Is it possible to get the energy benefits of a smart car in your building with the same ease of use? Yes!

Shadow Ventures, a boutique venture capital firm focused on investing in seed-stage technology companies disrupting the build environment, is excited to announce the five companies selected to participate in their first Multifamily Technology Accelerator cohort. The inaugural Multifamily Technology Accelerator cohort includes: Embue, a cloud-based service platform for portfolio-wide apartment building management based in Boston.

The timing is right for multi-housing to adopt smart building technology and services. Ironically, by coming later to the party than commercial real estate, multi-housing is in a good position to do it once and do it right: the right technology, the right infrastructure and the right software services, all integrated into an easy-to-adopt package. 

The Back to Work Challenge Awards recognizes companies who developed new best practices, innovations and partnerships during the COVID-19 global pandemic, and Embue was recognized for our work on the Newcastle Saranac Apartments, a 97-unit affordable housing community located in Boston owned and being renovated by The Schochet Companies, a real estate and development company based in Braintree, MA.

Asset protection is important for any multifamily property owner - things like burst pipes in the winter and water leaks any time of the year can really wreak havoc on a building. Recently, an Embue customer averted disaster by getting alerted to a rapidly escalating issue that drives home the importance of alerts and proper monitoring of central equipment.

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) has long been recognized as one of the most important elements in any building. There are five key steps all multifamily owners and property managers should take to ensure that IAQ is safe for residents.

Embue’s hometown of Boston is like many other communities in the US. There’s been a lot of gentrification where new luxury housing displaces older buildings that served communities with less fortunate residents.

And while there are lots of societal inequities between the types of residents, one glaring example is in digital equity. Digital equity is a lot of things. In its purest sense, it occurs when people can’t access and effectively use the technology necessary to participate in society -- things like high speed internet -- which can put lower income residents and seniors at a disadvantage.

The Internet of Things, or IoT, is changing the way we live, the way we work and the way we manage our lives. IoT refers to a wide range of internet-connected devices that can communicate with other networks and devices that link to the real world. Most of us are already using IoT devices in our daily lives -- we use smart TVs to stream content, connected doorbells to see who is knocking at our doors and smart thermostats to control and automate the temperature of our homes.

Embue, the apartment building intelligence and automation startup, celebrates achievement in the Real Estate Tech Awards (#RETAS) 

Boston, Mass. -- September 5, 2019 – Embue, a leading provider of apartment building intelligence and automation solutions, today announced that it has been named a winner of the Sixth Annual Real Estate Tech Awards (#RETAS) in the Built World, Smart Property category. The award was presented by CREtech (cretech.com), the largest event, data and content platform in the commercial real estate tech industry.

Are you maximizing your maintenance team?

In the multifamily business, your team has to do a lot, from solving resident issues to checking on the heating and cooling systems to keeping everything clean and responding to emergencies -- and that’s just the beginning. The tasks can be routine and monotonous, but they’re absolutely critical to the health of the building and are the keys to resident satisfaction.

The good news is that implementing affordable, cutting-edge technology just might be the answer.

So you’ve started to think about moving toward making your multifamily building smart -- but how can window air conditioning units fit into the equation? As it turns out, traditional window and through the wall AC units have much more to offer towards creating an intelligent system than most realize.

Up to now, users had to make the decision between leaving the AC on all day when no one is there, or coming home to a hot apartment and waiting hours for it to cool down. Which do they choose, comfort or waste?

There’s no question that smart thermostats are great for residents. The ability to control temperatures remotely, set schedules easily through a smartphone app, and access data history are just a few of the reasons why every multifamily building should be equipped with them.

However, our customers have found that the real value comes from behind the thermostat -- that’s where, for property owners and managers, the magic happens…

At Embue, we’re technologists who not only have a passion for, well, technology, but also for buildings. And we’re a startup. Which means that we work hard, work closely and hand-in-hand with our customers to build a product that solves real problems and delivers strong ROI.

And sometimes we’re so heads-down working with customers that it’s hard to see the progress we’ve made.

But that changed last Thursday…

Shadow Ventures’ mission is to help grow the technology companies poised to transform AEC, commercial real estate, and beyond.

Robert Cooper is a serial entrepreneur whose first startup, a spinout from Cornell University, was acquired for 24X. Let’s just say, he was hooked, and he’s been building companies ever since.

Embue was named to 6 HOT #CREtech Companies to Follow List.

“It begins with smart apartment + changes everything about how apt. buildings are operated. Delivered by the team that knows buildings, networks + data analytics.”

One of our customers, Maloney Properties, is in the middle of large, $34 million renovation project at Franklin Highlands, one of its multifamily properties here in Boston. A major part of the project includes extensive repairs to the building’s exterior walls, new roofs, and repairing or replacing windows. The external work areas are currently tented, and kept warm with construction heaters so the work can move forward in inclement weather and through temperature changes.

It’s an exciting time to be a proptech company, and we’ve noticed a real change in the customer mindset. Over the past year, we’ve seen multifamily owners move from “why should I…” to “how do I…,” and as more buildings become technology enabled, owners, managers, maintenance staff and residents all benefit. But, more on that in another post. In this post, we we’d like to talk about customer adoption and how we’re evolving to meet the needs of this rapidly growing market….

We’re pleased to announce that Embue was recently been named to The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s (MassCEC) DeployMass Commercially Ready Technology (CRT) List.

True story: I recently used Embue Super while drinking a pint at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. And, also true: I prevented a major problem back home.

Our family was on vacation in Ireland and while we were visiting the #1 tourist spot in Dublin, I got a low temperature alert from Embue on my phone. (I've got Embue installed in my house) Somehow we'd left a couple of thermostats in the Off position. Now, we were 3,000 miles away and it was going to be 10F overnight back in Boston. So I used the Embue Super app on my phone to turn the heat on and check the target temperatures. And then got back to my pint.

This same use case is key for our customers as we head into winter.

The dog days of August are behind us, but at Embue things are really heating up. We recently installed Embue in a 127-unit affordable senior housing complex in downtown Boston and we’ve already seen some impressive results. In the first two months of the heavy cooling season, Embue has saved 25% on total electricity usage (kWh) and has reduced the building’s peak demand charge by 25% as well.