On Tuesday, Salt Lake City smart building pioneer PassiveLogic announced that it has raised $15 million in financing from Brookfield Growth, the growth technology investment arm of $690 billion global asset manager Brookfield.
Passive Logic said it will use the new funds to support the development of a first-of-its-kind autonomous buildings platform that can be used to retrofit buildings of all shapes and sizes for greater energy efficiency. PassiveLogic enables buildings and building controls to make independent real-time decisions based on digital twin descriptions.
PassiveLogic describes itself as the world’s first “general purpose” autonomous system platform, distinct from single use-case systems marketed in industries, like automotive.
“An autonomous car will only be an autonomous car, it can’t be reconfigured for any other purpose. PassiveLogic’s technology can be used for any type of autonomous system the end user wishes to design — including custom use cases,” PassiveLogic CEO Troy Harvey explained.
In industrial applications like buildings, each project is a custom one-off — a unique combination of architecture, engineering, system topologies, and business use cases that traditional automation or deep learning approaches are incapable of solving. By contrast, PassiveLogic says its own software, Autonomy Studio, provides end users a generative design and management environment that executes on the company’s Hive Autonomous System hardware.
“To get to the future of real estate, there needs to be a digital platform that can aggregate building data, enable building managers to customize automation controls, and act upon it in real-time. This platform will be the interface for the next generation of PropTech services the market wants to plug into buildings, and will save customers both time and money in deploying automation projects,” said Josh Raffaelli, Managing Partner at Brookfield.
PassiveLogic’s platform has demonstrated 30 percent energy efficiency gains in the field through optimized real-time control that responds to the dynamic nature of the building environment. Through these direct efficiency improvements coupled with enabling users to add enterprise applications to the platform through their Solution Store, PassiveLogic says it will help real estate leaders such as Brookfield reach their carbon neutrality goals.
“PassiveLogic has built an incredible array of technologies that address the whole life cycle of the building business. We are reinventing how we design building systems, how manufacturers describe equipment as digital twins, how automation hardware engages with construction professionals — all the way to providing owner-operators with the first high-level tools and API for making new types of building applications,” said John Bacus, VP of PassiveLogic’s User Software.
“Buildings are the most complex systems in the world, and yet of the four major worldwide players in automation, the newest platform is now already 25 years old. Just think of that, in technology terms, and how much has changed in that time,” said CTO at PassiveLogic, Jeremy Fillingim.
