Investment in IoT Category: Smart Facility Management software company, Facilio

We’re excited to announce our seed investment in Facilio, a unified software suite for IoT-driven facilities and sustainability management for buildings.

Isn’t it surprising that our workplaces, where we spend almost 50% of our day, are always either too hot or too cold? Though the IoT buzzword has being doing rounds for a couple of years, we see little or no impact on the occupants of the building, especially at workplaces where the physical environment has a direct correlation to employee productivity. Unfortunately, most IoT solutions focus only on energy consumption optimization, without taking a holistic view of the functioning of the building. This industry entails high capital and operating expenditure, involves management across entities (workforce, assets and energy utilization), has regulatory compliance, and has high associated risks.

The building ecosystem is still characterized by conservative approaches driven by hardware-centric automation systems, siloed legacy, and desktop-based software. Hence owners, heads of operations, and facility managers rely heavily on manual workforce and don’t have an easy way to compare OPEX (operational expenses) across their properties or find ways to instrument and measure how the building is being operated.

There are more than 650,000 buildings in the US with more than 100k sq. ft. With information stuck in silos, bringing all this distributed data together is complex, to say the least. And it’s an expensive problem. Annual OPEX can be as much as 25% of construction costs, with 41% of those costs going to facilities maintenance and 35% to energy consumption. Having disorganized teams, uneconomical practices, and limited visibility into cause and effect contribute significantly to raising these costs, making it a billion-dollar opportunity. Moreover, the problems are not restricted to the US; globally, these percentages are even higher.

The time is ripe now more than ever. Equipment manufacturers are opening up their APIs, shifting the IoT problem to a more software management layer, without any hardware installation. There is also enough infrastructure available in buildings for their data to be further processed by 3rd party software providers. This opens up a huge opportunity to create a cloud software to manage buildings in a centralized, people-centric and efficient way for an industry that is at the cusp of transformation and ready for cloud adoption. Using AI/ML, one could go way beyond just integrating the building automation systems to making the overall building facilities management more predictive thus helping in accelerating processes, optimizing spaces and better coordination between resources.

We first met Prabhu, Raj and Yoge in early 2017. They had demonstrated 17 years of deep expertise in connecting software to hardware (via networking), thus forming an ideal blend of IoT and SaaS expertise that made them a rare combination. The team viewed buildings as a live ecosystem with a massive workforce of people who require fast, efficient service and a good occupant experience, with their security, power and safety needs taken care of.

Facilio is an all-in-one software suite that helps buildings manage their entire portfolio, from maintenance to sustainability. It’s a full stack platform for real-time facilities optimization. Now, for the first time ever, building owners will be in the driving seat to run buildings efficiently and centrally, almost on autopilot!

Leveraging a clear market opportunity to disrupt traditional, disconnected systems, Facilio is creating a better building experience for both facilities teams and the people who work out of buildings every day, showing a marked increase in revenue, productivity and satisfaction levels. Accel is excited to be associated with Facilio. We look forward to working further with them as they continue creating delightful and sustainable facilities experiences.

— Accel Partners: Shruti Ghatge & Shekhar Kirani

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