Tony Mancilla spent the first decade of his career as a commercial producer and director for companies like Budweiser, Coca-Cola and Citibank.
His career started in New York City and spread internationally. Mancilla ended up in Los Angeles, once working as a manager at an independent film financing firm behind a Netflix-purchased movie called "The Invitation," and eventually as co-founder of a marketing agency focusing on innovative companies.
But his winding career brought him to a new venture. As he worked with a Portuguese technology firm through this innovation-focused agency and served on the board of a New York manufacturing company, he was inspired to research a gap in the market: finding an inexpensive way to monitor building operations like air quality.
"What I found is [monitoring technology] seemed to be still in the dark ages and was trying to catch up, and it had this feeling of only being accessible by Manhattan and Los Angeles buildings and these elite corporate entities," Mancilla said.
In 2021, Mancilla founded Lucy Networks with plans to sell affordable sensor devices to monitor energy consumption and air quality in buildings. The startup works with Portuguese company Noa Technologies to develop patent-pending sensor devices. Mancilla is now preparing to go to market and is running pilot programs with, for example, a school in England and a hotel in California.
He became a Tampa homeowner in 2022 — after closing on a house in Palma Ceia — but officially became a Tampa resident in 2023 and joined Embarc Collective in 2024, headquartering Lucy Networks in Tampa over New York City and Los Angeles.
"Right now, the company is based in Tampa, looking to source and find local talent to help in the commercialization of this and to go to market," Mancilla said.
Tampa has available talent to hire, an entrepreneurial community and "authentic" people. And the city aligns with Mancilla's research and development through Noa Technologies in Europe, he said.
"For my lifestyle, personally, and for where I want the company to grow, I think [Tampa] is a hub of innovation, a hub of creativity, and people don't pigeonhole themselves in the 'dos and don'ts' of the big cities," Mancilla said.
Florida also provides a challenge for the company. It's hot and humid, which means buildings require more energy and maintenance than in other regions. Lucy Networks will get to grow with some of the most demanding operational environments, Mancilla said.
Mancilla's vision for this business isn't solely building management and cost-cutting. The devices are a way to holistically approach the environment, lifestyle and health. Mancilla envisions it as interacting with a building in a new form, he said.
"I come from advertising; I want people to think about buildings as living and breathing, create a person behind, it's not just brick and mortar ... it's like our veins, our breathing," Mancilla said.
