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Christopher Naismith

Audette is building a carbon reduction plan for every building on the planet. With the built environment representing 37% of global carbon emissions, there is no carbon-free future without carbon-free real estate. By creating and unlocking this data into global markets, Audette is accelerating the adoption of cleantech towards a zero carbon economy.

Tell us about yourself?

I began my career as a Civil Engineer in housing development. I quickly realized that the decisions we, as engineers make, have huge effects on the people who live in our communities. I also realized that in many cases, we were making very bad decisions for the future of the planet. I dropped out and tried to find a better path. From building water pipelines in Uganda to off-grid housing in New Mexico, I ended up in the field of Building Science. For ten years I helped large corporate real estate decarbonize their portfolios by designing low-carbon heating and ventilation systems. After some time, I realized this was also not going to happen fast enough and that the world required scaled technology solutions to drive the decarbonization market.

In 2020 I launched Audette, and it’s taken off from there!

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

I’d probably go back and hand myself a pitch deck. It’s taken two years to really understand the messaging and mission behind the work that we’re doing, and who the best partners are to work with. The work of finding product-market-fit is never really done, but if time-travel is an option it would certainly provide a shortcut!

What problem does your business solve?

The world needs to halve emissions by 2030 in order to be on track for our global climate goals. This means we needed 100% of zero-carbon heating solutions in buildings at least two years ago. To catch up, it is imperative that every building owner know exactly what solutions they need to install. Audette allows any address in North America to ‘claim’ their retrofit model and get connected to financing and technology providers to make those upgrades cost-effective and easy to deploy.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

We’ve been led to believe that the onus for solving climate change is on the consumer. In fact, decisions made by the engineering and technology community have an outsized impact and limit the ability of the community to take real action. In real estate, upstream decision makers are working from a deficit of information that can be solved by rapid wide-scale modelling of the correct pathways and delivery of efficient, low-cost solutions into the market. No one else was doing it, so we started Audette.

What is your magic sauce?

We treat the entire global building stock as one portfolio and develop intelligence from the outside in. By aggregating big data sets & aerial imagery to build models before engaging building owners, we are able to turn over high-resolution decarbonization pathways for any building immediately, allowing users to fill in any unknowns. This drastically minimizes the level of effort to get to meaningful decarbonization solutions quickly.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

Over the next 24 months, we will deploy models for 150 cities across North America. On the back of that, we’ll be launching into Asia Pacific and in 5 years have mapped commercial buildings across both continents.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

COVID-19 has been a challenge for everyone, including commercial real estate owners. With work-from-home, increased sanitization, and repurposing buildings front of mind, it has been challenging for ‘carbon-committed’ groups to take meaningful action for a number of years. While it took a while for the market to reorganize, we’re thankfully seeing a renewed drive towards this mission and Audette being adopted readily as a partner in the journey!

How can people get involved?

We’re launching the ‘100 to Zero’ Campaign to deliver carbon reduction models across 150 North American cities. If you’re in Commercial Real Estate, Government, Utilities, or Technology and have science-based reduction targets to which our models can add value, we’d love to talk to you. Please reach out to info@audette.io or visit www.audette.io.