David Walsh and the art of wasting less

David Walsh landed in Australia on a Wednesday in 2009. By Saturday, he was digging foundations for two Italian builders. He had arrived with his wife, two small children and about A$5,000. His next working life began with a shovel.

Back in Ireland, his construction business had been caught in the property crash. Sydney offered a place to begin again. Permanent residency from an earlier spell in Australia helped make the move possible; a computer science background gave him other options. Neither paid the rent automatically.

Today, Walsh is the founder and co-CEO of CIM, which makes software for people running commercial buildings. His route there involved enterprise technology, property, a freight-company night job and a persistent question about wasted energy. Viewed together, those episodes suggest a habit: look carefully at what is already available, then find a better use for it.

Wednesday: arrival. Saturday: foundations.

The family’s first Sydney home was a leaky rented apartment. Some furniture came from the roadside. Walsh sent out CVs in the evenings while working on foundations during the day. The details have the useful untidiness of an actual restart. Nobody had arranged a ceremonial first day.

He had known Australia before this move. Earlier travel and work there had given him a connection to the country, and he returned to Ireland in 2004. The construction business that followed suited his enjoyment of working with his hands. When the market collapsed, the Australian residency acquired years earlier became unexpectedly valuable.

The experience matters because Walsh’s later business concerns buildings as they operate, with their machinery, bills and maintenance demands. He had worked around both physical property and software. In Sydney, he began looking for work where those interests could meet: sustainability and efficiency in buildings.

A family business, a computer science degree

Walsh grew up in Templemore, County Tipperary, in a family with a retail-business history stretching back more than 200 years. Honesty, education and the way a customer was treated were part of the upbringing he later described. His father, a civil engineer, encouraged him to complete a degree.

His education took a detour through work. He left a course at the University of Limerick for an opportunity at Intel, then completed his IT studies at Griffith College Dublin. Roles involving SAP and Intel took him through enterprise systems; property and construction supplied a different view of how businesses function.

Connections helped him make use of that experience in Australia. He credited the Irish Australian Chamber of Commerce and Sydney’s Lansdowne Club with helping his business develop. His account of migration includes other people who opened doors. Even a determined founder needs someone on the other side to answer.

The expensive silence of a building

Working in environmental hardware, software and consulting, Walsh noticed a gap. Buildings produced data, yet their operators struggled to use it to establish why energy was being wasted. Meter readings could show consumption. He wanted a closer view of what the equipment was actually doing.

CIM’s current company history dates its founding to 2013. Walsh and university colleague Colin Cullinan built the first version of the software. The premise brought his earlier experience together: use technology to make the operation of a physical building easier to understand, then help someone correct the problem.

That last step gives the idea its practical character. An alert can explain that something needs attention. A contractor still needs to know which job matters, what to investigate and whether the work has solved it. Software enters an existing chain of responsibilities, with all the opportunities for delay that a chain provides.

QIC’s use of CIM gives that cycle some substance. More than 200 faults were identified, with a reported 90 per cent fault-closure rating and maintenance tickets generated from alerts. These are results from that application, rather than promises for every building. They also show why the handover matters: finding a fault creates work; closing it produces the benefit.

The night shift was part of the business plan

The early company began with A$1,300. Walsh supported the effort by stuffing satchels at night for a freight company, earning A$38 an hour. During the day he worked on the business and sold the software. The arrangement was physically ordinary and financially useful. It paid for the time needed to find customers.

He later advocated bootstrapping until the market had demonstrated that it wanted the product. Paying customers offered a test that enthusiasm alone could not provide. He also argued that a clear environmental purpose could attract experienced recruits when a young company could not compete on salary.

External capital eventually arrived. In 2017, CIM Enviro secured A$3 million from Capital Markets Technologies. Walsh was interested in the experience of Andreas Furche, whose earlier analytics business SMARTS had been sold to Nasdaq. For a founder learning how to grow a software company, that background was part of the investment’s appeal.

Walsh compared startup money to sugar given to children: useful in moderation, liable to create trouble in excess. It is an amusing comparison from someone asking people to finance his business. It also explains his preference for investors who could contribute judgment alongside cash.

Impatience, with someone checking the steering

“I’m not a patient person by nature,” Walsh has said. He described that impatience as useful because it made him push forward. He paired it with optimism, while acknowledging that he could underestimate the time and effort required. It is a recognisable founder’s combination: enthusiasm with an occasionally optimistic calendar.

David Wright provided a counterweight. Long before sharing the chief executive role, Wright was an adviser and chairman whom Walsh credited with bringing experience and governance to his entrepreneurial instincts. Walsh also spoke about developing empathy. His account of himself allows for adjustment, rather than treating temperament as an immutable company asset.

In discussing leadership, he emphasised giving colleagues a voice in strategy. The approach became more collaborative as CIM grew. That is a useful development for a business whose product asks owners, engineers and contractors to work together. Internal cooperation and the customer’s daily experience have some common requirements.

“The way I want to measure success is through the strength of the relationships around me.”

David Walsh, 2021

Two Davids, different diaries

CIM announced a US$6.7 million Series A in September 2022, led by Five V Capital and Carthona Capital. Expansion into Asia and North America was part of the plan. In early 2023, Walsh moved to Colorado to establish a US presence. His public professional profile now lists Boulder.

Walsh’s own advice on expansion had been to establish the home market first. In his 2023 writing about scaling climate technology, he described Australia as the place to develop the product and refine the approach before taking it abroad. He also warned against spreading a young business across too many problems. For CIM, the specific task was extracting and making sense of equipment data. The sequence gives his international move some context: years of local work came before the effort to build a physical presence on another continent.

The next change involved sharing the top job. In October 2026, Wright described his first year as co-CEO and the division of responsibilities. Walsh concentrates on international clients and partners. Wright focuses on scaling the business and deepening its work with Australian clients. The arrangement gives each a different set of problems to pursue.

The company’s distribution has changed too. Wright reported more than 20 partners and buildings under management more than doubling in 18 months. Partners offer a way to reach buildings through the engineering and service businesses already responsible for them. For Walsh, international expansion now includes helping those businesses change how they operate.

A useful answer beats another dashboard

His later public discussions keep returning to the people who must use the technology. In an April 2025 building-analytics panel, he described contractors using data to prioritise tasks. He also discussed the possibility of conversational interfaces, allowing a building manager to ask a straightforward question and receive a usable answer.

The contractor response had surprised him. Mechanical service teams could use the information to arrive with a clearer view of what needed attention. It extended the usefulness of the product beyond the owner paying for it. That is a consequential part of his story: the customers who commission software and the people who make it useful can sit in different organisations. Walsh’s work increasingly involves both. A better diagnosis needs a route to the person doing the job.

By an August 2025 panel, his emphasis included trust: AI should be tested against data and results in the field. The distinction matters in a business dealing with actual equipment. A persuasive demonstration can start a conversation. The person responsible for the building needs confidence that the recommendation survives contact with the machinery.

Walsh has set ambitions beyond the next contract. In the 2022 funding announcement, he described a goal of helping the sector reduce more than one gigatonne of emissions. That remains a stated ambition. The daily work underneath it is smaller and more particular: another building, another operational problem, another team that needs a clear answer.

There is a connection between that work and his Sydney restart. He arrived with experience that needed a new application. He built a company around equipment whose data needed one too. Years later, the question running through both stories is still practical: what could we do with what we already have?