Winner of CORENA's Innovation Award (2026)
February 2026 · $5,000 · CORENA · Innovation Award
The CORENA Innovation Award is a national prize for technology that materially reduces emissions in Australia. Occivar was named the winner of the second-ever Innovation Award in February 2026 - for an edge-AI building intelligence platform that right-sizes HVAC and lighting against actual occupancy. It is the first independent national recognition of the platform's energy thesis.
About CORENA
CORENA - Citizens Own Renewable Energy Network Australia - is a community-funded climate finance organisation. It lends to and supports projects that cut emissions from buildings and the broader built environment, drawing capital from supporters across the country.
CORENA's Innovation Award exists to recognise the technologies that can make community-funded climate finance go further. The award targets innovation that is affordable, deployable, and measurable in its emissions impact - the qualities a community lender cares about more than abstract novelty.
Why the platform won
Most commercial buildings in Australia run their HVAC and lighting to a schedule designed for the busiest day of the year. The result is a baseline of wasted energy that compounds across every quiet day, every weekend, every public holiday. The fix is right-sizing the schedule against actual occupancy - and the limiter has historically been that the occupancy data either does not exist or is locked inside a vendor dashboard with a privacy problem.
Occivar's architecture closes that gap: anonymous counts, on-device inference, no video stored, no privacy review required to deploy. The CORENA judges named it the winner because the energy thesis is real, the privacy answer is structural, and the platform is affordable enough that a single building's saving pays for the next deployment.
How the award pushes the MVP toward commercial pilot testing
The Innovation Award provides $5,000 as either a cash contribution or an offset against a CORENA loan. We are deploying that capital straight into the cost of getting hardware into a first commercial-pilot site. A single edge sensor, calibrated and shipped, is below the threshold the award covers - which means the award directly funds the first sensors in the ground.
Equally important is the credibility. CORENA's audience is community lenders, climate funds and energy efficiency programmes - the exact procurement channels a commercial building's sustainability team has to satisfy before it signs a contract. The award is the third-party validation that shortens those conversations.
In effect: the funding pays for the first pilot, and the recognition pays for the second.
The MVP is built. The first commercial pilot is the next step.
Backing from CORENA is what is converting the architecture into a deployable product. If you have a space we should count, that is the next conversation.