The product: MOMENTUM

The need to ramp up climate-responsive construction is urgent and will only get more so. Climate-responsive construction is construction work that is needed to:

  1. Reduce the carbon footprint of buildings to curb the pace of climate change

  2. Protect buildings and their residents from the environmental hazards resuting from climate change.

The former is an urgent need this decade, because in GHG emissions reductions, what we do today matters much more than what we do 5 or 10 years from now. The latter is and will be a growing need as the specific local health and environmental consequences of the changing climate affect daily life and safety.

Although the buildings sector makes up a significant portion of carbon emissions, it has been too slow to attain the speed and scale of construction necessary to meeting the GHG goals that must be met to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Cadence OneFive seeks to change this by enabling city-scale acceleration of existing building decarbonization.

Our product seeks to:

  1. Enable funders to deploy retrofit money across a market

  2. Enable owners to make retrofit decisions faster

  3. Enable contractors to aggregate demand for retrofits

Our Approach

We use 20-years of lessons learned on the ground in the building energy sector boosted with today data science and technology to:

  1. Speed the journey from planning to construction start by providing the right information at the right times. We believe that what takes 18-24 months today and be completed in 6 weeks with our help, which means many more construction projects can get the green light.

  2. Improve the functioning of the market for multifamily construction services by providing information transparency currently lacking. We believe that owners seeking carbon-responsive construction services ought to be able to find the right contractors at the right price easily, reducing transaction overhead for both owners and contractors.

  3. Increase the availability and quality of climate-responsive construction services by mitigating risks that are easier to address at the market level than at the building level. We believe that by leveraging network effects, we can deliver contracting modes and risk-mitigation that makes it easier for both owners and contractors to adopt new technologies.

We believe that, as an industry, we have enough dedicated people, technology and knowhow, and money to get started on city-scale decarbonization of existing multifamily buildings. What we don’t have is ample time.

Funders

Include utility energy efficiency programs and financiers that seek to deploy capital into buildings. We hypothesize that funders fundamentally care about deal flow (and we will test this assumption in the market). We aspire to provide a solution that identifies repeatable, bankable upgrade projects at scale & reduces performance risk.

Real estate owners (and their agents)

Owners and property managers who act on behalf of owners generally have 15 things on their plates that they consider more pressing than decarbonization. We hypothesize that owner and managers care about getting quality work done cost effectively in a way that enhances (rather than distracts from) core operations and asset management (and we will test this assumption in the market). We aspire to build technology that removes friction and adds a degree of magic to decarbonization upgrade implementation for building owners.

Contractors

Contractors undertake construction (building rehab) projects. We hypothesize that contractors care about expanding their business, predictable sales pipelines & not absorbing the financial risk of new technology learning curves (and we will test this assumption in the market). We aspire to build technology to support contractors in reducing project acquisition costs & in predictably growing their businesses. We also aspire to build technology that allows minority contractors and those from economically excluded communities to participate in the energy transition.

Video Intro

Here’s a 1-minute intro video from April 2023 and a 4-minute product demo recorded in January 2023.