September 2nd, 2021 — With the built environment accounting for almost 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, reducing buildings’ energy usage represents one of the biggest opportunities for rapid decarbonization. But identifying these opportunities at scale remains difficult: the process for assessing buildings to understand the opportunities, costs, and projected savings of energy efficiency is expensive, cumbersome, and a significant barrier to scale.

Audette digitizes the assessment process for building decarbonization by capturing digital data about the building stock and layering in machine intelligence. This approach significantly reduces costs and streamlines the identification and evaluation of opportunities for low-carbon building improvements. The platform also connects commercial building portfolio owners with financiers via a marketplace that reduces friction and improves capital allocation to retrofit projects.

Here’s why we’re so excited about what Audette has built.

The audit process for building decarbonization remains stuck in the past.

• Building audits are a necessary and established process within the commercial buildings space, representing a crucial first step towards decarbonizing building portfolios. But this process hasn't changed in decades.

• Despite a rapidly changing technology environment, almost all audits remain consultant-led, paper-based, and in-person.

The market for building energy efficiency is huge and multifaceted—and desperately in need of organization.

• Commercial real estate groups, governments, and corporations spend $220 billion on building energy efficiency every year. This market is driven by a combination of individual building economics (reducing costs and improving a building’s value over time), corporate emissions reductions goals (many of which require deep retrofits to achieve ambitious targets), and government mandates (requiring financiers to deploy capital to energy efficiency projects).

• Few players are providing clear blueprints for decarbonization at scale. Every step of the energy efficiency value chain is characterized by a fragmented stakeholder ecosystem, and solution providers struggle with go-to-market strategy, technical differentiation, and incentive misalignment.

Goodbye, audits. Hello, Audette.

• Audette’s end-to-end software solution enables more efficient, digital-first processes for decarbonizing buildings, reducing the cost and time investment of building audits by up to 90%.

• The company solves multiple pain points along the energy efficiency value chain by digitizing the due diligence process, matching financiers to recommended improvements, and measuring and verifying energy savings after implementation.

• Audette’s software determines what equipment is in need of replacement, qualifies for rebates, or is coming up on warranty, and then provides a ranked list of recommendations for high-potential retrofits across an entire portfolio.

• Building owners can also use Audette’s marketplace to connect with financiers to implement prioritized equipment upgrades and find incentives that reduce the overall cost of retrofit projects.

Powerhouse Ventures invested in Audette’s pre-seed round alongside Active Impact Investments, Turnham Green, and Panache Ventures. Since launching their core product in 2020, Audette has partnered with enterprise clients representing more than $145B in assets across Canada, where the company is headquartered. We’re proud to work with Founder & CEO Christopher Naismith and the entire Audette team to meet existing pipeline demand and scale across North America.

Special thanks to Ella Warshauer, Marie Thompson, and Ry Storey-Fisher.

To read more about Powerhouse Ventures’ other publicly-announced investments, visit our Insights page.