within business and across value chains, regarding goods stocks and their properties, throughout their lifecycle. This can be further used towards more circular design and better supply chain management, through AI-enabled recommendations on the current use of each item, and their potential reuse, repurposing and recycling options.

Innovation & Scalability

Our key innovation lies in our focus on a system-thinking approach for transitioning to a circular economy. Building on top of our experience in cybersecurity and big data visualisations, we are developing a digital tool that enables secure data exchange (a really important element in sectors where operation insights are key to their market differentiation) and provides a user-friendly interface so that any stakeholder can make informed decisions, either being an IT expert or not. To the best of our knowledge, currently, our competitors usually focus on the assessment of products’ circularity or sustainability or extending their lifecycle (reselling/renting/swapping/etc) or managing them as waste (recycling facilities). Our solution aggregates these services and provides quantitative information and motivation from one hand to businesses to produce higher quality and more circular products and from the other hand to consumers to reward those businesses and benefit accordingly. A key competitive advantage is also the utilisation of AI to support decision-making across every step of the product lifecycle. Our vision is to eventually support the creation of ecosystems that will transform not only a single organisation, but entire value chains, in order to achieve a successful transition to a circular economy.

Traction & achievements

Since the launch of our sustainability offering (early 2022), our digital solutions have already stood out in multiple contexts. The EU-funded S4Fashion project, seeking for projects to pilot novel processes and create a product, service or business model with scale up potential for sustainable or circular fashion. selected ZELUS' Digital Bank of goods adjusted for the fashion industry and called Digital closet (brand name: VÒNG). The Digital closet was also selected in the initial phase of one more mentoring scheme called U-Solve focusing on solutions that enable circular economy and waste reduction in cities. Both programs focus a lot on consumers' behavioral change that drives demand for more sustainable and circular textile products. We have also already started working on other services of the Digital Bank addressing the textile industry and another part of the industry's value chain namely the garment production. ROCTex is a service that enables textile producers to accelerate the adoption of technological innovation required in the sector, in order to increase their energy efficiency and reduce their footprint during the production process. This service enables data collection and digital connectivity of the product life cycle phases for building or enriching the digital product passport of each manufactured item. This initiative is supported by the EU-funded KYKLOS4.0 Open Call for innovative solutions that enable circular manufacturing.

Team & Why Us

The team consists of a multidisciplinary group of experts with complementary skills in the development of ZELUS business in the field of sustainability. Ms Aggeliki Piknada (MSc), co-founder, is responsible for delivering the organisational culture profile and the managing of content development and marketing tasks. Ms Dora Kallipolitou (MSc) is the Product and Innovation Manager and exhibits many years of experience in design thinking approaches for business transformation towards sustainable development through circular economy. Ms Maria Bouloukaki (MSc) is an environmental engineer and sustainable fashion expert, with experience in strategic business management through circular economy practices. Dr Vasilis Tountopoulos is the company CEO, working as a system architect and in business development. Finally, Mr Efstathios Kapsiotis (MSc) is the main software developer for the digital tools of the solution.

Funding Needs

Despite the discussion regarding the importance of the transition to a circular economy, it is a fact that a lot of businesses are not ready yet to embark this journey and often do not even know where to start from. Similarly consumers are confused by the abundance of information that often are not even accurate (greenwashing) and as a result don't know what to trust. A big part of our investment is going to be dedicated to make our tools trustworthy and transparent both through the technology used in their development but also through their co-creation with our key audiences. Therefore we target funding that will allow us to do exactly that: connect us with our audiences and provide us with the resources (estimated value: 350K) to create awareness among our audience members and co-create together solutions beneficial for all.