What Investors Want to Know: How LEXI’s Wireless Building Management System is Pioneering Decarbonization

LEXI is a wireless building automation solution that helps digitize buildings to be more energy efficient and reduce CO2 to meet decarbonization requirements for climate mandate compliance.

Governments around the globe, driven by their commitment to carbon emission reduction, are regulating more and more industries. Commercial buildings, which account for 26% of global energy-related emissions, are now being tightly regulated.  To address this issue, LEXI is extending its Enterprise IoT platform to become a lightweight, wireless, cost-effective Building Management System-i.e. the LEXI SmartBMS, to easily retrofit older buildings for decarbonization.

The UBS Sustainability & Impact Institute’s “Retrofit Revolution” report states that 90% of all commercial buildings will need some form of retrofit to meet new climate mandates for reducing energy consumption and decarbonization. This includes most buildings built before 2010. It should come as no surprise that the older the building is, the more energy it consumes and, simultaneously, the harder it is to retrofit. In most cases, to retrofit these buildings, a wired building management system (BMS) is largely out of the question due to the cost of running wires in older buildings, the cost and risk to the building owner of displacing tenants during a retrofit,  as well as the fact that most older buildings contain asbestos, which means you can’t drill into the walls or ceiling.

The LEXI SmartBMS is a wireless BMS which supports a variety of standards-based wireless protocols (as opposed to the typical walled garden approach currently used in commercial wired BMS systems) tightly coupled with our IoT Cloud to deliver an exceptionally cost-effective platform.  Our plug-and-play, open system provides the interface devices, sensors, gateways, web and mobile applications required to reduce energy consumption and enhance facility operations. We normalize and aggregate standards-based data to enable regulatory compliance reporting and AI optimization for continuous performance improvements.

LEXI began as a player in the Enterprise IoT space with an executive team of leaders focused on that space, including John Osborne (COO).  John was previously US President at the largest IoT manufacturer in the world, Leedarson, as well as former Chairman Emeritus for the Connectivity Standards Alliance, and former Vice Chairman of the Board for the Z-Wave Alliance.   John was hired simultaneously as our former VP-Sales, Michael Bailey Smith.  

 I worked with Deepak Saxena (CTO) in the AdTech space prior to starting LEXI and his experience building massive online advertising exchanges is the underpinning of what is now the robust LEXI IoT Cloud, which enables us to manage, aggregate, and store AI-ready data, a key element of the LEXI SmartBMS solution.

Kelvin Ngan (VP of Operations, China) has 30 years of product development and manufacturing experience. He oversees all of LEXI’s hardware development in Hong Kong and Southern China, where his depth of knowledge and his relationships are critical to our success.

As the VP of Account Management, Caroline Gick brings experience in customer-facing roles for B2B and B2C technology companies in Silicon Valley into the role as the primary contact with LEXI’s current customers. Her organization (she is a former librarian!) and focus on customer experience and customer operations in prior positions come together to help LEXI maintain strong and growing relationships with customers.

With our move into Climate Tech and the Built Environment in the past year, we have begun to add leaders in the spaces of Smart Buildings, Automation, Energy Management, Sustainability, and Decarbonization in an advisory capacity, with plans to add to our executive team in future funding cycles.  We have brought on the following individuals as new advisors, some I have known for years and others to whom mutual connections introduced us as they saw the value in what LEXI is doing in the Smart Building and Climate space.

Hans Bukow and I have been friends for more than 25 years. His experience involves founding and performing as CEO/CxO of venture-backed companies, at companies such as eWork, FASTech, and Provade. Most recently, he has ventured into the Climate Tech space. Hans is a proven leader in start-up to growth execution, product with business strategy-vision, business development, product development, and general management operations. 

Brian Bernstein has experience as a CEO, as well as in Sales, Marketing, and as a Product Executive at companies ranging in size from startups to multi-billion dollar enterprises (including Osram, Philips Lighting, and Digital Lumens). Through his work he has engaged in B2B, IoT, SaaS, robotics, lighting, industrial automation, and data and analytics – realizing customer value with hardware and software systems and services.

Tom Shircliff is the co-founder of Intelligent Buildings, LLC and a respected leader and strategist in the Smart Building space. He focuses on the business approach to technology in portfolios and how that creates financial value and reduces risks for investors, asset managers, and corporate real estate executives.

Mark Skeen is the VP of Global Business Development at Johnson Controls (JCI).Through his work with Johnson Controls, Mark has a deep understanding and expertise in the building controls environment, the business of smart, healthy, and sustainable buildings, and in selling into commercial buildings and organizations across the globe. Prior to JCI, Mark was the  co-founder and VP of Life Safety & Compliance for Qolsys, a Silicon Valley-based home security, home automation and life safety technology startup. Qolsys was acquired by JCI in 2020.

 Anna Gusel is a clean tech professional dedicated to scaling the energy transition by helping clients develop decarbonization roadmaps, build tactical energy action plans and implement smart solutions to optimize efficiency, minimize costs and ensure energy resilience. Anna has a background in product development/management and go-to-market work, establishing sales channels, driving business development, growing partnerships, and managing customer relationships.

Since our last raise on Republic in 2022/2023, LEXI has brought on several large Enterprise customers, Rheem ($6B/rev commercial and residential water heater and HVAC manufacturer) and Crane ($3B/rev industrial valve manufacturer), to power their connected products strategies, including hardware and software development. To that end, we have built some significant new enterprise functionality, such as BACNet support (BACNet being the Building Management System protocol) and MODBus over wireless support (MODBus being the primary wired communications protocol in commercial buildings).  

We are currently delivering on the first phase of the Wireless Connected project with Rheem for a pilot with New York City Housing Authority in New York in November and are attending the Smart Building Show in London with Crane in early October as they announce the availability of a new LoRaWAN connected valve solution, built entirely on LEXI technology.  

We have also extended our Enterprise IoT customer traction into the Building Retrofit and Climate Mandate Compliance space with the LEXI SmartBMS. As we are building out the LEXI SmartBMS, we work cooperatively with several large players in the commercial real estate space, including Brookfield ($950B European Real Estate Manager) and Patrizia ($60B European Real Estate Manager). For the LEXI SmartBMS, customers Crane, Rheem, Brookfield , Patrizia, and CIRQ+ (Hospitality tech startup) are all evaluating commercial building candidates for pilot deployments in the US, UK, and Germany with onsite visits being scheduled in the coming months and the first pilot deployment expected in November.

The companies most referred to in our competitive landscape are the large, traditional building controls companies such as Honeywell and Johnson Controls. While these companies have a long history in the market, they focus on providing solutions for large commercial buildings and are, themselves, very large companies. LEXI differentiates itself by focusing on the small-to-midsize building retrofit market, including buildings up to 200K square feet (too small for the Honeywells and Johnson Controls to address) and is nimble, lightweight, open and standards-based, and a comprehensive plug-and-play solution.

As a Climate Tech platform, we differentiate ourselves from the growing number of software-only solutions by providing a comprehensive hardware and software solution that enables customers to connect and control their assets (buildings), pull data from their assets to our Cloud to normalize, aggregate, and store AI-ready data, which they can then customize for their climate compliance and reporting needs.

Another key differentiator is the LEXI SmartBMS Work Group, a workgroup of industry leaders in the Property Management & Commercial Building spaces, led by LEXI, with a mission to develop a Smart Building platform that enables companies to meet their decarbonization and performance goals. In October 2023, LEXI convened the first meeting of the SmartBMS Work Group, an industry trade group that we founded to fully develop the specifications of our SmartBMS. The work group meets monthly and includes three of the world’s largest Real Estate Asset Managers, Brookfield, Patrizia, and CBRE, as well as LEXI customers Crane and Rheem, and partners NXP Semiconductor and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

After two years of software development, adding key enterprise functionality, notably BACNet and Modbus, over wireless support, LEXI will finally reap the rewards of our work.  Our customers, Crane and Rheem, in particular, are forecasting significant production POs for both the platform and the new hardware devices we have created for them.  

 By the middle of 2025, we will also be well into multiple SmartBMS pilots and, by the end of the year have moved closer to what could be considered production/repeat deployments of the SmartBMS, probably numbering 10-15 across all our partners and customers.  

The combination of enterprise IoT production orders and SmartBMS deployments will result in a significant rise in revenue next year.

Quite simply, it is the achievement of the Crane & Rheem production orders coupled with the SmartBMS deployments.