We’re pulling back the curtain on the last few months of intensive learning, creating and getting things done.
Everything can always be done better than it’s been done.
— Henry Ford
This quote speaks about the fundamental importance of ‘efficiency is king’. The more I gave this a thought, the more I realized the quote defines what fundamentally motivated us to create Facilio: the idea that continuous efficiency in buildings have the power to impact and improve billions of lives and the quality of the environment.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Henry Ford wanted to build a simple, reliable car that anyone could afford. He wanted to change the average American’s life. He needed to find a way to cut down the price of a car. He needed to get efficient. And how did he do that? He introduced the moving assembly line.
Ford built and sold over 15 million Model T’s through the 19 years of its production time. The innovation of the assembly line revolutionized the automobile industry, created the most efficient mode of production and changed society at large.
Today, the built environment is in a much similar spot.
Disruptive innovation in the built environment
As demand for commercial spaces grew, the way buildings were being managed became increasingly disorganized – with multiple tools, scattered communication, scrappy data silos, inefficient operations, and wasted energy – all adding up to massive cumulative costs.
Buildings needs innovation (like the assembly line was needed for the automobile industry) to help drive a continuous flow of efficiency.
If technology could empower buildings to create impactful experiences for everyone interacting with it everyday, it would most singularly revolutionize the quality of life of billions of people, day in and day out.
Meet Facilio – the technology company transforming the built environment
To efficiently manage something as massive and complex as buildings, all your facilities components (from energy and maintenance to assets and security) need to get organized.
People, systems and equipment need to work together in sync seamlessly.
You need a place to centrally know how multiple, distributed facilities perform. You need a place to understand the health of expensive assets and effectively manage resources.
You need a place to get teams together on the same page – whether to quickly track maintenance schedules or to carefully analyze and act on energy behaviour.
And you need a place to have all these information together, organized, and accessible by different sets of people in real-time.
Facilio is all of these things in the most straightforward way you’ve seen, in one place. It’s a unified suite of facility management software, harnessing IoT and machine learning models to manage building operations, maintenance and sustainability, together as one.
An all-in-one app suite. Built for buildings, built for all
Unlike typical seed startups, we focussed on building a suite of applications that was both exceptionally powerful and visually beautiful.
We found that companies use a handful of separate tools with different interfaces offered by different companies at different prices and struggled with all that complexity.
This piecemeal approach quickly broke when they couldn’t make data move seamlessly across distributed properties and disorganization began to reign.
Companies need solutions that are built dedicatedly for buildings. Those that specifically focus at solving facilities challenges — not re-purposed makeshift industrial management solutions. So we set out to simplify and straighten things up.
We tried to understand what facilities stakeholders actually wanted. What technicians needed, what supervisors needed, what managers needed, and most importantly what occupants needed for a superior building experience.
We asked them about their challenges and goals, and what they wish they had that they didn’t already have. And then we deliberated on it, took their wishlist, and made it a reality.
To us, facilities management is all about achieving the flow of continuous efficiency in real-time. We were mindful and intentional in what we were solving.
Impressive early adopter experiences
We spent the last couple of months tightening it up, improving every pixel of the interface, and linking it all together to turn data into differentiation. We then invited some large commercial property owners to try Facilio beta.
Being people-centric is a feature at Facilio. Knowing the dynamics of the market is more critical for us than simply building what the industry needs.
So before we even began to build Facilio, we reached out to a good number of FM companies, commercial real estate (CRE) owners and organizations that operate large portfolio of buildings.
We pitched the idea to them while extensively researching market trends. We started creating Facilio fully insight-driven, embracing every single feedback we got.
We built our base of early adopters while staying honest with what we could deliver by when. And the companies noticed – they really appreciated managing multiple buildings together as one, in sync.
When they saw it in context, they loved how a single solution maximized their facilities experience for everyone interacting with it, and, in real-time.
For us, this translated as a direct measure of the disruption the commercial real estate industry was evolving towards.
Carefully, we’ve been crafting Facilio as a well thought-out enterprise software suite that unifies facilities and sustainability management across portfolio of buildings.
We’re thrilled that Facilio is actively engaged in multiple pilots now – especially with large organizations each of those who manage multi-million sq.ft of space.
The team that’s passionate about efficiency
We wanted to start Facilio to reflect our belief that technology can be leveraged to create the best possible positive impact on the world – as a means to improve the lives of billions of people and the quality of the environment. This was the ambitious goal we set for ourselves less than a year back.
We then assembled a great team of talented and motivated people who believed in this idea and took the big leap to step out of their comfortable well-paying jobs. Very soon, we were backed by a leading investment firm that trusted Facilio’s vision to transform the buildings industry.
Facilio’s leadership is a seasoned team of product, business and engineering expertise. For over a decade we’d been working together at Zoho Corporation — building, shipping and scaling world-class cloud and IoT applications.
Today, Facilio is headed down the road to success and at this time I would like to thank two of my trusted friends and ex-colleagues — Girish (Founder & CEO, Freshworks), for being a huge inspiration to start up and for carefully coaching us through the journey; and Arvind (Founder, Zarget) for helping Facilio get on its feet, having us co-share his office space and facilities.
At Facilio, we’re continuously rethinking the way buildings are managed – shifting traditional, tactical facilities management towards smarter, predictive facilities experience. We’re on a mission to help the built environment thrive towards continuous sustainability by empowering people, machines, and buildings achieve high levels of efficiency. We created Facilio to help you take that step.
