Exclusive: CEO Logan Soya Talks Data-Driven Property Management
What do Lincoln Property, Vornado and Cushman & Wakefield use to track and manage their energy usage? Aquicore. Bisnow spoke to CEO Logan Soya about how he got his company off the ground, the need Aquicore sought to fill and his next steps.
Logan saw a painful problem and wanted to solve it. While 41% of the energy in the United States goes toward keeping buildings running, the EPA reports 30% of it is wasted. Most of this waste comes from not having the data to see how building systems are running. Operators could save $40B/year with the necessary information to tackle energy waste.
That’s the problem Aquicore seeks to solve. The company collects real-time data on resource usage such as electricity, water and gas with sensors and sends this data to a centralized web platform. Companies using the service see up to 24% energy savings within the first 60 days of operation, Aquicore reports.
Logan began his career in IT and telecom—industries that have a long history collecting real-time data to manage resources. He wondered if real estate had a similar tracking mechanism. “I spoke with building engineers at commercial buildings and was shocked by how much manual effort went into collecting data on building performance,” Logan says. He was particularly moved by a building engineer describing the tedious process of walking to each floor to read a meter if something was wrong.
Aquicore soon went from an idea to drumming up support from Washington, DC-based incubator 1776. Unlike other early stage investors, 1776 aims to invest in companies that want to tackle tough problems in sectors that need a high degree of regulatory attention. Logan tells us incubator co-founders Evan Burfield and Donna Harris proved invaluable in supporting the company. 1776 led the $3.1M seed round and proved instrumental in introducing Logan to Series A partners Kiddar Capital and Navitas Capital.
With early funding in place, the company turned to executing an ambitious sales strategy. The process starts with communication, Logan tells us. “We work hard to understand the fundamental issues and problems at a very granular level,” he says, “then build up from there to understand how it can create a disruptive solution when applied to hundreds or thousands of commercial buildings.” Aquicore now counts Lincoln Property, Under Armour, Vornado, Splunk and Cushman & Wakefield as customers.
Aquicore differentiates itself through offering an end-to-end standard data collection system. Logan and his team are not only building a software platform that presents real-time utility data in a standardized way, they also deliver and connect the physical sensors that collect the data. “That means an organization can use our single platform for facility operations, public displays, budgeting and tenant billing,” he says.
Aquicore has nearly 40 employees. “We’re actively hiring and eager to find experienced team members who enjoy hard-to-solve problems and are interested in sales, business development, hardware or software development,” Logan says.
