building-automation
(8)
Deb Noller Wants Buildings to Stop Merely Complaining - and Start Fixing Themselves
The software engineer from New Zealand has spent two decades teaching commercial buildings to reveal what they waste. Her next wager is that the useful building will not just spot a fault - it will quietly correct it.
David Lamarche Knows the Hard Part of Transformation Is Human
Levio's CMO built a career connecting technical systems, customer journeys and the people asked to change. His most revealing lesson begins with a surprisingly small question: can we keep our chairs?
Deepak Aatresh Is Teaching Buildings to Think Like Chips
A magazine article pulled him toward microprocessors. A construction time-lapse sent him in a new direction. Deepak Aatresh has spent the years since translating the logic of silicon into a language for buildings.
Patrick Callahan
Patrick Callahan is the CEO of Alquist 3D, a Greeley, Colorado company at the front of the 3D concrete printing industry. A West Point-era Army infantry officer turned defense-industry executive, he took the helm in October 2023 and steered the startup from emerging-technology curiosity into a commercial force, landing a landmark partnership with Walmart to 3D print store expansions across the country. He pairs two decades of defense business development - where he captured hundreds of millions in contracts at Critical Solutions International and AirBoss Defense Group - with a mission to make building faster, cheaper, and safer.
Jeffrey Carleton
Jeffrey Carleton is the co-founder and CEO of Runwise, a New York-based smart-building company that pairs proprietary wireless sensors with cloud software to cut the energy that boilers, cooling, electric and water systems waste. Drawing on seven years spent running 150 New York apartment buildings, he turned a hands-on operator's frustration with 1960s heating controls into a platform now deployed in more than 10,000 buildings, serving roughly 1,000 customers and saving over $100 million in energy costs. In June 2025 Runwise raised a $55 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures, bringing total funding to $79 million, around a thesis Carleton states bluntly: every building needs to be rebuilt with software, not bricks.
Terry Heath
Terry Heath is the founder and CEO of Sciens Building Solutions, a Pleasanton, California-based fire and life safety integrator he built from a whiteboard plan in 2016 into one of the largest independent platforms of its kind in the United States. A former Royal Navy electrical engineer who came to America via Siemens, Heath has stitched together more than sixteen acquisitions and now runs a roughly 1,800-person company headquartered in the East Bay.
Scott Cahill
Scott Cahill is the co-founder and former CEO of LEXI, an intelligent enterprise IoT platform headquartered in Lebanon, Ohio. He built the company from a smart lighting passion project into a universal wireless building automation system that claims up to 90% cost savings over competitors. Over 7.5 years he led LEXI through a $2.6M seed round, a $3.5M pre-Series A, and multiple equity crowdfunding campaigns, accumulating $5.5M raised and a $30M valuation by 2024. In 2024 he handed the CEO role to Hans Bukow to accelerate LEXI toward IPO, while remaining as an advisor.
Honghao Deng
Honghao Deng is the CEO and co-founder of Butlr, a San Francisco-based Physical AI company that uses anonymous thermal sensors to understand how spaces are occupied - without cameras or personal data. A Harvard GSD MDes graduate and MIT Media Lab researcher, Deng spun Butlr out of MIT in 2019 alongside co-founder Jiani Zeng. The company has raised over $105M in venture funding, deployed 30,000+ sensors across 22 countries, and processes 1 billion data points daily. Deng is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and the inventor of 'Illusory Material' - a multi-material 3D printing breakthrough named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2021.