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Robert Cooper
President and CEO, Embue
Industry experience: 40 years
After receiving more than $6 million in funding from the venture capital industry and MassDevelopment’s emerging technology fund since late fall, a Worcester proptech startup that makes multifamily utility systems smarter is gearing up for expansion. Robert Cooper is CEO of Embue, which provides wireless technology and monitoring software to landlords. A native of New Zealand, Cooper is a veteran of the Massachusetts tech industry with past roles at Stratus and Lucent, and co-founded Embue with tech entrepreneur Larry Genovesi in 2015. Embue company has operated out of Worcester’s WorcLab incubator for more than four years, and the company’s platform is used in more than 70 buildings in the Northeast totaling more than 6,000 apartments. Its local clients include WinnCompanies, The Schochet Companies, and 2Life Communities.
Q: How does the Embue platform deliver savings to landlords?
A: We started the company in early 2015 to latch onto this unmet need for multifamily buildings to be a lot smarter. Everybody’s got to live somewhere, and those multifamily buildings traditionally have very little technology in them, even the most professionally-run buildings. Before we came along, it was very manual: tons of walking around, looking for problems. As a consequence, there was a lot of energy waste, and problems with flooding or frozen pipes or broken boilers at 2 a.m. A key enabler of what we do is our installation partners, going into those buildings and putting the “Internet of Things” devices throughout the buildings. There are a lot of sensors connected to major pieces of HVAC equipment like boilers and chillers. We put in a very robust in-building network. It’s using some of the technology you might have in your home, but it’s got to be very reliable.
Peoples’ homes are mission-critical. Most of what we do is software running in the cloud. It’s tapping into that abundant data we’re pulling out of the building and applying analytics and machine learning to understand all manner of information about that building. Some of it is real-time, an emerging problem that the staff really wants to get on: We found out a boiler tripped out, and we’re about to tell the staff how long it’s going to be before the building is safe and comfortable for the occupants. One of our customers had a boiler go down on a late Friday afternoon. They found out within a few minutes and looked at it remotely, and they did need to go on-site and fix that problem later that evening.
If you compare to what would have happened without our platform, the boiler would have failed, the building would have stayed pretty warm and nobody would have complained until 11 p.m. That same data and analytics is super helpful when you’re trying to plan out decarbonization of that building. Ultimately, you may be replacing that gas boiler with an all-electric centralized heat pump system. Is that heat pump going to work and keep the building warm enough? Maybe you need to do new windows or more insulation. The data is going to be able to tell you exactly that.
Q: Does the platform enable landlords to save on maintenance staffing?
A: On the maintenance side, it’s really about staff productivity. It’s not so much you’re going to put in Embue and lay people off. The maintenance staff are chronically overloaded and that only got more challenging in the pandemic, as people quit and are aging out of the industry. Instead, it’s allowing them to get more of their jobs done during the day, and having higher satisfaction. The other aspect of our return on investment for the customers, beyond staff productivity, is immediate energy savings. We’re saving 20 to 30 percent or more on the energy costs that the landlords and renters might be paying.
Q: Who is Embue’s target customer, and what does this technology mean for property owners in communities adopting the new Massachusetts opt-in stretch energy code?
A: Most of our customers are thinking about it. The more forward-looking ones have put plans in place. Boston has the BERDO 2.0 [Building Emissions Reporting Disclosure Ordinance] that is getting real, so buildings will start getting fines. We’ve actually taken the BERDO database, which is public, and examined all those buildings and run out analytics and analyzed the potential savings. Looking just at the multifamily buildings, there are over 100 buildings in Boston that will start paying fines, and we can predict how much starting in 2025. If you look to 2030 when the threshold rachets down lower, then there are hundreds or thousands that are going to get hit. Decarb is expensive. It’s a long-term project. It’s like planning out what car or house I’m going to buy in a few years, that kind of long-term decision.
Q: Why does the Embue platform specifically apply to multifamily properties, and are there plans for other products targeting other real estate sectors?
A: From a technical perspective, it will work equally well in pretty much every other kind of commercial building. We decided on the sales and marketing to focus on the multifamily space in our software, and we made a user experience that is very much tailored to staff in multifamily. But we recognize its relevance in other building types.
Q: What are Embue’s latest funding goals?
A: We raised the $2.3 million seed round late last year and then we followed that with $3.8 million from MassDevelopment. What’s nice is MassDevelopment gave us a facility we can draw on as we hire more Massachusetts employees for the green economy, and as we draw in more equity and venture investors. It’s a new facility that we will draw on for the next one to two years. The facility should allow us to hire about another 30 more staff as our plans evolve.
Q: Is Embue planning to expand its own real estate footprint?
A: We are largely remote and hybrid. We need a space to get everybody together, and right now WorcLab is meeting those needs pretty well. That may change as we grow. The nice thing about places like WorcLab is they are pretty flexible. To be perfectly honest, I could see some of the new forms of suburban coworking space in our needs. The business team just got together to figure out which is equidistant from everybody. It’s a really interesting time for folks like us.
Cooper’s Five Favorite National Parks:
- Yosemite
- Fiordland, New Zealand
- Everglades
- Tongariro, New Zealand
- Acadia
