“Our mission is to triple the rate of building retrofits – by showing you the best path and connecting you to installers and finance partners to get the work done,” said Nick. “We help you find the best projects, build plans, and track projects through to completion.”

Nick’s background lies in a mix of technology and business consulting: “always on the bridge between the two, and with a long-held passion for sustainability.”

In this Q&A, Startups Magazine finds out more about Building Atlas, and what makes it stand out from its competitors.

What was the inspiration behind starting the business?

My Co-Founder Olga and I worked together at Google, building a supply chain decarbonisation platform. After landing that successfully, we wanted to find a way to have more direct impact in one of the biggest emitting sectors, the built environment.

How does Building Atlas use AI and data to assess retrofit potential?

Typically, to understand how to improve energy efficiency of a building, it takes a site visit from an energy consultant. After a few days of work, you get a static report with recommendations, one building at a time. Instead we use AI and a variety of data sources to give you the optimal retrofit plan across any size of portfolio.

What makes your platform different from other retrofit planning tools?

Most retrofit planning tools are focused on residential properties – single homes reliant on government subsidies to achieve meaningful payback. For non-domestic buildings, tools are typically accelerators for consultants – they require a lot of data, building elaborate digital twins, rather than focusing on actionable recommendations.

How would a commercial property owner use Building Atlas?

Give us just the addresses of your buildings, and we’ll instantly generate retrofit recommendations that can be used for capital planning and prioritisation. From there, we’ll ask for more details on your goals, and data for specific buildings, to refine your plans.

You can adjust these scenarios – you might want to plan to remove gas from all your buildings, or focus on making a specific set of buildings as low-energy as possible, regardless of cost.

What challenges have you faced on the journey so far, and how have you overcome them?

Data is hard – finding data, matching sources together, and making sure we understand their accuracy is very important. We’ve spent a lot of time on weird data edge cases, especially on addresses. 

What have been the highlights so far?

Building a great team, and working with customers and partners who are as excited about solving climate change as we are.

What has been your biggest learning curve as a founder in this sector?

We need to build trust with customers. Property managers really know their buildings well, so we need to be clear on our level of accuracy, and our confidence in each data attribute or recommendation

What’s next for the company, and what goals do you have for the next year?

We’re busy working to deliver for a series of customers – we’ve set ourselves aggressive revenue targets, and that also means delivering a great set of features for them.

For us as founders, most importantly, we’d like to see some of the projects we’ve recommended get completed.

How do you envision Building Atlas evolving?

We see building retrofits as our north star – driving down the energy consumption of the built environment. If we complete that goal, we’ll be doing well.

But we also realise that we’re gathering and calculating a huge set of interesting data about buildings, especially the unexciting, average buildings that don’t have complex, expensive building management systems. We expect that Building Atlas will be the place to come to learn insights of any kind about buildings – what systems do they have, how are they used, how busy are they, how can I make them more efficient? Building Atlas will tell you the answers.

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