German property technology startup company aedifion recently announced it raised €12 million (approximately $12.9 million) in a Series A round. World Fund, Europe’s leading climate technology investor, and BeyondBuild led the raise. This funding round will be used to further develop the company’s platform so it can help its customers save more money and fight commercial real estate buildings’ rising climate costs.
How aedifion works
CRE owners, developers and administrators can use aedifion’s platform to monitor energy use throughout their portfolios. They can receive gas and electricity consumption data in real time on a digital platform. Additionally, the aedifion platform can spot overspend and energy overuse, such as empty conference rooms being heated. The platform can also identify areas that need additional insulation or retrofitting or use AI to control heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.
The aedifion platform’s ability to highlight where and how to drive energy efficiency helps its customers decrease their energy expenditure by up to 40 percent, according to the company. It can also save millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
In Germany for example, there are 2.7 million CRE buildings with approximately 1.35 billion square meters of net floor space. Based upon energy efficiency savings seen across its current customer base, aedifion calculates that mass-adoption of its software could save more than 10 million tons of CO2 each year just by using the cloud platform.
“We want to make buildings part of the energy system of the future,” said Johannes Fütterer, aedifion founder and CEO. “Thanks to digitization and artificial intelligence, buildings can become part of the energy transition — as virtual power plants that are part of a smart network. We can achieve this because our software contains the best engineering knowledge on the market with more than 13 years of experience. Inefficiencies in operations are automatically identified on an ongoing basis, which saves money and reduces emissions – and all of this is completely digital and scalable across all properties.”
AI’s role in decarbonizing the built environment
The cloud software platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor, manage and control HVAC systems in a predictive manner. It considers factors such as weather (changeability, seasonality, localized forecasting), and a CRE building’s thermal capabilities, determined by the software by benchmarking and cross-comparing with other buildings of the same size and usage to determine appropriate energy usage levels.
Aedifion can also adjust energy purchasing across a built environment so that energy is purchased at “low price-point periods” (such as 4 a.m. local time), bundling up energy purchasing across aedifion’s platform, to maximize price efficiency for all users.
The aedifion platform works with other proptech software and can cross-communicate through an open API so customers can easily build it into their technology stack as a one-stop shop for energy monitoring across their portfolio.
“Office buildings are responsible for 6.6 percent of global CO2 emissions — an astounding figure,” said Mark Windeknecht, investment manager at World Fund. “If you can solve energy inefficiencies for commercial buildings, then there is huge potential to reduce the climate impact of this sector at the same time. Aedifion is an excellent deep-tech example of how climate mitigation and cost savings can be scaled via software, in a way that suits customers and the planet.”
