Behind Facilio’s Series A: How IoT and AI is Shaping the Future of Facilities

When we started out to build Facilio, we were obsessed with how little attention efficiency got in the realm of facilities management.

As a company, we were persistent about leveraging technology to connect together the three integral parts of a building – people, sustainability, and machines – together in real-time.

Today, almost everything around is experience-driven. We see how Uber simplified the taxi monopoly to create uninterrupted customer experience as compared to traditional cabs.

We look at Tesla and you instantly know it’s a boot-to-bonnet commitment to technology that’s disrupting the auto industry.

Buildings, however, are still burdened with decades of complex automation and legacy systems. The traditional approach to facilities management steered by hardware is bogging down commercial real estate (CRE) owners with inflexibility and rigidity.

To put things into context – over 80% of the building life cycle cost is spent on operations, repair, and recapitalisation, which means between 5 to 6.5 times more money is spent on operational costs than on construction costs.

Yet CREs have been placed at a blind spot with limited supply of critical real-time information. They continue to fire-fight issues rather than being in control of things. And in a market as competitive as real estate, experience drives everything.

And THIS has been our mission at Facilio since Day1: to enable continuous efficiency in buildings by harnessing IoT and AI and help CREs create superior experiences where people can thrive.

Optimising facilities in real-time – and what it means?

When we started Facilio, we wanted to declutter the way properties were being managed. Traditionally, CREs have relied on standalone and make shift facilities management software (basically repurposed industrial solutions). This high-cost, rigid, and silo-ed infrastructure have constantly prevented them from keeping pace with modern experience-driven services.

We wanted to create Facilio to break these boundaries.

By leveraging the existing automation in buildings, Facilio harnesses IoT and AI to utilise the buried goldmine of performance data to predictively optimise facilities and create a unified experience.

What we learnt repeatedly was that building owners and operators were extremely upbeat about the idea of combining operations and sustainability management in real-time, within one platform.

Having Facilio in their buildings gave them a modern tech-driven approach to facilities management plus a predictable model of overall sustainability across their portfolio.

But as a new entrant – what surprised us the most is the FM industry’s willingness to innovate and continuously support tech-driven transformation.

We were incredibly lucky to have worked alongside some large enterprise customers at an early stage and to have aligned their abundant wealth of knowledge with our product vision.

Overall, there are now more than 20 Million sq.ft of space managed by Facilio across 150+ commercial buildings globally, including some of the most iconic mega structures in the world.

And all of this wouldn’t have been possible without the immense support of our partner community who continue to champion Facilio and play an empowering part in our growth – thank you!

Future of Facilio: Creating the path to a predictive built environment

We’ve now raised capital that we’re going to put to work towards making our software suite more powerful and extensive.

We will remain committed to our vision of helping CREs achieve continuous efficiency in real-time.

And this means we’ll be stepping on gas to expand Facilio’s product offering, improve our machine learning infrastructure to produce more predictive models of building performance, establish AI-driven RPA capabilities to unlock long existing pain points, and much more.

We will continue to prioritise speed and you will find us growing in terms of talent. We will begin our international expansion and as always continue to cultivate an inspired partner community, globally and in existing regions.

We’re just getting started

To my team and everyone who’ve been part of this journey – I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in such a short time. Thank you and congratulations!

Importantly, I’m thankful to Shekhar Kirani of Accel for his tremendous support and mentorship. I’m now excited and looking forward to our partnership with Lee Fixel of Tiger Global – thank you again for trusting the Facilio vision.

But, this is only the beginning. We’re just getting started and we’re going to invest every ounce of effort to help create incredible experiences where people can thrive.