With energy becoming rarer and pricier, and regulation pushing hard towards sustainability, the real estate sector has to move quickly, both with low-carbon construction, and better energy management.
Energy monitoring platforms can go a long way in reducing the energy consumption of a building. But not everything can be solved through software. At some point, heaters have to be changed and walls and windows have to be renovated. So where should asset managers start?
Beeldi is a data management platform that facilitates the collaboration between asset, property and facility managers. By creating reliable and real-time inventories of technical equipment (heaters, CVC, elevators…), Beeldi allows asset managers to draw the best decisions to maintain and renovate their buildings. The company was founded in 2017 by Kévin Le Port and Thomas Feltrin, two engineers from Engie. They were later joined by Anthony Ambrosio.
In July, Beeldi raised a 8M€ Series A round with Citizen Capital, MAIF Avenir, and their historical investor Starquest. We couldn’t be happier to get on board. Here is why.
The road to sustainable buildings has to be quick and efficient.
Real estate operations and maintenance is still very much a pen and paper industry. Some audits are done, but the information becomes quickly outdated and is not used to its full potential. Beeldi aims at digitizing this whole process, which we believe can create tremendous value.
The company started out as a platform allowing facility managers to digitize the audit of technical equipment in buildings (like HVAC, elevators, plumbing…). Using Beeldi, an audit is 3x faster and produces a digital report, with more precise, reliable and comprehensive data on the entire building. Then, instead of quickly becoming outdated, this audit can stay up to date with Beeldi communicating with the existing maintenance tools used by the facility manager.
You might not think of this as very innovative. But as it turns out, asset managers have very little live data on their building, so when it comes to making renovation decisions, they really have little insight on what to do in priority, what is the energy/carbon tradeoff associated with each action, and how to plan the renovation over several years. So they rely only on the people on the field.
Why should I replace this heater? Did it have problems recently? Is it costly to maintain ? How old is it? How much time was it supposed to last in the first place? Has it been properly maintained by my facility manager ? How much energy could I save if I replaced it? Are there some more pressing issues that I should focus on beforehand?
Without the answers to these questions, it is hard and time consuming for asset managers to make decisions, let alone make pluri-annual renovation planning. The problem is, renovation will have to play an important part to reduce the energy consumption. Not everything can be done through intelligent energy management, the hardware has to be tackled at some point.
Energy consumption can be reduced of only c. 25% through a monitoring strategy. The rest requires to go through device configuration, or renovation and no solution focuses on this part.
Beeldi allows them to regain control over their own building, with real-time data, that did not exist before. It also puts carbon and energy efficiency on top of the radar, by calculating the efficiency gain with every renovation. Therefore, by helping asset managers to better monitor their buildings, Beeldi helps the industry move faster towards sustainability.
Essential and powerful trends driving the market.
When we first met with the founding team in march, we were already sold on the market. In fact, our previous investment in Deepki had taught us many things:
Firstly, there is a very strong urge to change in the real estate sector. Both the French regulation (“Décret tertiaire”) and the evolving client expectations push towards more sustainable buildings, that consume less and less energy. And energy prices going through the roof have accelerated this trend even more.
Secondly, renovating our existing building stock is key to meet our objectives in CO2 reduction. The real estate sector accounts for 38% of global CO2 emissions, up to 40% of this being the mere energy consumption of buildings throughout their lifetime.
Most companies on this market, like Deepki have addressed this market by providing insights on energy consumption, but very few of them actually produce the data necessary for the asset manager to act on this insight. We feel that Beeldi will take this approach to the next level.
Founders who have seen the problem with their own eyes.
Construction and Real Estate are sectors that are difficult to disrupt when you’re not from the industry. They often require seasoned founders, who know how their clients work and can speak their language.
Fortunately, that’s the case with Beeldi : Kévin Le Port (CEO) and Thomas Feltrin (CPO) used to work at Engie Cofely. Both of them experienced the issue they are trying to solve, and it helps them connect to clients better, and build the best product to satisfy them. They were later joined by Anthony Ambrosio (COO), who brings a lot of clarity and structure to the team vision.
Their attachment to their mission and will to change the industry was an immediate fit with our thesis, with what we look for in founders. From the first meeting, we immediately knew working with them would be both easy, exciting and we now trust them completely to embrace the huge opportunity they have in front of them.
What’s ahead.
Beeldi has already been implemented in over 6400 buildings, and 100.000+ devices are audited through their platform every month. This enormous dataset holds a tremendous value and it’s now time to use it!
The 8M€ round will allow Beeldi to go deeper into the recommendations they provide to asset managers, and to offer new services to them, such as automating their regulatory compliance monitoring, or facilitating their collaboration with their facility managers.
We believe that Beeldi is spearheading the next generation of tools for real estate asset management. Both their know-how and dataset are unique, and should allow them to quickly conquer the market, and to help it move quicker towards sustainability.
This ability to transform a market linked to a fundamental social or environmental issue is the core of our thesis at Citizen Capital. If you have the same kind of ambition, please reach out !
