Robert de Burgh-Day (Brightspace)

Robert de Burgh-Day is the founder of Brightspace, a start-up that uses occupancy tracking to reduce energy usage from HVAC systems in commercial buildings. He’s also a Climate Salad member and went through our GGP program. Brightspace has since scaled massively with a focus on the SEA market, with plans to install their product in largest shopping mall in Asia. We spoke about the advice he had for hard-ware founders, and tips for companies looking to scale overseas.

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What does Brightspace do?

We build edge AI sensors and software control systems for large commercial buildings. Basically, we go into a building and install our hardware, which allows us to anonymously track all the people in the building, and all the environmental metrics. Then we use that to create a live digital twin, which is primarily focused on saving money from HVAC usage. But we've got clients that use us for lighting, to improve their tenant comfort, or want the occupant data to streamline their operations.

Can you talk about expanding to the Southeast Asian (SEA) market?‍

We were invited over by by Global Vic, and they’ve been exceptional. They got us into a conference/trade show they were running over there last year. We got a lot of interest locally from that. They've since supported us significantly with introductions and support, and even attended client meetings with us. I couldn't recommend the Singapore team enough. That was the jumping off point in the sense that we decided, okay, let's start doing it now. But we always had that in mind. We knew where our product works best. We're not really interested in selling in the US market: it's busy, it's competitive, the climate's not perfect for our product. And realistically, I just see so much growth in Southeast Asia. I also appreciate an eight hour flight versus a much longer flight in the different time zones.

We've also got a quite a few early investors in our business — people from construction and engineering — that have worked in major blue chip companies within Australia, and then have done the tour of duty through countries like Singapore, Malaysia, India, and the Middle East. That's helped us massively because it means we've got deep industry contacts in all these markets. We've also got validators who will stand up for us and get us in front of clients who are trusted in the market already. I cannot stress how important that is. If you're trying to push something to these markets, especially in our space where we're dealing with massive assets, you better have people who can put their reputation behind you. It would be incredibly difficult to just go there alone not knowing anyone. It's all about network if you're doing hardware, especially in a B2B oriented enterprise.‍

What were the differences between the Australian and SEA market?

One thing you've got to be careful of in Southeast Asia is that there's a lot of yes — yes is said a lot more than what it's meant. People will say yes to be polite.There’s also more appetite to try new things. In Australia, we've got early adopters who champion new technology, but there’s a big part of the market that’s not going to try anything new. Whereas over there, I feel like there's more of a desire to be ahead of the pack, at least in our space.

And when you're talking about Singapore, Malaysia, and some of the other countries, it's a pretty green field when it comes to climate. They’re a lot earlier on the journey, which comes with it’s blessings and curses. You're not competing with attention for other solutions — which might be doing different things — but you do get categorized in the same bucket, so there's an education piece as well.

If there's one thing that that that matters over there, you need to have a financial incentive to adopt technology. The term in the region is “coin operated.” If you can give them a little benefit, then they will move.‍‍

What did you wish you knew before expanding?

I would have been more targeted with the conversations I was having. You've got limited runway running a start-up. Identifying the highest value conversations would have saved us a reasonable amount of time and money. You go overseas and everything's shiny and everyone wants to talk to you, but you definitely want to identify the fastest path to getting some early product in market. How you’re perceived is important too. It's all well and good to get your product in somewhere small, but you've got to find something that's blue chip or blue chip adjacent — or something that people respect — and if customers see someone they respect do it, it really opens up the market.

What are the challenges facing hardware start-ups in particular?‍

The hard thing about being a hardware startup in Australia is nobody likes hardware. If you're in the investment space, it's very difficult to get money. You basically have to sell your product before it's finished, otherwise you're not going to get any money. You've got to balance this timeline of, okay, we know where our feature set is, we’ve done all the testing and maybe we can't manufacture at scale yet, with somehow getting a bunch of orders, when you haven't got the product. Timing these two things is very tricky.

We spent a year doing that. We were basically ready to do mass manufacturing, while trying to get these orders. And the investors are saying, get the orders and we'll give you the money. And then they say, go deploy the product and then we’ll give you the money. So there's a real chicken and egg problem in hardware in Australia. There's definitely not enough being done about it.

How does you sell a product when it’s not ready?

Well, you've got to do something right? You've got to have enough data. You've got to understand your product in the space, to the point where you can make some good projections around the outcome. Then you've got to do proof of concepts. If it means you've got to do part of a building for free, give them three months of data. But set up an agreement where you say, if you get to the KPI they want, then they'll give you the rest of the building to deploy.

And that’s the stage we’re at overseas. We've built the pipeline, we've got the sites, we've got the POCs approved. We're just about to start deploying, including at a major international airport, and one of the largest shopping centres in the whole of Asia. And we've got a bunch of office partnerships over there as well with interior design companies. So some really good opportunities, but it just takes time. Everything takes a long time.

The process took 5 years right?

We did spend two years building that before we started on the other products. The infrastructure that sits behind our product has been built over five years. But the two products that we're focused on at the moment really have only been — from ideation to manufacturing — three years. The occupant tracker and our environmental monitor have been fairly quick. But we spent a lot of time on the early two products as well. We spent quite a bit of time in R&D and also in doing some research projects around the efficacy of our products in our system. I can recommend the best guys in Australia to do this, there's a group called Co Labs.Those guys are unbelievable.

What would've been helpful to know in the early stages of running Brightspace?

In hindsight, if we had gone and built a beta version that we could sell a bit more early, we probably would have saved about 6 to 8 months, because we would have got more funding earlier. Hindsight's 2020. But taking something which is realistically building a new network protocol, building a hardware product, building software for the cloud and the firmware on the back end and doing all the testing — you’re running like five businesses doing that.

It's capital intensive and time intensive. And if you're not really well funded and can't throw a big team, it's going to take time. We've probably spent $5 million in the last five years, and we've raised a lot of money. We've also put a lot of our own money in. We've raised a lot of debt and other things. But it's difficult. It's difficult to do when you don't really know where your next grants are coming from. So it makes it hard to think long term.

On talking to hardware founders.

Go and talk to some founders that have built hardware before. No one's going to steal your idea. Believe me, we don't want to build anything else. You'll save yourself an unbelievable amount of effort and time if you just go and find someone that's done it before to give you some advice. And they will, because they've been through the pain and don't want you to go through it.

What's been your proudest moment?

Probably when we got everything to work. And also seeing my team evolve and grow — we've got a couple of guys that started here as their first job out of uni, and the others five years in, so that's been awesome to see as well. But check back with me when I get those sites in Malaysia — then that’ll be the best one.