The Role of Tech in Building Safer, Resilient Cities
May 30, 2024 | Sanober Jakhrani
Earlier this month, we wrapped up our 12-week growth programme with Demo Day 2024 — a huge thank you to all the founders, mentors, and real estate leaders who joined us from across the globe.
For a decade now, our programme has been supporting next-gen start-ups transforming the built world. At Pi Labs, we believe that today’s technology isn’t sufficient to ensure the world is fit for generations to come, and that’s why we source and invest in the technology of tomorrow.
Our Growth Programme has been our flagship since our very early days; this is where we take risks as we see ourselves as the vehicle of change. Through the growth programme, we’re able to look at the horizon, see what’s coming, and see what’s ahead.
Each year, our focus shifts as we strive to stay ahead of the curve in built-world tech. This year, inspired by our own research, SUSTAINABLY INTELLIGENT: AI FOR A GREENER BUILT WORLD, we explored how AI can address sustainability challenges in real estate and make cities more resilient and safer.
Pi Labs Demo Day 2024
We’re proud to highlight this year’s Cohort and their bold ambition in tackling some of the biggest challenges in the built world!
Connect with Lucy Lyons & Matt Goodridge
Kestrix helps social housing providers plan, price, and validate retrofits.
But their ultimate vision is to become the Google Maps of heat loss, the data layer powering the built environments and climate transition.
Globally, heating and cooling contribute to 10% of CO2 emissions, highlighting the urgent need for widespread energy-efficient retrofitting.
Despite the availability of technologies like insulation, retrofitting isn’t progressing swiftly enough to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. In the UK alone, 1.8m homes need retrofitting every minute, but only a fraction of that is currently being achieved.
Kestrix Customer Deck
Part of the problem lies in data. Currently, there is no reliable system to universally measure heat leaks from buildings, leading to significant bottlenecks in retrofit delivery.
Kestrix is the first company to develop AI that can not only spot where heat loss is happening but also quantitatively measure it. This means that they can scan a whole city and rank every building in that city from most leaky to least leaky!
Today, Kestrix collaborates with over 10 social housing providers and R&D partners, having surveyed more than 1900 homes. But this is just the beginning. By 2027, its goal is to map over a million buildings, with its data benefiting a diverse range of stakeholders.
Connect with Robin Li & Zhihao Zhao
Genia is building the operating system for engineers and the construction industry.
Engineers are often left underserved, relying heavily on manual processes that are time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to errors.
Their workflow typically begins with creating general layouts, heavily relying on their own experience and intuition. They then proceed to perform hundreds to thousands of calculations and iterations manually. After arriving at a detailed design, it goes through multiple stages of review and modelling, adding further time and complexity to the process.
Despite the industry spending billions on design software, only 35% of processes have been digitalised, leaving 65% still reliant on manual methods like pen and paper or spreadsheets. This reliance on outdated processes leads to a 40% rejection rate for permit applications due to human errors, resulting in significant delays and financial losses.
Genia customer deck
That’s where Genia comes in. With their Structural Copilot, they’re turning weeks of work into just a few hours. Their solution enables engineers to work faster, avoid errors, and win more projects.
They’ve already partnered with top industry players like Suffolk Construction to transform existing structures efficiently. Built by engineers for engineers, their solution is capable of automating the entire workflow, ensuring physically valid designs with minimal effort.
Connect with Vincent Cook
Cyber Operations is addressing the critical challenge of supply chain security.
Organisations can protect their internal networks, but they struggle to protect third parties that interact with their environment. They don’t have visibility of their entire supply chain or the ability to predict and understand if it’s at risk.
Current approaches to address this issue rely on outdated methods like threat intelligence and third-party risk management tools. These methods are manual, slow, and lack actionable intelligence, leaving organisations vulnerable to cyber threats.
Cyb3r Operations Customer Deck
Cyber Operations wants to simplify this process as much as possible and empower organisations to proactively protect their supply chains. Their proprietary technology has three key stages. First, it identifies every third party within the customers’ environments through an attack surface discovery scan. Then, they leverage a dark and deep web intelligence model with over 172 billion attributes that ultimately help them predict and anticipate potential threats.
This proactive approach contrasts with traditional one-off risk assessments, providing continuous monitoring and protection. This technology offers unmatched visibility, predicting ransomware attacks with up to 76% accuracy and reducing onboarding time by up to 70 times. For example, a large construction firm in the UK saw its onboarding time decrease from 10 weeks to just one hour after switching to Cyber Operations.
The impact of Cyber Operations is evident in their impressive track record, with clients experiencing significant improvements in onboarding speed and threat detection.
Connect with Kunmi Oludoyi, Raza Rubbani & Adebayo Popoola
Sorair Technology is on a mission to help industrial companies protect their most valuable assets: people, property, and profits.
Industrial and logistics companies spend millions every year on asset protection services like CCTV cameras, insurance premiums, and security staff. But still face break-ins, thefts, and vandalism. Criminals exploit CCTV blind spots, and human security staff can be inconsistent in their monitoring.
Sorair Customer Deck
To solve this, the Sorair team has developed Sora Net, an autonomous surveillance system that connects with the existing infrastructure such as cameras, sensors, transforming them into a comprehensive security management platform. The AI Lookout Engine uses computer vision in CCTV cameras to detect threats and monitor conditions. The AV Engine integrates autonomous vehicles and drones, automating patrols and threat responses. The AI Foresight Engine analyzes site activity and incidents, suggesting new security setups and patrol routes based on past data. This system improves on-site security operations, increases surveillance coverage, and detects threats early.
Sorair’s solution reduces security contract costs by 35% and detects health and safety risks five times faster than current methods. It stands out by integrating with both old and new security infrastructure, using AI to unify and automate surveillance.
Connect with Leise Sandeman & Alex Cooper
Pathways is building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing.
Imagine buildings as LEGO blocks. To truly decarbonise construction, we need to start at the material level– Manufacturing of materials particularly in the built environment is responsible for 20% of global emissions. As urban expansion accelerates, especially in the next 30 years, the need for sustainable materials becomes even more critical.
Pathways Customer Deck
Regulations are tightening; with demands for environmental product declarations becoming more common. Manufacturers are now required to create what’s called an environmental product declaration- a kind of environmental nutrition facts list, but instead of calories and carbs, we’re looking at chemicals and carbon. It’s about understanding every component of a product, from the chemicals in the varnish to the fuel used in transportation and manufacturing. Most sites don’t even know where to begin with this data, and it's currently being handled manually.
Pathways has built software that sits on top of the manufacturer’s data stack, ingests unstructured data like fuel invoices and generates life cycle assessments automatically.
Pathways gives its customers more than just the output documents. The data integration is live into the customer’s data stack; it can tell them which part of their production is actually responsible for the emission. Moving from pure documentation into decarbonisation information!
Pi Labs Team With Cohort 12
We’re delighted to be on this journey with
- Pathways [Leise Sandeman & Alex Cooper]
- Sorair [Kunmi Oludoyi, Raza Rubbani & Adebayo Popoola]
- Genia [Robin Li & Zhihao Zhao]
- Kestrix [Lucy Lyons & Matt Goodridge]
- Cyb3r Operations [Vincent Cook]
Connect with the founders to learn more about their innovative work and explore potential collaborations to create a digital and sustainable built world.
We’d love to work with you!
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