“We are Building Atlas, we decarbonise and renovate commercial real estate at scale. We work with commercial real estate owners. We ask for nothing except just the locations of buildings. With that we are able to supply them with the order of priorities for renovating their buildings in the future. We protect the value of their buildings and their investments.” said Stephen Lorimer, Co-founder of Building Atlas introduced his startup at the Challenge Identification Workshop.
Building Atlas helps owners of real estate portfolios find the best path to retrofitting their non-residential buildings in order to avoid stranding risk and to increase asset value. The startup is a part of the first cohort of the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator, a brand-new initiative supporting climate innovation in the built environment in London.
The founders comprise of Nick Taylor, Co-founder, Commercial & Ops, Olga Khroustaleva, Co-founder, Product, and Stephen Lorimer, Co-founder, Customers & Science, who have come together to pool their expertise in building and scaling enterprise and consumer products as well as building energy modelling.
While the cohort journey may have just begun, Stephen feels there is a lot of opportunity that the accelerator offers to the startups associated with it. Scoping out the potential, he said, “The Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator can help all the startups by first really validate with customers that are going to be buying these solutions about how to use these services and how they fit into their procurement in the future. The second part is data, how do we get the support of data for our business models? The goal is to utilise this data that looks towards the future and not the past. And the third part, is synergy – to be able to say we actually can work together and almost recommend each other. We operate at a big data scale and at a strategic scale. Others might work at a building by building scale. The accelerator brings us together to identify how can we help each other?”
The accelerator is designed to support startups and early-stage scale-ups in the clean tech sector, with a focus on developing cutting-edge solutions for the built environment. Selected participants in the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator will gain access to a wide range of resources, including R&D advice, internships, technical workspace, and networking opportunities with industry stakeholders.
Stressing on the need for diverse startup portfolio and equally varied lived experiences feeding into clean tech solutions, Stephen said, “Investors are customers who often ask for a very new product – what is the solution you are making, what is the problem you are solving. But they also ask as a founder, how did you find your way to this solution? Accelerators like these are an amazing place to ensure that you have the whole wide range of lived experiences and that grows the market across different people who want to use the service and who can benefit from this in the future.”
The first cohort of the accelerator is a unique and diverse space when it comes to approaching the problem of retrofit from utilising big data to create a service for strategic investments to some that are creating a product that plugs into a building from one room to a neighbourhood. The support offered for these startups is equally versatile, Stephen notes, “The same can be said about the stakeholders who range from property developers while others are consultants in the industry who await the right innovation to disrupt and change the retrofit market as we know it.”
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Powered by Imperial College London, via Undaunted and Enterprise, the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator is part of the Greater London Authority’s Better Futures programme, co-funded by the UK government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
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Undaunted is a partnership between Imperial’s Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment and The Royal Institution
