Making buildings smarter through IoT platform

Zoho veteran Prabhu Ramachandran and friends have built an 'Alexa' for buildings which offers real-time facilities management to commercial real estate owners

When the software boom started in India in the 1990s, the small village of Siruseri near Chennai was chosen to be the first IT hub in Tamil Nadu. It's in the same village that the son of a farmer, Prabhu Ramachandran, dreamt of becoming an IT professional.

After completing his engineering from a government college in Chennai, Ramachandran joined Zoho, one of India's first bootstrapped Unicorns, in 2000. Here, he headed the webNMS team in 2004, the original product of the company which triggered its growth story. In 2010, he spearheaded the IoT product line for Zoho where his team built an android equivalent platform, which could build apps for third parties in a short span of time. 

After spending around 17 years at Zoho, Ramachandran, who was always passionate about large scale deployments and how to improve facilities with technology, saw an opportunity in the traditional real estate market. 

“Whenever we imagine a city, we get a picture of an iconic building in our mind. Buildings are also places where we spend almost 80 per cent of our time during the day. Hence, they also have a mental wellness impact on the population,” he says. But large commercial buildings have a lot of inefficiencies and their management is heavily labour-driven, and this is where the magic of facilities management comes into play.

Hence, along with his team of over 35 IT specialists -- 25 of them from Zoho - Ramachandran in 2017 launched his venture Facilio, which offers real-time facilities management solutions to commercial real estate owners. The other three company cofounders, Rajavel Subramanian, Yogendra Babu and Krishnamoorthi Rangasamy, are also Zoho veterans.

Facilio has a large scale app which Ramachandran explains is like an Alexa for buildings. It is basically an IoT based software which can talk to lifts, security cameras, fire safety panels, air conditioners and get live data feed from all the buildings of the clients on a single platform, real time.

“Our software can pick up information from all these elements and then the data comes to our cloud where we apply machine learning to get insights. For example, if the weather in the morning is 30 degrees celsius in Chennai, it takes the air conditioner around 30 minutes to bring down the temperature to 24 degrees. However, if the same air conditioner takes longer for the same job, our system automatically tells that there is some problem in the centralised cooling system,” he explains.

The start-up claims that through its platform, operational expenses of buildings go down by around 10 per cent.

But real estate is a tough nut to crack. So Facilio chose the local companies to crack the market. Even though the products such as air conditioners and lifts come from global giants such as Honeywell and IBM, they are executed by a local player. Facilio made these local vendors their channels on a revenue sharing basis and went to their clients convincing them that software is the future. 

“Hence, since day one, we didn’t have a product, but we had customers already on board who were willing to work with us. That helped us a lot as we sharpened our products based on their feedback,” says Ramachandran. 

The model was enough to attract the attention of the investors. The company got its first funding from venture capital firm Accel Partners, right on the day one. Just last week, it closed the second round of funding from Tiger Global, a globally respected venture capital firm that is known to have backed many successful startups of today including Flipkart, Freshdesk and Quickr among others. Lee Fixel, the celebrated investor and partner at Tiger Global just took only 30 minutes to come to an agreement to fund Facilio.

The Chennai-based company has now firmed a strong global ambition. While it has already launched in Dubai and the US, in the next 6-8 months, it plans to enter the European markets.