Clockworks Analytics Gets a $16.1M Funding Round

Clockworks Analytics, which provides cloud-based building analytics systems, announced that it had closed a $16.1 million funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $28 million since its 2008 founding in MIT’s Building Science department. Some clients include MIT, Kaiser Permanente, Harvard University, Merck, and GK Norway.

The funding “will support continued product development, investments in sales and marketing, and expansion of the company’s international presence,” according to a company press release.

The round was led by Carom Growth Partners with participation from existing investor, SE Ventures. The company focuses on analytics that can help pinpoint faults and inefficient operations in buildings and claims having worked with more than 2,500 buildings.

“These new investment dollars give us the capital we need to further accelerate our already strong growth, both in North America and abroad, and to continue to invest in what we believe is the best technology in the FD&D market,” said Clockworks Analytics co-CEO Nick Gayeski in prepared remarks.

The technology uses a type of artificial intelligence called an expert system, which is software designed to mimic human expertise. “In order to accomplish feats of apparent intelligence, an expert system relies on two components: a knowledge base and an inference engine,” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. “A knowledge base is an organized collection of facts about the system’s domain. An inference engine interprets and evaluates the facts in the knowledge base in order to provide an answer. Typical tasks for expert systems involve classification, diagnosis, monitoring, design, scheduling, and planning for specialized endeavours.”

“The company’s clients—across healthcare services, life sciences, higher education, commercial real estate, and mechanical and operations service providers—have completed over 40,000 building tasks to correct issues identified by Clockworks’ diagnostics and identified over 286K tonnes of carbon savings,” the company said. 

“Buildings are becoming increasingly data rich environments but, in contrast to other domains such as image processing or government operations, open datasets representing commercial building operations are nearly non-existent. Even more rare is ground-truth verified data for building system and equipment operations,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says about fault detection and diagnostics. “Software-based analytics represent one of the fastest growing markets in commercial building technologies, and as data science comes to buildings, the industry has seen an explosion of interest in the development of advanced analytics and controls. In particular, FDD (fault detection and diagnostics) technology enables average savings of 9% with 2-year paybacks, by using building operational data to identify system or equipment level faults, and isolate their causes.”