He asked a simple question - "how green is this building, really?" - and couldn't get a straight answer. So he built the company that gives one.
CEO & CO-FOUNDER // SCALER
Real estate is responsible for close to 40% of the world's carbon emissions. Yet ask most owners what a single building actually emits and you get a shrug, a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and an invoice from a consultant. Zlatan Menkovic looked at that gap and saw a product problem hiding inside a planetary one.
Scaler, the company he leads as CEO and co-founded in 2021, is the software layer for that mess. It pulls building-level and meter-level data, turns it into retrofit roadmaps, models the impact of a decision before a euro is spent, and spits out the regulatory reports that once took a quarter and a war room. Specialists use it. So do people who have never heard of the CRREM curve.
The pitch is refreshingly unromantic. No moonshot hardware, no promises of fusion. Just the plumbing - reliable ESG data - that lets an investor decarbonize a portfolio because they can finally see it. In an industry that moves like a glacier and spends like a sovereign fund, boring and trustworthy is the disruptive part.
If you want to have a global impact, there are few better places to start than the real estate industry.
Menkovic did not arrive from a climate lab. He arrived from a design studio. He studied industrial and product design at TU Eindhoven, then added a business degree from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - a rare combination that shows up in how Scaler feels: opinionated, usable, built for humans rather than auditors.
Then came the founding years. He led PeerReach, an Amsterdam startup billed as a "social relevance engine," and in 2013 was named Dutch Co-Founder of the Year. PeerReach wound down in 2014, the way many first companies do. Before and around it sat a string of ventures - the digital agency Yume, the industrial design firm Intelligent Design, a stint as a partner at a social network called Imonline. He was, in the language of investors, learning to compound.
The middle chapter was Uber. At Uber and Uber Freight he worked as a product lead and senior product manager, shaping rating systems and the logistics tools that decide how loads and drivers find each other. It was a crash course in wrangling enormous, messy, real-world data into decisions people make in seconds. That instinct - data you can act on, not just admire - became Scaler's whole thesis.
In July 2024 Scaler raised a $10M (about €9.2M) Series A led by Plural, the European fund built by repeat founders, with continued participation from Base10. Earlier funding of $2.75M in 2022 brought the total to roughly $12.75M. Plural's team called him a "brilliant repeat founder" - the kind of endorsement that says as much about the ten years before Scaler as the years ahead of it.
He runs the company across two cities. Amsterdam, where he learned to design and to build, and New York, where he now scales the business. His co-founder, chief business officer Luc van de Boom, came from GRESB - the benchmark the entire real estate industry uses to grade its own sustainability. Between them they cover the two halves of the problem: the data and the industry that has to trust it.
The results read less like a manifesto and more like an invoice. Around 30 clients, together stewarding more than $350 billion in assets. Customers who planned $840 million in retrofit and improvement measures. Users who, in 2022 alone, cut carbon output by 15 million kilograms. In 2024 the company signed its first customers in Asia-Pacific and put its first person on the ground there. The map is getting bigger.
Investors are under pressure to decarbonise their portfolios, but to do this effectively they need data, presented and analysed in a way that helps them make the best decisions - for their clients and the world.
There's a quiet contrarianism in Menkovic's approach. The climate conversation loves the visible fix - the solar array, the heat pump, the shiny new build. He points instead at the property manager's inbox, at the utility meter, at the audit-ready report nobody wants to write. Decarbonization, in his telling, is won in workflows. You can't reduce what you can't measure, and most of the built world still can't measure.
It's a patient person's game, and Menkovic has the resume of a patient person - a company that closed, several that pivoted, and a decade of learning what timing feels like. Scaler is the venture where the market finally caught up to the founder: regulation tightening, investors on the hook, and a designer in the room who knows how to make hard things feel simple.
Not every win looks like a wind farm. Sometimes it looks like a landlord finally knowing which building to fix first.
If you want global impact, there are few better places to start than real estate.
Investors need data, presented so they can make the best decisions - for clients and the world.
We've been blown away by the reaction and feedback from our customers.
He trained as an industrial and product designer before he ever wrote a business plan. It shows in the software.
His LinkedIn is simply zltn - his own name with the vowels stripped out. Efficient, like his product.
PeerReach, Yume, Intelligent Design, Imonline - a whole shelf of ventures came before Scaler.
Co-founder Luc van de Boom was an early hire at GRESB, the benchmark real estate uses to grade itself.
His ~30 customers together look after more than $350 billion in property. Small team, planetary blast radius.
Amsterdam taught him to build. New York is where he scales. Scaler lives on both clocks.
Zlatan Menkovic is the CEO and co-founder of Scaler, an ESG data platform helping real estate managers measure, report, and cut the carbon footprint of their buildings. A Dutch product designer turned repeat founder, he built Scaler after years shaping products at Uber and Uber Freight and an earlier startup, PeerReach. Scaler now serves roughly 30 clients overseeing more than $350 billion in assets and raised a $10M Series A in 2024 led by Plural. Menkovic's pitch is blunt: if you want global impact, start with the buildings we already live and work in.
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