March 7th, 2023 — It is difficult to overstate the sheer scale and impact of the built environment. Financially, the construction industry represents 12% of global GDP. Environmentally, buildings account for nearly 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions. Because most buildings last for multiple decades, a crucial decarbonization opportunity exists when planning major building renovations or new construction. The design phase of real estate projects is the best chance to address both a building’s embedded carbon – the carbon emissions associated with building materials and processes – and its future operational emissions.
Building owners, design consultants, engineers, and architects must make decisions about design and deconstruction – how to methodically remove and salvage reusable materials from an existing structure instead of doing an indiscriminate demolition. These choices can significantly change the cost, waste, and carbon emissions of a project but are made today after stakeholders undergo manual, bespoke processes that often see them juggling conflicting goals and constraints. This often leads to suboptimal outcomes as project collaborators can only evaluate a limited number of designs and lack a seamless way to analyze trade-offs. Teams might inadvertently embed more carbon than necessary while looking to mitigate operational carbon, or send valuable materials from existing structures to a landfill without realizing that a deconstruction plan could fit within their timeframe.
Adaptis’ platform automates the new build and renovation design optimization process for multifamily and nonresidential buildings, generating thousands of building designs and adaptations that evaluate the cost, time, and environmental impact across both carbon and lifecycle building material waste. With a dynamic and user-friendly visual tool, Adaptis empowers building owners, building designers, and architects to build, compare, and choose the most carbon-efficient designs while meeting key constraints.
Addressing building adaptation and new construction at the design phase represents a massive economic and environmental opportunity
In 2021, there were nearly 70,000 permits issued for alterations and improvements to multifamily, commercial, and industrial buildings as well as an additional 36,000 permits for new construction in their home country of Canada alone. Including the United States, supporting the optimal design of these projects represents a multi-billion dollar opportunity.
While a lot of attention has gone to reducing carbon emissions related to energy usage in the built environment, there’s an opportunity to address embedded emissions. According to RMI, at least one-quarter of the built environment’s total emissions can be attributed to the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of building materials.
Increasingly complex constraints and multiple stakeholders make the design phase ripe for innovation
Today, projects must not only be optimized for building cost and time-to-completion, but also for operational carbon emissions, embedded carbon emissions, salvage value, spatial daylight autonomy, and total lifetime costs.
Currently, there are no robust tools to help building owners, design consultants, engineers, and architects jointly evaluate trade-offs across these indices, nor are there integrated, dedicated tools to help building owners monitor the ongoing outcomes of their decisions.
Adaptis allows stakeholders to intuitively and quickly compare tradeoffs across a wider range of designs than ever possible before
Adaptis’ platform assists in the upfront assessment and design of a project, helps users validate that design decisions are being implemented throughout construction, and enables the ongoing tracking and monitoring of results throughout the life of a building, assisting with maintenance, capital planning, and future adaptation decisions.
For a given project, Adaptis generates hundreds or even thousands of potential design options, all with key environmental and economic attributes associated with each design. Users can filter down to the designs that meet their minimum constraints and easily compare tradeoffs between those that remain.
Behind the intuitive user interface, Adaptis’ platform is powered by proprietary methodologies and databases, custom-built machine learning algorithms, and models developed during the founders’ PhD research.
Powerhouse Ventures is proud to join Adaptis’ $1.5M pre-seed fundraising series alongside 2048 Ventures and Blue Vision Capital. We look forward to working with CEO Sheida Shahi, CTO Aida Mollaei, and the entire Adaptis team as they support the decarbonization of our built environment.
Special thanks to Marie Thompson, Gabriel VanLoozen, Gabe Cuadra and Sam Wohlforth.
To read more about Powerhouse Ventures’ other publicly-announced investments, visit our Insights page.