An award-winning UK startup Gooee is a tech spin-off from the global lighting organisation Aurora, whose serial entrepreneur chief executive and founder Andrew Johnson founded Gooee in 2014 with Neil Salt and Simon Coombes. Gooee has invested five years in developing an internet of things (IoT) Building Intelligence Platform unifying building control, communication, sensing and data analytics.
Driven by entrepreneurial innovation and value creation, their focus is on building performance solutions for tenants, facilities managers and owners. Gooee provides the necessary hardware and software that drives significant cost optimisation, operational efficiencies and enhanced occupant experiences.
To date, the term proptech has been broadly used to describe a variety of solutions that focus on real estate finance. Gooee has developed a unique way to converge IoT, the built environment and the people within it to create a truly smart real estate proposition.
The incumbent dominance of legacy companies within the building management sector has caused stagnation, where owners, managers and occupiers struggle to effectively get a grip on the buildings they inhabit. The lack of access to data is the issue and the vast majority of facility managers claim this is their number-one problem in addressing these traditional challenges.
As one of the largest British startups in IoT proptech, Gooee is disrupting this space with both innovative technology and subscription-as-a-service business models to achieve significant cost-savings and higher rentable value, while enhancing the employee experience for the occupiers, making businesses more productive.
It’s about peeling back the layers of a building, its systems and data, and bringing it all together, presenting the infrastructure and data in one place, and enabling customers to build value around it – Gooee’s “single-pane view”.
But, first, it’s necessary to understand why this march to intelligence is important.
Function vs efficiency
Traditional buildings face three central challenges: energy, space and people.
Globally, buildings contribute to a massive amount of energy consumption and this has led to legislation that demands buildings achieve energy quotas. Failure to comply will mean that potential and current developments will become unrentable.
In a commercial environment, when looking at space at any given time, 50 per cent is underutilised. At best this identifies a need to repurpose rented space, at worst this is expensive and unnecessary cost.
Finally, people represent 90 per cent of business costs, but a disengaged employee environment can cause businesses to lose billions a year in lost productivity.
Intelligent IoT backbone
Gooee helps solve these issues by converging infrastructure and unifying data sets. Their “android-style” platform combines technologies to ensure a more open, accessible and easily customisable solution.
Gooee’s enterprise-scale, Bluetooth network plays a significant part in this solution. Lighting’s view into spaces and dense building coverage makes it an ideal host for sensing, communications and beacon technology. Consolidating multiple systems into one MIoT (mesh internet of things) network backbone saves significant costs and future-proofs a building infrastructure.
The aim is to help businesses gain control, save money and engage employees or retail customers, using cloud technology and IoT to do this at scale, across multiple sites.
Value as a service
The convergence of physical infrastructure and technology will help businesses drive new services and revenue opportunities, while building owners can command a higher rentable rate because the building is smarter.
Businesses need to focus on people going forward and that should drive this intelligent revolution. Buildings are now about the connected community, and about how I can make my business more sustainable, streamlined, engaging and, ultimately, successful.
Pioneering the “British internet of things”, Gooee is rapidly expanding operations across Europe with significant design, manufacturing, and research and development taking place in the UK.
For more information on creating intelligent buildings and connected communities please visit gooee.com
