New office buildings are all eco-friendly and energy-efficient but it seems that somehow human beings – who work at these offices – and their well being have been omitted. Tomas Novotny, the 33-year-old founder of the Nordic startup 720 Degrees, wants to change this. In the era of ever-present affordable sensors, his mission – collect tons of data from the office environment, analyze it and let the software figure out how to transform it to a more pleasant working place – comes as a step in an office evolution.
„Somehow, we forgot that the people are more valuable than anything else in the building, including energy bill,“ says Novotny, adding: „Sadly, nobody knows what the office environment is anyway.“
Tomas Novotny.720 Degrees
720 Degrees´s cloud-based solution for indoor environmental quality monitoring is already being used in hundreds of facilities across Europe, counting GE Healthcare, IBM, CBRE or construction company YIT among its customers. The Helsinki-based company has seen significant success around Nordics and now eyes bigger markets. Next up? New York City.
Their move overseas is fuelled by the recently announced investment of €2.9 million from Pi Labs, J&T Ventures, Tekes, and a couple of angel investors from the U.S,, taking the total amount raised to €3.5 million since 2014.
„Currently, facility managers often rely on outdated methods of controlling a building or facilities
environment resulting in a loss in property value and deficiencies in occupant experience,“ says Novotny. 720 Degrees’ analytics provides occupants, tenants, property owners and property maintenance professionals with real-time information and provides automated suggestions on how to improve facilities for employee health and productivity.
So to all nine-to-fivers who feel tired, sleepy or numb at their open spaces (and do not have last night party to blame), there is hope after all. “Large property investors often consider the topic of ‘indoor air quality’ as only an expense item,“ says Rick Aller, co-founder of 720 Degrees. „Thanks to our solution, property investors can increase the value of their properties by significantly improving the quality of indoor air and occupant satisfaction.“
Tomas Novotny720 Degrees
Technology has been disrupting real estate just like any other industry. It is called proptech (shortcut for property + technology) and according to some VCs, it promises great potential.
„This sector has grown significantly in recent years. Some studies suggest that nearly half of the new buildings in the U.S. will be “healthy buildings” in 2021. Thanks to the volume of collected data and the experience with detailed real-time AI-driven data analysis, 720 Degrees already ranks among world leaders in this area, “says Adam Kocik, managing director of J&T Ventures.
„Until the robots take completely over, it is clear that humans represent one of the most expensive line items for most office-based organizations and therefore for the productivity’s sake, they need to be placed in healthy, comfortable environments,“ adds Joseph Balaz, New York-based real estate entrepreneur and business angel investor. „I was intrigued by the core technology and service 720 Degrees offers and had to invest.
According to Novotny, about one-third of all buildings face some kind of indoor air quality challenges. Often the HVAC is to blame for tired and slow-thinking employees. “These issues are easily preventable,” says Novotny. In some cases, his team discovered volatile organic compounds due to material emissions. “Proper monitoring and more targeted actions based on analytics have even lowered maintenance and operational costs in buildings, which is great news for real estate investors” adds Novotny.
Tomas Novotny at Green Buildings conference in Prague (2017).720 Degrees
720 Degrees solution analyze over a dozen indoor environmental parameters including temperature, carbon dioxide, chemical or particles as well as noise and its details. „Our goal is to make people comfortable with their workplaces so they can be productive. You need to realize that human beings evolved as outdoor creatures. Offices represent an artificial environment, very much unlike the natural conditions we have been used throughout most of our evolution,“ says Novotny.
He grew up in a small village near Brno, Czech Republic and his family background predestined his career. His father worked as a programmer and his mother as a doctor. So in 2010, when he moved to Finland to study entrepreneurship, his parent´s working paths merged into an idea, which later became 720 Degrees. He chose a difficult landscape to take off – the economic recession had been just behind its peak.
„Everybody talked about cost-cutting and money-saving solutions. Employee´s well being was definitely not a hot topic back then,“ recalls Novotny. It wasn´t until 2014 when the economy healed and Novotny with his peers Rick Aller and Simon Burg started working on 720 Degrees and kept adding big names to their client’s list since.
„It took a couple of years to gain their respect,“ says Novotny, who now plans to move to the U. S. to push the company to the next level. „New York has more office real estate than all Nordic countries combined and it is our job to show there what we are capable of and gain their trust.“