HomeBoost’s app will present you the place to avoid wasting in your utility payments

A couple of years in the past, Selina Tobaccowala’s daughter began leaving post-it notes round the home, telling everybody to “flip off the lights” and such.

Tobaccowala had simply offered her final startup, Gixo, to OpenFit and was searching for a brand new problem. “I noticed the youngsters and thought, ‘Let me see if there’s one thing there on the sustainability and local weather aspect,’” she informed TechCrunch. “There needed to be one thing greater than like turning our lights off.”

And not using a background in local weather science or {hardware} engineering, she wasn’t positive the place to begin. So Tobaccowala turned to one thing she knew properly: surveys.

“Given my love of surveys, I surveyed a ton — a ton — of shoppers,” mentioned Tobaccowala, who was once president and CTO of SurveyMonkey. 

What she discovered was that folks have been struggling to determine the way to decrease their utility payments.

“Once we talked to customers, we heard the identical factor time and again: They get that e mail that claims, ‘Hey, you spend more cash than your neighbors,’” she mentioned. “They have been type of caught with what to do about it.”

Tobaccowala co-founded HomeBoost to assist folks conduct their very own residence power assessments. The corporate was a part of the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.

HomeBoost’s evaluation course of begins by mailing prospects a BoostBox, a small package that features an infrared digital camera, a blacklight and a hyperlink to an app that takes prospects via the method. As folks stroll round their properties, the infrared digital camera reveals them the place chilly (or sizzling) air is seeping into their properties; the blacklight tells folks which lights might be upgraded.

Utilizing knowledge from the scans, the app then mechanically generates a report which suggests probably the most price efficient upgrades, together with rebates based mostly on the place the individual lives. 

In lots of components of the nation, utilities provide an analogous service. Utilities, that are incentivized to cut back finish customers’ power use, usually work with power auditors to survey folks’s properties to establish methods to trim their consumption. However the high quality of these companies could be very uneven, Tobaccowala mentioned.

“We talked to a bunch of customers who’d gotten residence power assessments performed, and there this sense that was like ‘all they did was attempt to promote me up an upgraded HVAC,’” she mentioned.

The HomeBoost app is cheaper and quicker than an auditor, and it helps folks really feel extra in command of the method, Tobaccowala mentioned.

HomeBoost expenses prospects $99, which is a couple of quarter the price of a standard, in-person evaluation. It’s also working with utilities, which cowl some or all the price for patrons. The startup has signed offers with Central Hudson, Omaha Public Energy District, and extra lately Avista. Omaha Energy, for instance, pays for all however $19 of the fee, whereas Central Hudson will cowl the complete price if householders try the BoostBox from a public library.

However not each house owner desires to finish the survey course of themselves, and never each auditor is a pushy salesperson. Devoted auditors can spend between two and 10 hours surveying properties, collating knowledge, and constructing stories, Tobaccowala mentioned. For that, HomeBoost has developed a model of its app for professionals, permitting them to serve extra prospects.

The corporate can also be testing a characteristic that can hyperlink householders with contractors who can observe via on the upgrades outlined within the report. For contractors, it’s one other supply of recent enterprise, and it permits them to get data on a challenge earlier than even setting foot inside a house.

By bringing customers, utilities, and contractors collectively, Tobaccowalla hopes that HomeBoost can in the end ship on the local weather entrance, too. “It’s a really distinctive state of affairs the place all people’s aligned to really decrease the utility invoice, which within the web result’s enchancment on the local weather,” she mentioned.