The Commercial Buildings market globally is a $1943 billion industry. But for a long time, digitization was deeply overlooked.
In 2017, Prabhu Ramachandran, along with his co-founders, set out to solve this problem with an IoT-led property operations platform allowing real estate owners and operators to aggregate building data, optimize performance, and control portfolio operations all from a single platform.
Seven years later, Ramachandran has raised 45 million dollars and his software is in 25000+ buildings across the world.
This is the story of Ramachandran, co-founder and CEO of Facilio and how his SaaS company is transforming the global real estate Industry using Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things.
Why did you start Facilio?
I was passionate about applying tech like IoT and AI to solve enterprise problems at scale, and already had 17+ yrs of experience solving for telecom. After spending a lot of time studying different verticals, we spotted real estate as a global market that impacts all businesses, individuals, and even the planet.
I started thinking of the problems that real estate companies face, and what the impact would be if we deployed an IoT platform approach to bring in remote monitoring and cloud mobility to real estate. When I dug in deeper, I found out that the real estate market was much bigger than telecom, and digital transformation or for that matter any sort of digitization had been delayed and the sector was behind by 25-30 yrs compared to others.
I had a group of good friends who believed in the same vision, and so in 2017 we began the journey together – Rajavel, Krishna, and Yogendra all of them had worked closely with me at Zoho. We raised our seed round at the time of starting up.
Today, our software is deployed in 25,000+ buildings globally. We have a distributed workforce of 200 employees working out of our offices in New York, London, Dubai, and Chennai. We have raised $45 million in funding, backed by leading investors including Accel Partners, Tiger Global Management, Dragoneer Investment Group and Cushman & Wakefield.
What were you solving?
The last biggest disruption in buildings took place 20 years ago, while hardware progressed, not much was seen on the software side.
Today, building facilities use a diverse set of software: traditional building management systems, apps for maintenance, environmental sensors at server rooms, systems for security and a lot more.
These tools were designed to operate independently, which made facility professionals stretch too thin to get real work done like tracking down information, exchanging redundant paper notes, and digging down energy-consumption charts and spreadsheets.
We embarked on a mission to provide a unified operations platform that empowers facilities managers & real estate owners to make the shift from traditional, tactical facilities management towards a smarter, predictive facilities experience. By empowering people and machines to achieve their highest level of efficiency, we help the built environment thrive towards continuous sustainability.
The aim was to bring in the same kind of disruption that ServiceNow did to ITSM and Salesforce to CRM.
What makes you most passionate about transforming the built environment?
We spend about 80% of our time indoors, be it at home, in the office, inside a mall, or at school. Buildings impact the quality of human lives, the businesses being run inside, and the environment. That is why we are continuously rethinking the facilities’ experience. We believe we aren’t building merely a great product portfolio, but a movement towards data-led property operations that will drive sustainability in a big way.
How did you determine the target audience?
We wanted our software platform to work not just for the technicians or building managers, but for everyone involved in delivering a smart & sustainable experience inside buildings. Also, from the start, we were clear that our software platform would be built for large enterprises managing multiple building portfolios across locations.
What advice would you give other founders looking to scale?
The deeper you understand the problem and solution, the easier it is to formulate the strategy and define goals.
Keep your teams small in the beginning, clearly define their goals and get them on board with the collective vision. Identify who your loyal customers are, nurture the relationships you have with them, and turn them into your product champions.
For example, Brookefield Growth was one of our early customers in 2017. They participated in our series B funding round and are a committed partner in our growth journey. This is a huge achievement for us.
What advice do you have for founders looking to build an Enterprise SaaS business?
Identify the early adopters in your category and go after them. Build teams that can make, sell, and connect with enterprise customers rather than SMBs.
When Facilio was founded, there were only legacy players with on-premise systems who would take years to deploy their solutions. We pioneered a platform-first approach on the cloud, which could be remotely deployed in weeks. In that sense, we are category-creators.
Channel partners play a very important role in making the enterprise sales engine a success, so invest in expanding your channel partner network.
About Facilio:
Facilio Inc. is an enterprise SaaS company that offers a unified cloud platform to make buildings operationally efficient. Facilio’s property operations platform allows real estate owners to aggregate building data, optimize performance, and control portfolio operations – all from one place. Customers in the commercial office, healthcare, retail, education, and other real estate categories across the world use Facilio to reduce operations costs, increase net asset value, and de-risk operational liability.
Headquartered in New York City with offices in Dubai, Chennai and London, Facilio is a global company backed by leading investors including Accel India, Tiger Global Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Brookfield Growth.
About Prabhu Ramachandran:
Prabhu Ramachandran is the founder and CEO of SaaS company Facilio Inc. Facilio is an AI-driven property operations platform that allows real estate owners to aggregate building data, optimize performance, and control portfolio operations – all from one place. Headquartered in New York City with offices in London, Dubai, Chennai & Singapore, Facilio is a global company backed by leading investors including Accel Partners, Tiger Global Management, Dragoneer Investment, Brookfield and Cushman & Wakefield.
Prabhu’s career spans over 18 years of product, business, and customer experience focused on enterprise-scale software for IoT-based connected services, sustainable building solutions, and telecom network management. Prior to co-founding Facilio, he was the Director of WebNMS, the IoT division of Zoho Corporation.
