Heath does not run a software company. He runs the company that gets called when the software fails and the building starts beeping. Sciens Building Solutions is a fire and life safety integrator: alarms, detection, suppression, sprinklers, the wiring no one notices until they need it. It is also one of the largest independent platforms of its kind in the United States. Most people in San Francisco have never heard of it.
That is the part Heath appears to like. From a corporate headquarters in Pleasanton, on the east side of the Bay's invisible line where venture capital stops and operating businesses begin, he has spent a decade assembling a roughly 1,800-person company by buying regional fire integrators and stitching them together. Sixteen-plus acquisitions, last anyone publicly counted. A reported revenue figure in the neighborhood of $134 million. And a category - fire and life safety - that almost no one chooses to specialize in unless they were trained to think about wiring before they were trained to think about brand.
Heath was. Before Sciens, before Siemens, before the United States, he was a Royal Navy electrical engineer. The Navy's own files put him in uniform from 1986 to 1990, somewhere on the wet, cold side of his twenties. Sciens' company bio likes to flag, with what reads like a smirk, that he was a "Royal Navy electrical engineer by day (and ship DJ by night)." The detail is small. It is also the only piece of the official story that admits he might be a person.
From the Navy he went to Siemens, the German industrial conglomerate that, for a generation, served as the polite finishing school for executives who liked complicated infrastructure. He spent many years at Siemens USA, moving through logistics, mobility, building automation, and finally fire and security. By the time he was ready to leave, he had collected the specific kind of expertise that has almost no consumer equivalent: he knew exactly how an unsexy, regulated, locally fragmented industry actually got served.
The match was lit in late 2015 by Huron Capital, a Detroit-based private equity firm that runs an "ExecFactor" program: an executive-in-residence track where seasoned operators are paired with capital to go build something. Huron met Heath. They wrote a paper together. The paper said three things were true at once: regulators were getting stricter, buildings were getting smarter, and the country was urbanizing faster than the existing patchwork of regional fire integrators could keep up. The fragmentation, in other words, was the opportunity. There was no national independent. There was no one bothering to be one.
In early 2016 they incorporated Sciens, named for science and for sciens, the Latin participle meaning "knowing." Heath was the founder and CEO. The first acquisition, WSA Systems, closed in September of that year. From there Heath put a CFO (Michael Dawid) and a COO (Kurt Schoonover) in the chairs next to him and started signing deals.
What followed is the kind of growth chart that looks suspiciously linear in slide decks and brutally non-linear in real life: ten additional acquisitions starting in 2019, a reported 35-fold increase in revenue and EBITDA, and, in 2021, a sale to funds managed by The Carlyle Group. Heath did not cash out and ride off. He stayed in the CEO chair. The deals kept coming - in the years since, Sciens has continued to expand its national footprint, most recently announcing an expanded Maryland presence in March 2026.
The operating philosophy he describes in interviews is unfashionably patient. He has told the trade press that Sciens aims for roughly 10% organic growth a year on top of the acquisitive growth, which in private-equity-rollup terms is the difference between a real company and a financial structure. He also speaks publicly about leaving acquired brands their local identity, which sounds like a platitude until you remember how many fire integrators have been bought, renamed, and quietly destroyed by people who did not understand that a relationship with a county fire marshal is not transferable on a spreadsheet.
The Sciens product portfolio reads like a recital of the things you ignore until a sprinkler head ruins your morning: fire detection, fire suppression, fire sprinkler installation and service, electrical and data communications, leak detection and location, integrated security. The technology stack the company runs internally is similarly unromantic - the public footprint shows a workhorse SaaS and engineering kit, from Salesforce CRM Analytics and HubSpot down to AutoCAD, Autodesk BIM Collaborate, and access-control hardware from Lenel, Brivo, and SALTO. None of it would survive a TED Talk. All of it keeps buildings standing.
Heath himself is hard to find online in any traditional press-photo sense. He gives sober trade-press interviews. He posts intermittently on LinkedIn. He keeps a Twitter handle under the Sciens corporate identity rather than a personal one. The press footprint of a man who has spent a decade quietly assembling a national company is, fittingly, the press footprint of a man who has spent a decade quietly assembling a national company.
There is a tell, though, and it is in the company's own bio. Of all the things Sciens could have said about its founder - "industry veteran," "M&A specialist," "former Siemens executive" - the line that has survived multiple website rewrites is the one about the ship DJ. Someone, somewhere inside the company, decided that the most useful thing a reader could know about Terry Heath was not his deal count. It was that the man who runs the alarm panels used to spin records below deck.
It is a small, unguarded detail, and it does a lot of work. It says: the person who chose to build a national platform in fire and life safety is also a person who, given a Royal Navy ship, a sound system, and a free evening, knew exactly what to do. Most CEOs would have edited that out. Heath, or someone close to him, kept it in. In an industry whose product is the loud noise nobody wants to hear, that is at least a sense of humor about what loud noises can be for.
The rest of the story is still being written in county-by-county acquisitions. Sciens has not stopped buying. Heath has not stopped running it. The reasonable read, ten years in, is that he is closer to the beginning of the project he described in 2016 than to the end. The largest independent fire and life safety integrator in the United States is not yet finished being built. It is being built, mostly, by the same person who started.