The client is a research-driven PropTech startup that helps built-environment ecosystem partners with cutting-edge digital tools solving their problems while accelerating the adoption of sustainable solutions for performance improvement. Born out of deep academic research, the client brings decades of experience and knowledge in green-building technologies, and is recognised among the region’s leading energy-tech solution providers in APAC.
Globally, buildings consume roughly 40% of energy and contribute around 30% of carbon emissions. An estimated ~22 trillion USD will be spent over the next two decades to improve buildings and make them better. Yet the building industry is deeply fragmented: building owners, financiers, consultants, and technology providers have no effective mechanism to work together and collaborate to accelerate the creation of better buildings - a gap that largely stems from a lack of shared data.
The vision was a platform that brings the different stakeholders of the built-environment ecosystem together, letting them collaborate seamlessly around a shared, data-rich view of buildings.
The client wanted to create a data-rich digital twin platform for the built-environment ecosystem - spanning building owners, managers, and occupants; consultants and ESCOs; investors and fund managers; and technology providers. The platform needed to integrate building and ancillary data from multiple sources and make it available to stakeholders to enable better decision-making.
At the core was a digital twin of buildings providing performance overview, analysis, simulations, and advanced search. Through secure logins, building owners can find buildings, view data, run analyses and simulations, and discover technology solutions and providers. Engineers and consultants can assess building performance and calculate potential energy savings across a wide range of technologies, while technology providers and investors can gauge market potential and run ROI calculations for prospective customers even before meeting them.
We delivered the product end to end across four phases, partnering closely with the client throughout.
We began with a discovery phase. The client’s team joined Focaloid for a two-day Discovery Workshop, bringing together product strategists, business analysts, UX designers, architects, and software leads alongside the client’s key stakeholders. The workshop combined brainstorming, persona definition, user-journey mapping, and rapid prototyping, followed by deeper analysis and documentation. The output: a product roadmap for the digital twin platform, detailed user stories and feature lists, and recommendations for the technology stack and architecture.
The design phase focused on the web platform’s user experience. Our UX designers worked with the client to shape the information architecture and user journeys, then produced the final UI mockups through interface design.
We followed Agile development with two-week sprints and a dedicated five-member team. Development opened with a Sprint Zero for sprint and release planning, supported by daily stand-ups, weekly reviews, and bi-weekly deliverables. A UAT phase preceded each major release to resolve finer issues before shipping.
The first major release came after six months, followed by a release every three months. Post-launch, we continued to advance the product roadmap while supporting the deployed version.
Buildings sit at the centre of the climate challenge - vast in their energy use, fragmented in how they’re improved. The barrier is rarely intent; it’s the absence of shared data and a common place to act on it. By building a high-performance digital twin platform that unites owners, consultants, investors, and technology providers around a single, data-rich view of the built environment, this work turns that fragmentation into collaboration and gives an entire ecosystem the tools to make buildings measurably better, faster.
Focaloid partners with founders and product companies to build software end to end product strategy, architecture, UX/UI design, engineering, and QA -including data-rich platforms, digital twins, and GIS-driven products. Whether you’re uniting an ecosystem or building a complex platform from scratch, we can help you get there with confidence.