When the vision of automation meets the mission of sustainability

Our story

If we were to encapsulate the Bisly story in two words, it would be “challenge accepted”. In 2018, the EU announced the Green Deal, including a path to Net Zero buildings. Buildings being the biggest contributor of CO2 emission is common knowledge.

They emit c. 30% of globally produced greenhouse gases and consume c. 40% of the energy. The potential reduction of carbon emissions from buildings through the use of automation is not only possible, but for the global economy, it’s actually five to six times more affordable than the more known path of electrifying the full transportation sector.

For example, with Bisly, it is possible for a medium-sized office building to save 40 tons of CO2 emissions per year. A comparable investment would be the purchase of four passenger EV’s, that would have a combined carbon reduction impact of 16 tons per annum.

It is clear that as a global community, we need to reduce carbon emissions, but we also need to make sure we take the most affordable and fastest route to reaching the climate goals.

The co-founders asked many questions – ‘why do only 5% of the buildings have some level of smartness and out of these 95% don’t work properly?’ ‘Why is the penetration so small if the opportunity is so big?’ ‘Why is the quality so poor?’ ‘Why is it costly?’

All the answers were more or less the same. This industry just doesn’t scale. It’s impossible to come up with a mass deployable smart building automation technology because of its hardware component. It’s also impossible to standardise this sector due to its complexity and too many moving parts.

Driven by a software engineering background and a passion for simplification, Bisly co-founder Siim Vips had an idea to reduce the costs and increase the quality by building all the processes around a universal building configurator, standardised system architecture and Cloud-based computing. This involved a similar approach to one used in the automotive retail industry for vehicle retail at Modera, a company he founded before. This company later became a Tier 1 supplier for global automotive companies, whilst getting listed in NASDAQ in 2021.

Bisly co-founder Ants Vill had the detailed insights of the cost drivers in the industry, specifically of overhead costs (ca 80% of any automation project) being the core problem by driving high CAPEX. This is coupled with a massive amount of on- and off-site coding that can reduce the quality and reliability of automated buildings. He had gathered this knowledge from his experience when co-founding automation engineering company DeltaE. The experience of scaling a global high-tech hardware business was meanwhile obtained as an early joiner in Skeleton Technologies, a European energy storage manufacturer, where, for nearly nine years, he was responsible for leading the development and operational teams to bring the products to the market and build needed factories to supply them.

Technical co-founder Jaanus Lepik knew, from past experience, how to build Cloud-driven home automation, IoT, blockchain and AI technology. Meanwhile, co-founder Mihkel Kõrgmaa had insight on the potential and challenges of automation systems from building up his commercial real estate portfolio.

Combined knowledge led them to believe that it’s possible to build a scalable smart building automation technology through standardisation that’s centred around universal digital twin technology, automotive grade hardware quality, bank grade security architecture, fully automated central updates down to the sensor component level, machine learning, and holistic remote management.

The challenge of creating scalable and widely affordable building automation technology was accepted and Bisly was born.