Letter from the Editor
Here's another issue of Smart Building Insight, with all the news from our growing and innovative industry. In pulling this one together, it does seem like the pace of news has slowed a bit, though it was a very busy summer. We delayed this issue a week due to Blueprint taking place over the past week. It was a great event, especially since it was an opportunity to reconnect with old friends and make new acquaintances.
As summer ends, we are looking forward to more in-person events. Next month is Realcomm. There are plenty of other events, too, though we plan to just attend these two. Additionally, Joe Aamidor is speaking on an upcoming CoreNet Global event about space utilization technology.
If you are trying to get through the newsletter quickly, here are a few high level takeaways:
- A few acquisitions from big names, such as Siemens and BP.
- We're happy to see that there continue to be a number of good strategic partnerships in the industry.
- See our Industry Spotlight for a review of where things stand on returning to the office.
Finally, we are starting to plan out the last few months of 2021; if you have a product or market strategy need, please feel free to reach out.
Aamidor Consulting Market Resources. We've been tracking all the key industry partnerships and M+A activity, all available on this readily available site as a resource to our industry.
As always, we look forward to hearing from you about how we might help with your product and market strategy needs. We also hope you enjoy this issue of Smart Building Insight.
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About Our Firm
Aamidor Consulting works with software and technology vendors, investors, and building owners/operators to help them understand the smart building landscape and formulate product and market strategy. See these project summaries and detailed testimonials from some of our clients that exemplify the strategic value we provide. Our work usually falls into one of these categories:
- Fractional product management for smart building software and solutions. If your firm is not able to hire a full time PM, we can provide that same benefit on a variable cost basis.
- Strategic advisory relationships with small and large firms, helping them adapt to the changing technology landscape. We routinely work with small firms and strategy/innovation teams at the largest of organizations.
- Working with investors to identify opportunities in the market and conduct commercial due diligence of potential deals. We have worked with leading VC and PE firms, in addition to firms acquiring startups.
Please reach out if you want to learn more. You can work with us in a variety of ways:
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Investment News
- New funding rounds and investments:
- Australia-based digital twin firm Willow has raised a $43B pre-Series B, with a number of well known existing investors.
- Locatee, which is in the workplace analytics and software space, has raised another $8.4M in growth financing. As we've highlighted in this newsletter, there is a lot of interest in technologies that can help bring people back to the office and provide better data about how offices and buildings are being used.
- We continue to see more money being invested into cleantech data management and sustainability software. A number of smaller firms are just getting started, such as Audette, which is a net zero carbon management platform for CRE firms, and raised $1M from Active Impact Investments. Similarly, Greenly, based in Paris, raised about $3M from a number of French investors.
- One of the majors in this industry, Measurabl, raised $50M in its Series C, led by Energy Impact Partners and a number of existing investors.
- We keep our eyes on the smart home market, and Brilliant raised $40M from Next47 (Siemens) and participation from Resideo (Spun off from Honeywell, operating as Honeywell Home).
- A bit adjacent, but Kevala, which provides big data analytics on the electricity grid to support decarbonization, announced a $21M series A, led by C5 Impact Partners.
- News on VCs and funds:
- Another good review on JLL's research on proptech funding, finding a significant spike in proptech funding and M&A.
- Related, Metaprop published its mid-year Global PropTech Confidence Index report.
- The Financial Times wrote about cleantech funding (their focus seems to be on the hardware based cleantech investments, like batteries and solar panels). The article notes that, unlike other emerging areas of technology (software or medical technology), cleantech firms "collectively destroyed over 80 per cent of the initial capital investment by VCs. Many required large amounts of funding to build factories and their technologies took longer than five years to develop. The few that succeeded still did not deliver enough capital return for VCs to justify staying in the sector." They don't say "valley of death" but do allude to it. We certainly have found that some investors still are skeptical of certain parts of the smart building market, based on the lack of a lot of home runs in the past.
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Industry Resources
Aamidor Consulting offers a few up-to-date resources to help smart building stakeholders monitor the market:
See our homepage to learn more about our the full breadth of our offerings.
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Industry Spotlight
Aamidor Consulting continues to provide insight to smart building innovators in this new section of our newsletter. This month, we highlight what smart building innovators should be watching as many speculate that offices will begin to reopen in the new year.
The pandemic has been an unusual time for offices and office employees. What was supposed to be a short work-from-home period has become a nearly 2 year experiment, which has driven significant changes in how people work, where they work, and what they expect from an office (and a job).
At Blueprint, it was a hot topic. And most individuals rightfully noted that they just don't know what will happen. But, they did agree that employees will demand new technology driven experiences. Additionally, regardless of how popular the office is, there will be an expectation for a more technology enabled office. It does feel a bit like sailing into the fog; there's not a threat of drowning, per se, but there is a lot of uncertainty. This is especially true when one considers all of the parties that are part of the office ecosystem: owners, operators, occupants, various service providers, etc...
We've been surprised by the significant growth in various workplace technology solutions, while also hearing that many employers have been surprised at the lack of employees returning to the office (even on a part time basis). Notably, even organizations that have conducted regular surveys of employees appear surprised that they usually over-estimate the interest in coming to the office. Many employees may plan to come into the office, but not follow through.
Of course, more employees should come back, in due time, and in some cases, all employees coming into the office on the same days will lead to the same peak demand issues that pre-pandemic traditional offices experienced. And, with fewer assigned desks, it is possible that these issues become even worse. So, the technology procurement we're seeing may be based on expected future needs, rather than a current pain point. This seems less secure, and certain, given what we don't know about when people are coming back to the office.
Action item: Given that the pandemic has created significant uncertainty in how offices are used, vendors measure their growth expectations with actual facts on the ground. Additionally, voice of customer will be essential for getting the product right in changing circumstances.
Aamidor Consulting supports startups throughout their journey in the industry, from the early stages of customer discovery to being on a rapid growth trajectory. See our startup services and past projects for more details on how we can help.
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Noteworthy Articles, Reports and News
- Return to the office: Continues to surprise, though we do feel confident that office reopens in the coming months.
- We've certainly seen a fair bit of discussion and disagreement about this thread on return-to-work research, based on data from Microsoft, but are sharing it due to the relevance and depth of the research. In short, based on "emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls and workweek hours of 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020", researchers found, in the words of the thread author: " People stop creating new bonds & become more siloed. Bad for innovation & careers." (Here is some of the higher quality feedback on the paper, if you are interested.)
- It might be old news by now, but Google is spending $2.1B on an office in New York City. New York has become a tech hub in its own right and, anecdotally we've heard that it's recovered significantly from the depths of the pandemic. However, there still are a lot of open questions about how work is done in the future (and, we aren't making predictions, but are pretty sure it will look different across different firms).
- Gartner's take on IT spending and return-to-work: 66 percent of survey respondents are delaying return to the office, and spending is shifting to supporting remote work.
- Cushman and Wakefield is predicting a significant influx of office workers in Q1 2022.
- We've shared other articles like this in other cities: occupancy way down, but energy consumption is not. This time, in Pittsburgh.
- Sustainability in focus, as it relates to real estate:
- Quick smart home update: the Matter standard, which seeks to bridge the gap between Apple, Amazon and Google, has been delayed until 2022. On a related note, Roomba announced that it is working on its own standard. Still a bit of standard alphabet soup.
- Job training as an enabler to delivering smarter, more efficient buildings is an area of deep interest for us. We're glad to see the NY Times covering this issue, as it relates to President Biden's infrastructure bill.
- It's a bit old, but the Advanced Energy Economy published a good summary report of our data-driven energy sector, called the Advanced Energy Now 2021 Market Report.
- Good research on emerging IOT tech from PitchBook, which notes that, for example, C3.ai has stumbled a bit since going public. This isn't proptech or smart buildings specific, but still is useful context.
- Digital twin firms may be interested in this open call for innovators in the facility management space, from the NEXT Coalition.
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