Frost & Sullivan defines a smart building as one equipped with networked devices that help provide a safe, productive, and comfortable environment for its occupants while optimizing operational and energy performance. Smart building industry participants, including leading, emerging, and start-up companies, innovate to achieve building decarbonization and digitalization and improve occupant well-being.

The product landscape for smart buildings is seeing significant start-up activity in some segments, including energy management, access control and elevators, smart building management, construction management, and fire safety and security. This study surveys the smart building ecosystem and considers factors impacting growth, with a focus on start-ups.

Customer adoption of digital transformation technologies has accelerated in the last few years and is poised to transform the building technology industry, making buildings more connected, sustainable, and cognitive. Intelligent building solutions using digital transformation technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), are advancing building operations and maintenance, moving from reactive to predictive maintenance. IoT has revolutionized the way buildings are managed and operated—smart buildings are more intelligent, energy-efficient, safe, and sustainable with the integration of IoT.

Frost & Sullivan offers this Start-Up Tracker as a resource to help ecosystem participants identify solution providers with offerings that match industry challenges. The tracker provides a rich database of start-up and niche players that have the capabilities to transform processes in smart buildings and add value for end users. To select these companies, Frost & Sullivan uses its best practices database and secondary research on smart building technology ecosystem mappings and rankings worldwide.

The study offers a list of 66 start-ups focused on IoT for smart buildings, displaying company headquarters, founding year, solution offered, and the target end user. Frost & Sullivan conducted detailed primary interviews with start-ups that stand out in different regions to generate a competitive profile and understand relevant developments, strategies, and value propositions. A Frost & Sullivan analyst has screened and analyzed each short-listed company and established an overall score for each start-up based on the criteria described in this study. To qualify as a component of the IoT, any product, application, or service must be part of a larger solution that comprises the following 4 elements.

•     Objects that are virtualized and imbued with data measurement capabilities
•     The ability to grant identities to physical and virtual objects
•     Interconnections between these objects for monitoring and interaction
•     The ability to generate real-time insights from data and incorporate them into existing business
processes

The IoT space is still in flux. Unlike more mature information and communications technology (ICT) markets, the IoT space has significant overlap with other industries such as automotive, energy, and transportation. To accurately observe and measure IoT-related economic activity, Frost & Sullivan uses the definition above to determine if a technology product, application, or service is part of the IoT.