Some big rounds, they are a-raisin'
Smart Building Insight - Fundraising and Product Launches - September 2025 from Aamidor Consulting
Letter from the Editor
Bob Dylan’s been playing over here lately, and to play on his famous song, there are a few firms that are a-raisin’ significant rounds of capital. Given all the news and a few analyses below, let’s get right to the issue, which includes:
Analyses of the two notable fundraising announcements: Passive Logic and Entouch.
A preview of a longer piece on the small building controls opportunity. (Unlocked for all subscribers.)
Funding rounds, with news from Munters, Wesco leading a round, and others.
Product launches, featuring JCI, Carrier, Schneider, and many others.
It’s a pretty long issue, but the market has been notably active since the end of summer, so please enjoy, and reach out if you have and question or comments (or, of course, want to talk about how we can help you with product or market strategy).
Also, conference season is upon us, and we’ll be attending a few events in the coming months:
NexusCon: Back again this year. Joe was there for the inaugural event and we wouldn't miss it this year. We can offer $75 discount code for readers: JOENEXUS75. Everyone who uses this promo code will be put into Joe’s pod. What's a pod? Think summer camp meets sports team. We'll be a group of ~20 others and will get together at the conference. Register here. (October 6-8th in Denver)
3rd Annual Smart Data for Energy Summit: Joe has been invited to provide a plenary session: “Emerging Technologies and Capabilities Across the Smart Buildings Market and The Evolving Customer / Vendor Relationship”. Readers of Smart Building Insight can get a discount on tickets: 10% Discount to attend with code “JA10” - Register here. (National Harbor, Maryland October 15 – 16 2025).
A housekeeping item - we are starting to book projects through the end of the year - please reach out if you think you will need our help. We’d be happy to talk, but get in touch soon! From fractional head of product to commercial due diligence projects for investors, our capabilities are wide within smart buildings product and market strategy.
Aamidor Consulting Podcast Spotlight
We just recorded a new market update episode of the Down Low with Joe, and introduced a new segment (which we plan to make more of a regular part of the show). Check out our YouTube channel or Spotify for when the episode is available.
This newsletter is a market wrap up and analysis of the smart buildings industry. If the email was forwarded to you, sign up to receive it directly.
Sneak Peek: Small commercial controls
We’ve seen many references to the ~90 percent of buildings that don’t have a BAS. But this misses a critical point: many of these building will never (and should never) deploy a building automation system. That’s primarily because of the heterogeneous nature of building types and operational/equipment characteristics of many buildings.
The US Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) is the best source of these data sets - and it updated every ~5-7 years. The most recent version is from a survey conducted in 2018, and is the primary (but not only) data set for data on building characteristics. Based on surveys conducted with actual building owners and operators, this data set breaks down a lot of interesting details about commercial buildings: primary use, size, equipment in each, and even operational details such as the presence of regular HVAC maintenance and if the floorspace is heated and/or cooled.
And, from CBECS, we can see that there are certain building types in which most buildings are small (food service, restaurants - 97 percent of buildings are 10K sq ft or less) and others, in which most buildings are very large (inpatient hospitals - 55 percent are over 100K sq ft, and the rest are between 10-100K sq ft). Moreover, the average size of a hospital in the US is 250K square feet.
Of course, most buildings, regardless of the type, are small, but a lot of square footage is in the larger buildings. To build on the example above, 91 percent of all inpatient hospital square footage is within buildings that are over 100K square feet. But, this long tail still adds up - even though we think of the “smart building tech for offices” market as primarily large buildings in major cities, nearly 56 percent of all office square footage is in buildings that are under 100K sq ft. Or course, every city - large and small - has office buildings, but many of them are very small and host local businesses (e.g., local attorneys, accountants, and other professions that are found everywhere). This information doesn’t prove or disprove our key thesis, but is useful context on the characteristics of buildings in the US.
We also think that there are some categories that simply are not strong targets for BAS, for example:
“Service” buildings are 15 percent of all commercial buildings, and, ~85 percent of these buildings are under 10K square feet (12 percent of all US commercial buildings are small, service buildings). This includes quite the collection of businesses, but they all are hard to address, likely run at relatively low margins, and also are likely managed independently, by small businesses:
From CBECS, this category includes: “Vehicle service or repair shop, Vehicle storage or maintenance (car barn), Repair shop, Dry cleaner or laundromat, Post office or postal center, Car wash, Beauty parlor or barber shop, Copy center or printing shop, Kennel.”
Post offices and copy centers are the only two that may have some elements of larger organizations that are managing comfort and energy strategically - since they are potentially controlled by national organizations with significant size and scale.
That said, 20 percent of these buildings are not heated, and another 19 percent only heat half (or less) of their square footage. And half of a 10K sq ft building is just not much space, requiring relatively simple, and potentially residential HVAC systems.
Additionally, 41 percent of these buildings are not cooled, and another 37 percent only cool half (or less) of their square footage. Our view is that many of the same buildings neither heat nor cool their space, though this is not explicitly clear in the CBECS data set.
So, already, we’ve removed roughly 3 percent of all buildings (most of which are small) that don’t even have heating - and it's probably more, given that many more don’t have cooling, or only heat/cool a small part of the building. To build on the point above, we can assume that small buildings with very small spaces that are heated/cooled simply will use a thermostat for comfort control - this is not a place for a BAS.
Religious worship buildings may be another category that has similar dynamics: 61 percent of these buildings are under 10K sq ft (which is 4.5 percent of all buildings), though in this case, most of them are heated and cooled. That said, 25 percent of them already have programmable thermostats, and 15 percent have smart, connected thermostats. For buildings this small, with individual decision-makers at each site, it’s likely that all HVAC maintenance is contracted through a local HVAC service provider (and these firms likely do not sell building automation beyond the thermostat).
Warehouses are another notable building type, which make up 17 percent of all buildings. 70 percent of them are under 10K sq ft (though, by square footage, nearly 40 percent of the space is in warehouses over 100K sq ft). 45 percent of them are not heated at all, and another 24 percent of them only heat half (or less) of the space.
A BAS is primarily installed to manage complex, zone-based comfort needs. But it supports actual HVAC equipment. Across all commercial buildings, 17 percent of buildings are not heated, and 22 percent are not cooled (even more are only partially heated/cooled). We don’t know that these are exclusively small buildings (they aren’t), but since most buildings are small (48 percent of all commercial buildings are 1-5K sq ft, the size of a house), it’s fair to assume that many of the ‘not heated and not cooled’ buildings are small.
While not the full picture, we have about half of commercial buildings that are under 5K sq feet, and 28 percent of these buildings (all types) have no cooling, and another 15 percent of them only cool half (or less) of these space. We simply don’t see a BAS being applicable to any 5K sq foot space, but definitely not if they have no cooling. This point probably extends to buildings that are 10, 20 or even 30K square feet.
While a lot of these buildings do not have a BAS, they do have thermostats (and swapping out to a connected/smart Tstat is much easier and inexpensive. For sites with rooftop units, this may be sufficient. As we’ll share in the full article, there’s much more adoption of thermostat-based controls among small commercial buildings than BAS, and our view is that this is the right approach for these buildings.
Stay tuned for our full article will cover a few more details, such as:
Alternatives to a BAS in these sites (that is, will a connected Tstat suffice?).
Market activity (see below on Entouch’s raise, along with peers that also raised earlier this year)
Breaking down the value proposition for BAS in small commercial buildings.
What is the opportunity in small commercial buildings?
Subscribers also will get access to some of the data we’re using in this analysis (XLS format).
The rest of this piece will run in the coming weeks.
And - need help figuring out market size and addressability for your products? We can help.
Smart building product launches and related announcements:
Accuenergy launched a new BAS sensor line, including AcuPRE™ Differential Pressure, AcuHUM™ Relative Humidity & Temperature, and AcuTEMS™ Temperature Sensors, to deliver more accurate, reliable data for smarter building automation.
Eptura appointed veteran Siemens executive Raj Batra as CEO, succeeding Brandon Holden, to drive its next phase of growth and innovation in workplace technology.
Pressac launched a new LoRaWAN® indoor air quality sensor to measure CO₂, TVOCs, particulate matter, temperature, and humidity, providing real-time data for smart building and HVAC platforms.
Mysa announced its ‘biggest product launch to date’, teasing entry into the central HVAC market - supplementing its baseboard heating controls.
From Founder/CEO Josh Green, “Lesson: Win a niche, build the muscles, then scale.”
This generally is the strategy we’d recommend in the smart building space, which is one reason why most successful firms have actually raised smaller than average amounts of capital (see below for more on some of those recent bigger rounds, however).
Schneider Electric reinforced its commitment to electrical contractors at NECA 2025 by unveiling new product innovations and leading thought leadership sessions on evolving industry standards and opportunities.
