Facilio Raises $6.4M Series A Funding Led By Tiger Global And Existing Investor Accel

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Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia (US), with operations in Chennai, India, Facilio is a facilities optimization platform that harnesses IoT and AI to drive real-time operational efficiency across real-estate portfolios. It offers an all-in-one software suite to help facilities centrally manage maintenance, operations, sustainability, and tenant experience, in one place. Funded by Accel.com and founded by enterprise SaaS and IoT veterans, Facilio was established in May 2017, and started its operations in 2018.

Prabhu Ramachandran is the founder and CEO of Facilio. Prabhu’s career spans over 18 years of product, business and customer experience focused on enterprise-scale software for IoT-based connected services, sustainable building solutions, and telecom network management.

Below is our recent interview with Prabhu:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Facilio?

A: Facilio is the world’s first AI & IoT-based real-time facilities optimization software offering unified facilities and sustainability management.
(And the smartest way to manage facilities!)

What that really means is that we leverage technology to connect together the three integral parts of a building – people, sustainability, and machines – in real-time, to help the built environment achieve continuous efficiency across portfolios.

Our powerful solution harnesses the connectivity of IoT and the intelligence of AI to enhance the facilities experience for users, increase transparency in operations and building performance, improve efficiency between teams and workforce, and drive a predictive maintenance model.

As a SaaS solution that covers end-to-end building maintenance, operations, sustainability, and tenant experience, across portfolios, Facilio provides the building and FM industry with the much needed unified solution to optimally manage multiple building systems, centrally.

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Q: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?

A: Buildings are an integral part of our everyday life, and have the power to impact and improve billions of lives, if they work in continuous efficiency. We believed that if we could harness technology to empower buildings to create impactful experiences for everyone interacting with it everyday, we would be creating a much-needed revolutionary product for the built environment. This is how the idea called Facilio came to be.

The company was established in 2017 with the objective of transforming the way buildings are managed, in response to a growing market need for redefining the facilities experience for customers and end-users alike.

At Facilio, we aren’t just building products. We are continuously rethinking the way facilities and buildings are being managed – shifting traditional, tactical facilities management towards smarter, sustainability-first facilities experience. We believe the future of real-time facilities experience is here and we feel we can help F.M.’s transcend into the next phase of service by becoming value players in the building management ecosystem.

Up until now, building owners haven’t had the technology to handle multiple aspects of managing a building like dealing with facility service vendors, equipment breakdowns and aligning tenant requests with facilities strategies. They have been in what can be called a blind-spot and have always been firefighting problems rather than proactively controlling operations from the driver’s seat. This is mainly because of inaccessibility to real-time insights and no central visibility of building performance.

Facilio solves just this – it’s the world’s first facilities optimisation software that harnesses IoT and AI to leverage existing automation data and provide superior facilities experience. Facilio is built from the ground up keeping in mind property owners and facility managers, to help them achieve real-time operational efficiency and sustainability across dispersed real-estate portfolio.

Q: What is your differentiator? What can you do that the competition can’t?

A: At Facilio our strategic objective is to use IoT as an enabler technology to solve the basic set of challenges faced by today’s facility management teams. Let’s look at the top three concerns of FM’s today:

1. Management of multiple mechanical assets;
2. Coordination between numerous service providers and workforce teams and;
3. management of various buildings across a vast portfolio.
If you notice, they all share a common thread – complexity in management of ‘Multiple’ stakeholders.

Most IoT solutions that have flooded the market today come bundled with a proprietary set of sensors that only adds to the existing disparate environment. Plus, they add an extra hardware layer to already hardware-centric systems and further increase complexity and the substantial cost of management and ownership.

Facilio, on the other hand, is a software-driven application that seeks to transform the facilities experience by integrating with existing assets, without having to uproot expensive infrastructure. And by acquiring data from these existing building systems, and analysing and contextualising it into real-time actionable insights, Facilio enables all stakeholders to make more informed organisational decisions. The fact that this is all done in a real-time environment ultimately provides a better occupant experience, and enables a predictive maintenance model.

Facilio is unique in that it removes the operational silos that building owners and operators struggle with, and instead provides a unified, holistic, and modern solution that combines efficient management of people, assets, sustainability, and the tenant experience, together. And this portfolio-wide visbility allows building owners/operators, as well as property and FM heads to be in the drivers seat, enabling efficiency from a predictive standpoint versus a reactionary or preventive one.

More importantly, Facilio helps customers operate at scale across their portfolio. It helps CRE’s and FM’s to manage building operations, maintenance and sustainability performance, by harnessing the power of IoT continuously and proactively.

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Q: Congrats on raising $6,4M! Could you tell us more about your recent funding round?

A: From the very start, we exemplified the approach of focusing on a large global market, identifying the gap and building distinctive products with a clear vision and execution. With the role of facilities management changing rapidly, and building owners increasingly expecting facility teams to be stakeholders and collaborators for business growth, the focus is shifting towards highly efficient operations and an elevated occupant experience. We believe that our strong team, a sharp go-to-market strategy, and our finesse in product execution aligned well to be the preferred technology partner for CREs & FMs to help optimize facilities in real-time. And this faith that customers have extended in our capabilities led to us securing the recent round of funding.

Now that we have the capital, we are going to put it to work towards two things:
a) making our software suite more powerful and extensive, and
b) expanding our operations.

We will remain committed to our vision of helping CREs achieve continuous efficiency in real-time. And this means we will accelerate the expansion of Facilio’s product offering, improve our machine learning infrastructure to produce more predictive models of building performance, and enhance our AI-driven capabilities to unlock long existing pain points, among others.

The funding will allow us to pursue our expansion in operations across the US, Middle East, and other territories. We will be setting up regional sales and support offices to focus on customer success and partner training while also investing in R&D for product innovation.

Q: Where do you see your business in 3 years?

A: We are expanding into the US and Middle East as we see a lot of untapped potential for the efficiencies we can bring to the built environment in these geographies. In line with this, we are in the process of building a strong partnership network in these regions to expand our reach.

The Smart Buildings and Facilities Management space is undergoing rapid transformation globally, and the global real estate and building management software market is poised to grow to more than USD 7 billion by 2022. There is a definitive shift towards embracing IoT and AI in buildings that empowers facilities managers with speed and agility to improve efficiencies in operations and sustainability. Facilio aims to be frontrunners in leading this transformative change in the industry.

Last Updated on January 13, 2019

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