Audette secures US$9.5-million to create a net-zero plan for every building in North America

Audette, a proptech company creating actionable data-driven decarbonization plans for commercial real-estate portfolios, has raised US$9.5 million in funding from a group of leading cleantech investors.

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Audette Team Photo 2022 (Photo: Business Wire)

Led by Chicago-based Buoyant Ventures, with participation from Energy Impact Partners, Active Impact Investments, Johnson Controls, Osgoode Properties, Powerhouse Ventures, Turnham-Green Capital, and Undivided Ventures, the seed round is being used to launch Audette’s game-changing technology across 150 North American cities over the next 24 months.

By using artificial intelligence (AI) to capture, monitor and analyze key building data, Audette’s end-to-end platform digitizes the outdated process of identifying emissions-reduction opportunities. This enables building owners to:

• Visualize entire portfolios, and identify and evaluate opportunities for low-carbon building improvements, much more quickly and accurately
• Develop emission-reduction strategies, track progress, and ultimately achieve goals much more efficiently and cost-effectively
• Source financing and incentives for retrofit projects

“Closing an oversubscribed capital round with some of the proptech and cleantech sectors’ leading investors validates the need for real-estate decarbonization at massive scale, starting with every commercial building in North America,” said Christopher Naismith, CEO and Founder of Audette. “With the zero-carbon transition estimated to drive $10 trillion in global transactions, decarbonizing real estate represents one of the biggest reallocations of capital in human history.”

It would take centuries for individual sustainability professionals to create the emissions-reduction plans Audette’s AI models are capable of generating, Naismith added. “Our team knows from decades of combined experience that human-driven decarbonization doesn't scale. Behind this bottleneck, trillions of dollars of market activity are waiting to be unlocked as part of a once-in-a-generation opportunity for real-estate players to future-proof their portfolios and create value.”

Through its work with the first-ever Google Cloud Accelerator Canada Program and Google's United Nations Sustainable Development Goals advisory program, Audette has gained unique access to the rich multi-sector data a portion of the seed round is being used to acquire.

“Audette exemplifies the promise we see for data and software to accelerate climate action,” said Allison Myers, Buoyant Ventures’ Co-Founder and General Partner. “Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually on energy audits and retrofit planning, and Audette is directly reducing those costs on a per-building basis. More importantly, its solution is enabling real-estate operators to quickly prioritize decarbonization and energy savings across their portfolios so they can start retrofitting sooner and faster. Buoyant couldn't be more excited to support such an amazing team focused on such an important problem.”

Audette’s platform parses geospatial imagery on top of its vast and growing sea of private and public data to find every rooftop feature of an area’s building stock. It then applies models from a library of thousands of digital twins across vintages, use types, and HVAC topology to deliver an interactive platform for carbon reduction at regional and building-specific scales. These building-level interactions retrain the platform’s AI models, which improves macro-scale accuracy and creates a flywheel effect.

“What sets Audette apart is a holistic approach that models the entire building stock and details decarbonization pathways across entire regions, not just building by building,” said Vida Asiegbu, Principal at Energy Impact Partners. “It presents data at both the macro scale, for economic planning, and to building owners themselves, who use their records to create custom carbon step-down plans for their portfolios. The company has assembled a diverse and talented team to address one of the largest opportunities for decarbonization: the built environment.”

According to Managing Partner Mike Winterfield, Active Impact’s 2021 investment in Audette was made “because Christopher is a founder with hustle and accountability who delivers results. Now, as Canada's largest climate tech seed fund, we’re excited to follow up on our initial investment because Audette automates the net zero roadmap of a sector that contributes 19 percent of global GHG emissions, has found product-market fit across an exciting customer base of real estate asset managers, and is ready to scale.”

About Audette

Based in Victoria, B.C., Audette is on a mission to create a carbon-transition plan for every building on the planet. By creating a meaningful path forward to decarbonization across the real-estate industry, Audette’s proprietary data-driven technology expedites emissions reduction and enables it to scale globally. The future is carbon-free, and Audette is meeting those future needs TODAY. Learn more at audette.io.

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