Building Atlas
Problem addressed
With commercial buildings in the UK responsible for 23% of built environment carbon emissions, urgent action must be taken to retrofit these buildings at scale. In addition to the climate impact, commercial retrofit will be required to meet the growing demand for sustainable office space in the UK.
Overview of start-up
Building Atlas uses a zero-touch approach to help clients future-proof their buildings. Their platform outlines standing risks and models optimal retrofits across an entire portfolio. They provide an actionable plan aligned to an overlap capital strategy and include expected costs and ROI from retrofits. Rather than needing to send a surveyor and energy expert to a building site, Building Atlas can take public and private data to estimate retrofit costs and ROI. If you provide an address, they can model which measures will be best for a given building. Incorporating commercial data, planning data, street view, etc, Building Atlas uses machine learning to predict materials and building type then use this data to model retrofit approaches. They also partner with financing organisations and contractors to accomplish the work required for retrofit.
What makes the start-up innovative?
By taking a data-first, zero-touch approach to modelling retrofits, Building Atlas use data and AI to build their retrofit recommendations. They take the addresses of a portfolio and apply their software solutions directly to the data about these properties rather than automating a manual surveyor workflow.
How the start-up has been designed to scale-up quickly
Building Atlas is building a cloud-based solution, and two of their co-founders have experience building products at scale.