Brainbox AI may raise first outside funding by the end of this year
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BRAINBOX AI MAY KICK OFF FIRST OUTSIDE FUNDING ROUND BY THE END OF THIS YEAR
TIM LEEMASTER
BrainBox AI, the Montreal, Canada-based building services company, may kick off its first outside funding round as early as the end of this year, CTO and co-founder Jean-Simon Venne said.
The company hasn’t decided on the exact structure or size of the funding round. “We’re looking at different options,” Venne said.
One possibility, outside of a standard seed round of a few million dollars, is to bring in a real estate company as a strategic investor in a larger funding raise to scale faster.
The company also plans to begin its first commercialization efforts around the same time, Venne said. The company is currently adding more buildings to its beta testing process, which is focused on retail spaces, offices, hotels, schools and warehouses.
He declined to say what buildings were involved in the current testing program. The tests are running in cities including Montreal, Toronto and unspecified cities in the US.
Brainbox is applying neural networks to heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. It has developed 28 algorithms, including ones that can “coach out” the best option if two systems recommend opposite courses of action, and hopes to have around 50 ready to go by the time of commercialization.
Other algorithms the company has developed plan staged startups of the different HVAC systems to use the least possible energy, which reduces costs. Brainbox says it can reduce energy costs by up to 35% over three months at this point in its development. Carbon footprints can be cut by up to 40%.
The company was spun out of Realterm, the Maryland-based real estate investment firm. Realterm manages USD 4.2bn in assets, mainly logistics properties, through three private equity funds, according to its website.
Venne said Brainbox plans to bring in a sales and distribution chief before or around the time of the start of the commercialization process.
One of the challenges of its ongoing hiring process is finding talent in the Montreal area, he added.