Smart buildings for a cleaner world

Meet the former British Army officer using technology and data to make commercial buildings around the world healthier and more sustainable

William Cowell de Gruchy
CEO, Infogrid

Five years ago, as he was conducting commercial due diligence on a large dairy business, William Cowell de Gruchy noticed an alarming lack of data to track products as they moved along the facility’s cold chain.

“There was a single thermometer on the wall and a clipboard where temperatures had to be recorded. It had been manually filled out, with the same temperature each day – and many weeks in advance,” he recalls. “Even though there were significant consequences of not having good data, they just didn’t have any.”

“I routinely saw the same problem time and time again, which was a woeful lack of good quality data in digital format, especially real time, but frankly, any kind of data,” he adds. “And that was leading to real concerns around health and safety, compliance to regulations, operational efficiency, and much else besides.”

That experience planted the seed of a business idea that marries two guiding themes of the 21st century: sustainability and innovation. The result is Infogrid, a start-up that places connected sensors and devices in work, retail, educational, industrial and healthcare environments, recording and processing the resulting data to make offices and buildings smarter and more efficient.

According to a UN report, the built environment accounts for about 39 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, with non-domestic building stock such as offices and factories representing about 20 per cent of that – making it central to efforts to reach net zero by 2050.

“Significant improvements in the pace of energy efficiency deployment are required as progress in recent years has been slow,” the UK Green Building Council concluded in a report last year.

Cowell de Gruchy, a former tank commander in the British Army, founded Infogrid in 2018 to address that challenge head-on. The London-based company uses proprietary AI alongside retrofitted off-the-shelf sensors in existing buildings around the world to reduce the amount of carbon emitted through heating, air conditioning and other sources of energy use, while simultaneously improving the health of those who work inside them, as well as the cost of operating them.

Air quality monitoring

A building set in greenery, shot from below

“Reducing carbon in the atmosphere and enabling healthier working environments are our North Stars,” he says. “If we can put a meaningful dent in the emissions profile of those buildings, and make them healthier, we will go a long way to making the planet healthier and more sustainable.”

Infogrid uses a range of sensors, including thermal-imaging equipment and beam-break lasers to capture human movement in the workplace. To protect personal identities, cameras are never used. At the same time, other sensors record air quality while gauges take real-time readings of the amount of water or energy used and much more. All these different methods of data capture feed into a wider intelligence system.

Dashboard showing most occupied desks

The resulting multi-layered data reveals patterns of office or building use that can then inform a rethink or redesign of building management - for example, by changing cleaning routines to prioritise frequently used areas and surfaces over those that see less human activity. In addition to the savings such analysis delivers on energy-intensive, chemical-based cleaning, Cowell de Gruchy says that it typically yields up to 40 per cent efficiency gains in terms of staff deployment.

What is an example of how Infogrid can help a landlord reduce their carbon footprint and meet sustainability goals?

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So you move from ‘understand’, so understanding your energy consumption or your gas or water consumption, through to ‘how do I fix that?’. And the power of combining datasets allows you to do that very quickly. So a simple example would be if you are over ventilating a space where you have low occupancy and you therefore have good air quality that has a very high energy impact. If you reduce that ventilation rate by using live data, you can very significantly reduce the energy consumption of your building. And actually save costs rather than introduce cost.Later on, you can use data to do things like capital projects for retrofits, whether that’s insulation, solar panels, or anything like that. But in the initial, there are a lot of quick wins around how you can operate the building that will generate big savings.

A illustration showing digital hand pushing a button, abstract

While the sensor devices come from third-party suppliers, Infogrid has a proprietary AI platform that allows them all to work together and makes the resulting data easy to understand, through what Cowell de Gruchy calls an events-transformation microservice. “They may be speaking different languages and be using different data formats, but we enable them all to communicate in ‘English’, so to speak, so they can inter-operate.”

Data collected by Infogrid can also be used to make buildings more energy-efficient. Its proprietary algorithms, which employ machine learning and artificial intelligence, create a detailed picture of lighting, heating and air conditioning use that can help clients better plan their overall consumption while lowering their carbon footprint.

A person inside the illuminated highrise office space

Could buildings develop their own system of smart sensors?

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One of the questions we often get is, why don't I just build this myself? Well, firstly, it's very, very difficult to do. And if you're trying to do that, from a standing start, and not a technology company, we've seen that go wrong a number of times. But more to the point, if you build something internally to a company, you'll only ever learn from your own insight. Whereas when you work with a company like ours, you learn from the insight of everybody, now you don't get any access to anybody else's data, no one will ever be able to access your data. But what artificial intelligence does is can learn from genericized data to apply things to situations around the world. So a simple analogy of this is like we all use Excel today. And that's incredibly powerful, incredibly intuitive. And that is so because it's built upon 20 years of global user feedback.

For real-estate owners, the data brings multiple advantages. First, constant monitoring makes it easier to meet local health and safety requirements. Second, it reveals, at a glance, how specific assets within a large portfolio perform, helping owners make better investment decisions. Beyond reducing energy and maintenance bills, smart buildings also create value because they command higher rents. As this makes them more desirable, the amount of time they remain unoccupied is reduced as well.

Set against the longer-term challenge of achieving net zero, Cowell de Gruchy says the data provides property owners and managers with a strategy they can follow. “That ultimately gives people a pathway from their initial deployment, which is just, ‘I want to know what my carbon footprint is right now,’ all the way through to ‘this is what I’m going to do about it down the road.’”

What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?

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On a personal level, the reason why I'm an entrepreneur ultimately is my passion in life is the preservation of the natural world. Everybody can contribute to this journey both in terms of the marrying of sustainability and innovation in the built world and you know, do get in touch but even in your personal and private lives, right little changes matter and cumulatively they add up and we need everything we can get to solve some of the biggest problems that human race has ever faced.

Cowell de Gruchy credits much of his leadership style and company organisation to techniques and approaches he learned in the army. One of the most important, he explains, is the concept of “mission command,” whereby subordinates do not receive specific orders but instead are made aware of the wider goal so that they can autonomously execute their part in it.

“The idea is that the more information you can give about the macro-objectives of the mission, the better enabled everybody throughout the chain of command is to make the right strategic decision – and in a split second.”