• Incube Space is a PropTech that is enabling commercial real estate to make better use of its data to improve sustainability and occupier comfort through their predictive building intelligence platform, CubeOS.
• The London based startup was founded during the pandemic when the future of commercial real estate changed forever, seeing less consistent levels of occupancy and more flexible requirements for space.
• Although early in their journey, CubeOS can be found in buildings in the UK, Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.

Incube Space Founders: George Johnston (Left), Rishi Chowdhury (Right)

About Incube Space

Incube Space was founded by serial entrepreneurs and co-founders, Rishi Chowdhury & George Johnston after they had previously built innovation programmes and physical hubs for large corporates such as Bosch.

Whilst building these spaces, they noticed how most buildings had a large amount of energy waste being produced and often unknowingly, the negative impact air quality and thermal comfort was having on their occupants.

The lack of interoperability and communication between building and tenant technologies leads to spaces that do not adapt to changing use of space.

Spaces with lots of people at certain points in the day often suffer from uncomfortably high temperatures or CO2 levels that contribute to that sleepiness, headaches, and general brain fog.

Spaces with no people could often be found being heated, cooled or ventilated despite the lack of people; wasting energy.

CubeOS is a platform developed by Incube Space to solve this problem.

How does it work?

CubeOS consolidates data from across sources such as space utilisation or indoor air quality (IAQ) sensors, door access systems, meeting room booking systems and hundreds of more technologies.

It analyses this data to have a full understanding of how a space is being used at any given time and then provides recommendations on how to adjust HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Con), lighting or other operational resource to ensure optimal indoor air quality where and when it is required, whilst reducing energy waste.

The future

Incube Space raised a pre seed funding round in early April 2022 and is currently rolling out pilots in  over 200,000 sq ft of commercial real estate. They plan to raise a seed round to accelerate growth and product development in Q3 2022.

The seed round will also help them scale their unique predictive optimisation capabilities.

Using automated machine learning, CubeOS builds unique models for each building based on aggregated and anonymised data to predict real time HVAC optimisation needs and make pro-active adjustments that counter any potential environmental changes, maintaining air quality and thermal comfort.

This means HVAC systems become dynamic. Think of CubeOS as your 24/7 building engineer, continuously tweaking and adjusting the HVAC as needs require.

For example, if 4 people enter a room, CubeOS knows that temperature and CO2 will likely rise by X rate and so counters that rise straight away by adjusting the HVAC. This significantly reduces the amount of airflow required compared to more reactive systems. At 100% airflow a system uses 100% of power consumption but if you only use 50% of the airflow the power usage drops to 12.5%.

By pro-actively making adjustments, CubeOS drastically reduces power consumption whilst maintaining optimal indoor air quality where required. This can help clients reduce energy costs by up to 40%, cut up to 100% of support requests regarding thermal comfort and increase productivity by 2%-10% which has the largest return on sq ft for tenants.

Incube Space is on a mission to make the buildings we work, live and play in; healthy, sustainable and productive.