In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Enlighted CTO and Co-Founder Tanuj Mohan joins us to talk about smart buildings and their role in the post-pandemic recovery as people return to work and start to travel again.

Tanuj started Enlighted ten years ago, after seeing the immense energy waste in normal office buildings. With his extensive background in network security and software, Tanuj founded Enlighted to leverage the opportunity to automate buildings to ensure higher productivity and comfort to the humans inside.

To start the episode, Tanuj shared the inspiration that started Enlighted. He said that, while working in a building, he realized that the entire building was being run, even if there was only one person inside. When he asked why, he found that it was due to a lack of visibility – if they couldn’t know how many people were inside and where, the lights, air conditioning, and other amenities ran as if the building was full.

So, Enlighted started as a sustainability play, providing building managers more insight into the occupancy of buildings to save energy and reduce operating costs. But Tanuj said that it quickly evolved into much more than that. “You buy a laptop with as much headroom as possible,” Tanuj said, “you don’t buy a device to meet the minimum needs of today.” So Enlighted became about future-proofing buildings and installing the tech to provide insights and control to enable people to work at their best.

Tanuj said that, in recent years, the field has changed a lot. There’s been a lot more education around the buildings companies are working out of, and there’s a great deal more understanding of the benefits additional visibility into building operations can provide. Tanuj added that going directly through the end-customer, rather than a construction company, has made a big difference.

Tanuj also shared some of the ways he believes IoT will be indispensable as we begin to return to our normal lives, working, traveling and more. He provided several Applications, including asset tracking in hospitals or ensuring compliance with social distancing in a variety of settings, and spoke to what he believed the future might look like for companies post-pandemic.

Interested in connecting with Tanuj? Reach out to him on Linkedin!

About Enlighted: Designed to change everything, Enlighted provides the world’s most advanced Building IoT Platform for leading commercial and healthcare organizations around the globe, with more than 320 million square feet of building space deployed to date. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, Enlighted was acquired in 2018 and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Siemens Industry, Inc. as part of Siemens Smart Infrastructure.

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Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(02:34) Intro to Tanuj

(03:40) Intro to Enlighted

(06:34) What do Enlighted’s customers look like? What stage are they in on their IoT journey?

(09:19) What potential does IoT have to benefit the operation of a building? What’s IoT’s role there?

(14:17) How does the technology involved in deployment differ per different kinds of buildings?

(20:41) What kinds of issues do you see on the security and privacy side?

(24:21) How have you seen COVID-19 affecting the smart building space? Do you foresee any long-term effects?

(29:02) How can IoT help with economic recovery as people start going back to work and traveling?