From the beginning of January, Skeleton’s long-time board member and top executive Ants Vill will join Bisly’s fast-growing team, stepping in as COO and member of the board. Coming from a long background in the energy sector, the top leader is a great addition to the Bisly team, bringing along valuable experience when it comes to entering foreign markets, developing hardware, managing processes, and scaling business. Holding most of the market share in Estonia with ongoing pilot projects in the UK, Sweden and Germany, Estonian intelligent building startup Bisly has an ambitious plan to become the market leader in its field, firstly in Europe and then globally. Bisly’s current COO and co-founder Mihkel Kõrgmaa will take the role of CPO within the company, putting most of his focus on developing Bisly’s main product.
According to Bisly’s CEO and co-founder Siim Vips: “Ants has been a great support for the company ever since Bisly was founded and it’s a great pleasure to now be able to work with him on a daily basis. As we’re now nearing the phase of rapid scaling, his joining as a late founder taking on the role of COO and member of the board is adding a lot of valuable experience to the team and is thus helping us grow exponentially and bring Bisly’s mission to life.”
The basis of this rapid scaling is Bisly’s innovative cloud-based software and their self-developed hardware that allow to turn both old and new buildings energy efficient. This helps to not only fight against climate change, but also improve the quality of life. Bisly’s intelligent building technology helps to save energy and is already ensuring energy efficiency in thousands of apartments and offices.
How do you see yourself contributing to Bisly’s growth in the upcoming years and what are your feelings about joining the team?
“I believe each generation has their own mission – our mission is to make the world a greener, cleaner, and safer place for not only us, but also the generations to follow. That’s why I feel like continuing my professional path in the green technology sector and thus doing my part in making our energy consumption more efficient and living environment better is a very natural step for me,” commented Ants Vill on his joining with Bisly.
“I’ve been familiar with Bisly’s segment, product, and growing team for a while now, having spent over the last two years as Chairman of Bisly’s Supervisory Board. I also have a good feel of the field thanks to being the co-founder of DeltaE, a company in the same sector. At the end of last year, I realized the time had come to exchange my periodic role as member of the council for a permanent, day-to-day contribution to the development of Bisly.”
Ants Vill sees Bisly having a great future and fast development. “I see great and fast growth potential for Bisly’s technology, and I am excited to put my experience from Skeleton into good use when joining the company. For the last eight and a half years, as Skeleton’s member of the management team, I’ve dealt with bringing high-power batteries and supercapacitors to the market and thus contributed to solving the challenge presented by climate change. While building factories and bringing new products to the market, various development, production and business roles have helped me realize the overall picture of the complexities and solutions connected to growing a technology company.”
Long-time and broad experiences that Ants Vill has acquired when leading companies and accelerating their growth, are of great importance for Bisly at this point in time. As Bisly’s is also a hardware-based product and there are many similar elements compared to Vill’s previous challenges, he sees this as a great opportunity to use his existing experience in both development and quality assurance, as well as supply chain and manufacturing. Ants Vill is also bringing his experience in general management and capital raising to the new role, as well as international business management experience he’s gained over the past few years. This will help accelerate Bisly’s objective to take on foreign markets.
The new COO of Bilsy added: “In order to reach the goals of the Paris Climate Accords and stop global warming, a broad-based approach across sectors is needed. Different buildings make up about 30-40% of global energy consumption and 20-25% of emissions. That’s why improving the energy efficiency of the real estate sector is of critical importance. To compare, the greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector that have gotten a lot of attention make up about 20% of the global amount. This is why prop-tech is a very attractive and attention-demanding market, where the main obstacle has been IoT systems based on outdated legacy technology. They come with a high cost and low scalability. Bisly’s innovative technology brings just the right product to solve the aforementioned bottlenecks.“
The global intelligent building market is estimated at around 86 billion dollars already today, with a CAGR of 11.4% and expected to reach $148 billion by 2027. This is accelerated by such strategic factors as high and continuously growing energy costs and complying with the requirements of various environmental, social and management standards. To comply with the European Commission’s building energy efficiency directive EPBD and its goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, buildings must significantly reduce their heating, cooling, lighting and warm water consumption by utilizing new technologies.
What are the first steps that an Estonian company has to take into consideration when expanding to a foreign market?
The first and most important step when it comes to expanding into new markets has already been taken by Bisly. They have developed a functioning, cost-effective and easily scalable product. On top of its leading market position in Estonia, Bisly is already today implementing pilot projects in their main target markets.
“Secondly, it is of course vital that both the product, team and the company are competitive on a global scale in order to make the growth ambitions a reality. Interest in both the product as well as the company is great, and this was definitely assured by the successful funding round at the end of the globally difficult last year. The company was able to bring in 3.6 million Euros with the lead investor coming from Belgium. This definitely puts us in the TOP5 in Estonia when it comes to seed-round companies,” said Vill.
“To move on, we have to continue growing our professional and modern sales and business development team on an international level. Along with top management and founders, with active sales, we target to sign framework agreements with main real estate developers and owners. We’ll definitely be turning our attention to creating a partner network through various integrators and distributors, to accelerate our exponential growth and ensure local support for end users.
