Making buildings more efficient is not only good for the environment, it can also greatly reduce running costs for owners. CIM is making it easy to access access a whole suite of building data to make measurement and reporting easier for both owners and managers.
OnImpact spoke with CIM founder and CEO, David Walsh.
What does your business do, and who are your customers?
Our vision is to be the world leader in building analytics and property operations software, making it easy to operate large buildings at their peak operational performance, to deliver economic and environmental benefits for shareholders, tenants and society.
The built environment generates nearly 50% of annual global CO2 emissions, of which building operations are responsible for 27% annually. Fortunately, with the help of building analytics technology, this sector has the biggest opportunity to quickly and cost-effectively cut carbon emissions and play a critical role in curbing climate change.
Our advanced solutions, the PEAK Platform, provides a smart, simple and transparent way to get large buildings, and the people involved in running them, operating at peak performance. We power resource-efficient and environmentally responsible buildings by providing data-driven insights to maximise their operational efficiency and rapidly reduce their energy consumption.
Peak performing buildings have smaller carbon footprints and are able to achieve better sustainability ratings enabling their owners to meet their environmental, social and governance goals, and deliver long-term value to shareholders and tenants.
What’s the core problem you’re trying to solve?
Operating large buildings, and striking the right balance between comfort, environmental sustainability and profitability, is incredibly difficult. Especially, if you have little to no oversight into how the systems and equipment critical to running your buildings are performing, and what you can do to improve overall performance.
The key to solving these challenges lies in unlocking the performance data stored within a building, and then using it to optimise operations. We make this easy and accessible by giving our customers visibility and control over their building performance date. Our platform integrates building intelligence, machine learning to improve operational efficiency, tenant wellbeing, sustainability and asset profitability.
Our PEAK Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform is the foundation of our solution, helping our customers with an end-to-end solution that makes it simple and easy to make building management decisions that reduce energy consumption, run equipment more efficiently and effectively, improve thermal comfort and get maintenance and operation teams to work together better.
How have you seen investor interest in the climate-tech space develop in the past 5 years
The investment momentum has picked up, allowing for major improvements in underlying technology capabilities, which has allowed us, as a software company, to thrive. Because of this, our outgoings are less than what they were previously. This promotes a sort of ‘technology velocity’. And we have seen climate tech achieving a real step change in delivering value.
Value in terms of ESG outcomes, and value in terms of helping teams to work better and more collaboratively.
What support (from Government or other stakeholders) would help accelerate growth in the climate-tech space?
- Skilled migration – supporting this to fill skills shortages, through incentives, easier pathways or reduced taxes
- Minimising our dependence on traditional mining in favour of data mining. This will allow us to transition from fossil fuels (what built our country) to being able to sustain a high standard of living by limiting the activities that are damaging our environment.
- Grants – there is a lack of early stage funding, this means certain minority groups might struggle to bring their ideas to life. We support financial mechanisms (taxation incentives or options to draw upon super) to help kickstart innovations and start-ups
Was there a business (either local or globally) that influenced the development of your organisation?
There are a number of outstanding software solutions out there from which we have been inspired. For example, the workflow module of our platform was partly inspired by the collaboration aspect of Atlassian’s Jira – the power of getting teams to work better together.
Zapier, the workflow automation is fantastic.
Xero, which underscored the ability to use design and UX to build a product that maintains high active engagement.
SafetyCulture, which is making a real difference in the OH&S space.
Patagonia, the ‘going purpose’ rather than ‘going public’ is inspiring, and there is a lot more that industry can do to follow suit
What’s in store for your business in 2022?
CIM recently announced that it has raised AU$10 million after closing its Series A.
The round was led by Five V Capital alongside Carthona Capital and also included seasoned property executives such as Mark Steinert, former CEO of Stockland. The funding round was followed shortly after by an additional secondary round of A$6.6 million.
The new capital will be used to expand CIM internationally into Asia and North America, in addition to building out the team with a doubling of headcount expected in the next 12 months.