The Matcha Initiative
Nicolas graduated in IT and marketing and began his career in 2008 at SAUTER, a Swiss building management systems (BMS)supplier, at its Swiss headquarters. He spent several years as a product manager and led the launch of the first BMS cloud platform in Europe. In 2015he moved into business development for the APAC region and relocated to Shanghai for twenty months to work closer to the markets he served. He settled in Singapore in 2018, where he created and directed the SAUTER APAC Competence Centre until June 2022.
He left SAUTER that year to dedicate himself fully to beez-fm, the GreenTech company he had founded in December 2019and leads today as CEO. After eighteen years inside the building automation industry across Europe and Asia, Nicolas built beez-fm to fix what he believes is the real cause of the climate crisis in our buildings: not a technology gap, but a broken market structure.
The idea behind beez-fm, in three lines:
Why. We believe the climate crisis is solved by re-aligning incentives, not by selling more products. When everyone profits from verified outcomes instead of transactions, decarbonisation stops being expensive and becomes inevitable.
How. We flip the model. Green Funds pay, not the building. We earn only when a building saves more.
What. We sell AI-verified decarbonisation projects to Green Funds. Buildings upgrade at zero CAPEX.
As a Gen Y baby, I've always wondered if we'd be the first generation that couldn't guarantee our children a better life than we had. If we think about it, my parents could guarantee that we would have a better life than them, with rapid development, travel becoming accessible, work becoming less painful. But for us, with global warming, exponential population growth, extreme weather and less food security, we cannot guarantee our children a better life.
Strong from my experience in Europe and Asia as a BMS supplier, I have seen too many instances where decision-makers favour unreliable, cheap devices coupled with outdated Building Management Systems (BMS) design, in order to keep CAPEX investments to a minimum.
This always results in a significantly reduced building efficiency, increased OPEX and an unnecessarily high carbon footprint. To solve this economic and environmental issue, I have created beez-fm.
In fact our revolutionary business model that uberizes the BMS market is the real game changer that makes the difference. When we speak about climate change and global warming, some people think about finding the miracle product that would save all human lives. Others such as Greta Thunberg would scream that our current system which requires an infinite growth in a finite world is the problem to tacle but does not provide any solution.
With beez-fm we provide the solution to this problem, a new way of generating growth! We eliminated the principle of selling products. We sell what our customers, the building owners, really need: comfort in their buildings at the lowest possible energy consumption. We are getting paid only on the result, with a portion of the energy savings we achieve.
Opening your own startup is a tough journey and you are often questioning yourself, but hard work finally always pays off.
I would like to share a story to illustrate how hard work pays off. Consider our project with a renowned hotel in Bankok Sukhumvit, which was our first venture of this scale, previous ones being considerably smaller.
Upon completing this project, we had to completely re-programme the way they managed their chiller plant. Many products were malfunctioning or lacked proper command capabilities. Some sensors were providing inaccurate data, adding complexity to our engineering tasks. Furthermore, the local team was accustomed to the manual control of everything.
I personally handled the entire engineering of the chiller plant in between investor calls, sales meetings, and proposal preparations. It was an intense period, as the hotel operates 24/7, necessitating updates to the chiller plant during the night. I was remotely working on this task every night from 1am to 4am, with only about two hours of sleep per night. This was crucial because I had to ensure that the chillers were functioning correctly when the kitchen started its operations at 6 am. I made myself available for any customer inquiries at any hour of the day or night.
Ultimately, we managed to successfully implement the system, and the customer observed significant energy savings. However, at the time of signing the contract, we didn't have our predictive model for the baseline, and the baseline we used, based on the COVID-19 period, didn't show any savings as per our contract terms. However, the customer was witnessing savings based on their 2019 consumption.
Even though the customer wasn't obliged to pay us according to the contract, I met with them and proposed establishing a new predictive baseline for the contract and adjusting it so that we could receive fair compensation for our services. The customer expressed satisfaction with our services, our unwavering availability, and the realized savings. They agreed to revise the baseline to reflect our contributions and compensate us accordingly.
Well, it has been quite a journey to start the business and to promote a solution through a completely new channel. Nevertheless, this year, we have been awarded several times and this was such a great pride and happiness to see that others have acknowledged our business model.
We have received the following awards:
And even for myself, as an individual, I have been awarded the following title: “Top 10 Leaders in Singapore 2023” by CEO Insights Asia