0 to 7,500 buildings fighting climate change

Carbon emissions have always been important to me and my co-founders. It's hard to believe that 10 years ago, smart building controls were literally just ideas on paper. And now, they're installed in over 7,500 buildings, and have taken the equivalent of over 75,000 cars of carbon output off the road.

Buildings are wasting a ton of money on energy.

It all started 12 years ago with my co-founder Jeff. Jeff was managing 150 buildings in New York City. He was routinely paying energy bills and would notice that one building would be using 70% to 90% more energy per square foot. And that didn't make any sense.

They used to keep track of every single 5 cent garbage bag being used to save money. And yet, there was literally millions of dollars spent on energy being wasted.

So he came to me and our co-founder, Mike, and what we figured out is that the vast majority of buildings, not only in New York City, but across the United States, are running on control technology from the 1960s and 70s.

Most buildings are running on controls from the 1960s.

These controls are just wildly inefficient.

Number one, the software is hard coded on that control. Your iPhone gets smarter and smarter with software updates every day, and these controls will never get smarter.

Number two, they're running on what's known as an outdoor reset algorithm, which is literally just a table of hourly times to run and temperatures outside.

Number three, they have no indoor sensors, meaning they have no idea what's happening in the building.

And number four, they're not connected to the internet, which means they can't get smarter, any adjustments require someone to manually make the changes to the hardware, and their efficiency/inefficiency measurements are nearly impossible to track.

Smart Controls save 20% - 25% on energy.

And so when Jeff, Mike, and I set out to fix this, we knew we would have to vertically integrate it. We would need new types of hardware and software that (that hadn't been invented yet) that was built to worth seamlessly together.

We would need to build technology that not only monitors everything happening in the building - detecting critical issues that can harm tenants and harm the building, but also allows you to completely remotely manage and automate management of a lot of the key systems in the building.

The net result of building all this, is that today we can save about 20% to 25% on energy bills.

Thousands of buildings adopted Smart Controls because they're a great investment.

Jeff's intuition was that if we want to be able to replace these controls at scale in 12 million buildings, they have to make their money back in just a handful of months.

Today, the average building pays for the system in just five months.

And then after that, they make four to five times on their money every year in perpetuity.

It's a wild economic proposition. But what's even more amazing is that by cutting fossil fuel usage, we're actually having a tremendous impact on carbon emissions as well.

Smart Controls are one of the country's largest carbon emission reducers.

If there's one lesson to learn from all of this, it's that reducing carbon emissions (the only way to save the planet) doesn't have to be something that's painful and hard. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

If you make products that people actually really want, and improve their lives, they will buy and use that product. The more people that buy and use the product, the more carbon emissions you reduce.

All we've really done at Runwise is found the secret sauce to getting building owners and operators to want to do that at scale.

It's basically a win win. What's good for people is also good for the planet.

Utilities are offering to pay for smart controls because they're so effective.

You can see if your buildings are eligible filling out the form below.