We finished 2016 the way we intend to start 2017, with ambition and great support from our team, investors and customers. Early December a press release went out stating our intention to move into the commercial sector after successfully closing a £1.2 million funding round. This funding will allow us to sell our monitoring and control system into commercial properties that are too small for building energy management systems (BEMS).
The press release dives into further detail, but the most notable quote comes from the boss himself, Chief Executive George McGhee:
“That £1.2m is to help us accelerate, get that through development and into the market,” he said.
“If you speak to Boots or Marks & Spencer, Tesco and so on, a building energy management system is too expensive. The energy consumed doesn’t justify spending £10,000, so what we’re doing is trying to bring some of the capability into a smaller system that is much easier to install, so if a BEMS system costs £5,000 to £10,000 we can get a core unit in there that can do the main monitoring and control for less than £3,000.”
The theory is that by monitoring usage, bills can quickly and permanently be cut by 10 to 20 per cent and this has already seen success, with a working prototype already being trialled and one retail company seeing a return on investment payback within four months.
This isn’t new territory for us, just an exciting opportunity to share what we do in new markets. This follows our recent success in the residential sector, an area which continues to grow with NetThings Click.
On the surface, with the saturated consumer Internet of Things market, energy monitoring can appear a crowded place; there are a lot of software-only solutions, but not many turnkey systems that can do physical connections to the meter, bring the data to the cloud, provide the analytics, the apps on the smartphone. There are lot of companies that do bits of that but few that can do the end-to-end piece.
We think we’re quite well-positioned in terms of technology, the channels to market and our track record. We look forward to delivering the best results with our product range to all of our commercial and residential customers in 2017.
