Cohort 9: Meet the Companies
With our second virtual programme well underway, take a moment to meet our latest founders!
Last year we completed our first ever accelerator virtual programme. After 7 incredibly successful cohorts, supporting over 35 startups, including the likes of LandTech, Office App, and Houst among many others, moving to a fully virtual format seemed like a daunting task. However, as outlined in my blog post last June, moving to virtual was in fact one of the biggest opportunities we’ve had to take the programme to the next level. You can read more about how we managed and benefited from our first virtual programme here.
And you don’t have to take our word for it: last year, Pi Labs won best accelerator in the UK for 2020, in the sixth annual Growth Investor Awards. This was across all sector and industry focuses and considering there a more than 200 accelerators in the UK, we’re very proud of this achievement!
This year, we’re doubling down on the success from last year, with our most international cohort to date, which we officially announced a couple of weeks ago. Not only are our five PropTech businesses this year very geographically diverse, spanning across Canada, Israel and the UK, they’re also operating across several high growth sectors, including Construction Technology (ConTech), robotics, sustainability & wellness, as well as investment management— all technologies and industries, which we believe will continue to thrive in a post COVID-19 world. We’re already starting week 4 of our 16 week journey with the 5 teams and I wanted to shed a bit more light on the companies, as well as what they will be exposed to as part of the programme over the next few months.
Audette.io
The problem
Conducting energy audits or a sustainability assessment on a portfolio level is a costly and timely process, that is currently carried out by consultants. These evaluations can take up to 6 months and cost up to $20,000 per building, leaving you with an inherent time lag between what you need to change and when you procure it. Ultimately, building owners do not have a clear & up-to-date view of the investment opportunities in their infrastructure making it harder to identify efficiency projects. Alongside this, there are a range of carbon-reducing options and access to finance that get missed.
The solution
Audette.io is a digital platform allowing property owners and managers to conduct efficient energy audits and then connects commercial property owners with incentive capital and 3rd party financing to run low carbon retrofit projects.
The team
Audette was founded in 2019 by Christopher Naismith and Matt Alfke in British Columbia, Canada, after developing the technology at Christopher’s previous consulting firm. Christopher has over a decade experience in energy efficiency through his experience as Energy Efficiency Engineer and a Product Manager at SES Consulting. He holds a BA in Engineering from UBC and a graduate degree in Building Engineering from Concordia. A long time friend of Christopher’s, Matt brings over 8 years experience in enterprise sales to emerging environmental markets, including carbon credit solutions, delivering over $10m in carbon offset solutions to the cleantech industry. The current team of 7 are all based in Canada.
ConWize
The problem
Project owners, general contractors, and subcontractors still heavily rely on manual Excel Sheets when it comes to construction tendering, bidding, and cost estimation. There is no standardisation in cost estimation & bidding processes, this results in human errors in under/over-budgeting and makes for a labour-intensive process requiring interactions with hundreds of stakeholders.
The solution
Conwize aims to increase construction project profits, whilst reducing human error and time through a fully automated project and collaboration platform. The whole tendering and bidding process can be monitored and followed seamlessly on one platform. The solution can be broken down into 4 key areas - planning; subcontractor collaboration; cost estimation; and advanced analytics.
The team
Conwize launched in January 2020 and was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel by Dima Haikin, Ran Levi Sody and Denis Umnov. The team has a wealth of experience in IT and Construction. Dima has over 14 years of expertise in the construction industry, working with ERP integration projects and managing IT departments. He holds a 1st in Industrial Engineering & Management, and an MBA from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Denis is an IT hands on specialist with over 25 years of development experience. He has also managed R&D departments of 40+ people. He holds an engineering degree from the Ivanono State University. Ran has over 15 yeas experience in sales and business development across construction, real-estate and e-commerce. They know and understand the pain of the tender process!
Hölmetrics
The problem
Burnout, presenteeism and excess turnover cost UK employers £45 billion annually. Organisational wellbeing is increasingly viewed as a form of risk-management and a way to improve operational efficiency. Traditionally these issues are examined using employees ’surveys. However, surveys are often associated with low participation levels, bias and long turnaround cycles (usually 6 months), making any action taken on the back of the results often irrelevant and out of date.
The solution
Hölmetrics is an end-to-end passive mental wellbeing platform targeting businesses with over 250 employees. It eliminates the use of surveys and gives real-time insights into the wellbeing of an organisation. The platform runs entirely in the background and connects directly to the workflow tools used within an organisation (i.e. Office 365, Google Suite, Slack) producing actionable insights into your organisation.
The team
Hölmetrics was found in 2019 in Calgary, Canada by the CEO Chad Verity. Chad has previous experience as a front-line youth worker and had experienced burnout himself. His passion to try and improve efficiency in the work place is infectious and attracted a world-class team. Hölmetrics has 8 employees, spanning AI/ML and data analytics experts to their CTO Nuran Jetha who has over 20 years’ experience in enterprise software development.
HonestAI
The problem
Real estate investment managers find it difficult to extract the right data points they need to analyse commercial real estate investment opportunities and make data driven decisions. This difficulty mainly arises as a result of a massive increase in volume and type of data available in internal databases as well as external databases which makes it increasingly difficult to filter through the noise and find the most relevant information quickly.
The solution
An AI/ML search engine for commercial real estate investment managers which takes internal client data (leases, surveyor and feasibility reports, tenant surveys, etc.) as well as external data (land registry, planning applications, market reports, etc.) to build a cognitive search tool specifically tailored to the investment manager. The manager can type in questions in natural language such as “What is the elevation on the fourth floor in S1 2DB” and get the most relevant output based on all the relevant data sources the search engine took in.
The team
Honest AI was founded in 2020, in London, by the CEO Dimitrios Konstanidis and CTO Marios Tsatsos. Dimitrios previously co-founded companies as a CEO, in Silicon Valley and England and dropped out from Cambridge University to join ARM, where he spent 3 years as a computer engineer. He studied Computer Engineering. Marios spent 10 years simulating complex quantum systems in the world’s top universities and led multimillion-dollar projects in HLRS, a top-10 supercomputer. As a data scientist in the Web of Science, he clustered a gigantic database of scientific records. He has a masters degree in Theoretical Physics from Imperial College London and a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg (Magna Cum Laude)
Okibo
The problem
The painting and plastering markets have traditionally suffered from low productivity and lack of quality control. Painting, sanding and plastering are all labour intensive and inherently imperfect tasks, requiring a high level of consistency and repeatability which is difficult to attain and measure. Furthermore, increasing labour costs and an ever-growing talent gap is putting additional stress on these markets and reducing margins even further. Painting, sanding and plastering are all labour intensive and inherently imperfect tasks, which are ripe for automation
The solution
OKIBO’s current prototype, the EG5, is a wall finishing robot that can operate without continuous monitoring. With its onboard cameras and lidar sensor, it can navigate the construction site autonomously and plans its own paths.
The solution currently focuses on painting and whole drywall installation — putting in plastering joint taping, coating, sanding of the plaster. An important feature of the robot is that it is entirely self-contained, it has an onboard battery and a tank for paint or other coatings. This allows it to operate without any tethers connected to the robot, which is crucial for it to operate autonomously alongside existing processes and workers. The robot also makes improvements to the actual quality of the painting by automatical- ly identifying each surface and ensuring a constant angle, velocity and distance to the wall, when painting.
The team
Okibo is based in Petach Tikva, Israel, and was co-founded by the CEO Guy German and CBO Nadav Shuruk. Guy has over 10 years software engineering experience, serving as CTO at GG Electronics, a buiness focused on industrial automation. Nadav started his career in finance and strategy consulting, before setting up his own consultancy that he ran for over 10 years. Guy and Nadav previously worked together at GG Electronics and that is where the idea for Okibo was developed.
Over the next 4 months, our teams will be faced with a combination of workshops, covering topics such as pricing, sales, marketing, building and managing teams, as well as fundraising and pitch training. They will also gain unprecedented access to our network of relevant mentors, real-estate players, as well as potential customers and investors, through individual tailored introduction exercises.
At Pi Labs, we also provide support and expertise to encourage resiliency and longevity in founders, to ensure that the companies we invest in have a real and sustainable impact in the sector. We support the holistic health of founders by providing dedicated mental health sessions as well as access to a growing support network throughout the course of the programme.
The end of our programme naturally concludes with a Demo Day in June, which we opened to the public for the first time last year. This year, we’ll bring further improvements to the format and make it our most successful event to date — keep a close eye on this space in the next couple of months!
