ICYMI: Quick look back at the end of the year
Smart Building Insight - In Case You Missed It - December 2025 from Aamidor Consulting
We’re back with our new format issue, In Case You Missed It, going out every 2 months - to all subscribers! In short, it’s just a quick wrap up of the greatest hits from our bi-weekly newsletter. We have been ramping up our coverage of the business of smart buildings, and figure you may have missed some of the great content heading into the holidays.
This issue closes out the year by revisiting several of the most important structural themes we’ve been tracking across smart buildings: financial performance of the key industry incumbents, revisiting our summer’s capital efficiency research with more granularity, and our full review of the small commercial building controls opportunity.
Quick updates
Before we get to the main event, we do want to share a things:
We added a “Resources” page to our newsletter homepage, for subscribers to access our market resources: our M+A tracker, Partnership Tracker, and some other materials coming soon. We hope you check it out (and use whenever you need some quick market data).
Lewis and Joe hosted a live podcast episode with Jake Elder, of Energy Impact Partners, to discuss data centers and how the growth in this asset class impacts energy and power demand. Check out a recording of the webinar here.
We now have a project inquiry page, which you can use if you need our help and want more details on just what we can do (and how long it might take!). You can access this simple and quick form here.
Finally - this coming weekend we have a new issue - focused on M+A and partnerships - and our 2026 predictions.
Key news items you may have missed
In case you missed it, here are a few news items of particular interest.
Analyzing the real opportunity for Small Commercial Building Controls: Last month we published our full analysis on small commercial buildings, which make up a large share of the building stock. However, as we explore in the article, most are not strong candidates for traditional or light building controls. Many are under 5,000 sq ft and may operate like large homes, while others lack heating and cooling entirely. The most viable targets for small commercial controls are restaurants, retail sites, and grocery or convenience stores. Our deep dive on this market segment focused on the actual addressable market, how much is already served by existing vendors, and the outlook for the sector.
Public firms earnings review : Across two issues, we reviewed Q3 earnings calls (and associated documentation) from leaders in the market:
Trane TT 0.00%↑ , Carrier CARR 0.00%↑ , Johnson Controls JCI 0.00%↑, Honeywell HON 0.00%↑ , Acuity AYI 0.00%↑, Schneider and others were covered in the main issue.
Siemens and CXApp CXAI 0.00%↑ , which reported later, are covered here.
We also provided a deep-dive analysis on Siemens Brightly’s acquisition of Setmetrics, here.
Capital Efficiency Update-What the Data Says About Scale and Staying Power: We revisited capital efficiency as a way to ground smart building narratives in operational reality rather than funding headlines. We’ll continue to “shout from the rooftops” about this, as it's a critical gap in how many growth-focused innovators think about this market. As background, earlier this summer we analyzed roughly 25 firms (from an initial universe of nearly 75) to assess how scale and capital deployment intersect, using a simple metric: dollars of funding raised per square foot deployed. The goal was not to single out winners or losers, but to understand what this distribution reveals about growth potential, competitive dynamics, and the likelihood of consolidation in a mature, fragmented market. Late in 2025, we shared a more detailed picture of how firms stack up on these metrics (see below).
What we’re watching
We posted last month about JCI’s technology strategy, which appears to be much less robust and broad-based as in the past. However, we’ll see how they describe these efforts in subsequent quarters.
In closing…
That’s just a sneak peek of the work we’re doing every day. If you want to go deeper on these developments - or other news in the market - we have a robust consulting practice in which we dive deeper into product and market strategy for OEMs, investors, and startups. And, if you’d like to discuss a project or connect about the themes above, you can reply to this email or use our new project inquiry page to discuss your needs.
And, on that note, we have recently standardized some of our most common offerings - featured below is our market intelligence subscription, targeted at Corp Dev and Strategy teams at larger OEMs.
Follow us on LinkedIn for more content - and, if you are interested, here are all the articles we've published. Moreover, check out recordings of our weekly issues of the “Down Low with Joe” on Youtube.