A huge amount of commercial real estate in North America could soon be more energy efficient thanks to Washington, D.C.-based energy data analytics and management startup Aquicore. The relatively young company is integrating its platform into the Angus AnyWhere system run by Toronto-based Angus Systems, one of the oldest and largest commercial real estate property management software companies around. It's a major leap for Aquicore, although the company's aggressive growth over the last year or so has been notable.
Aquicore's presence in the Angus system will let commercial real estate owners automatically collect data on energy use and bill payment, which can then be used to work out what tenants owe and what work needs to be done. That could potentially save owners many thousands of dollars in the cost of mistaken charges and a lot of time spent manually handling energy management, something customers ask Aquicore about a lot.
"This was really a low-hanging fruit for us," Aquicore CEO Logan Soya explained in an interview with DC Inno."We're very much customer-driven and we were happy to fulfill that need."
Most of Aquicore's presence will be on the back-end, not really interfacing much with actual Angus users, Soya said, but the software and possibly sensors that Aquicore created will be there. Minimal effort is part of what attracted more than 500 buildings before this deal to sign up with Aquicore, he added, and helped it raise $3.1 million in funding.
"One of the first things we look to do is eliminate the potential for human error or the need for human involvement at all," Soya said. "The heavy lifting is behind the scenes."
In the U.S. alone, tens of billions of dollars could potentially be saved if the 50 million monitoring points applied Aquicore's software. That's not even counting the hours of work actually checking, analyzing and billing by hand that could be saved. Connecting building management into a holistic system with the Internet of Things-style of devices and cloud computing is very much how Soya sees the future of property management and Aquicore's role. Not that the company is resting on its laurels. Recent moves in California and a serious hiring spree all point to even more plans for customer growth and platform improvement, though Soya wouldn't give away too much detail.
"We have a few new visuals and we're working on new capabilities for the platform," Soya said. "This is just the start. We've got a lot to look forward to."
