This 10-year-old startup has gone public to turn Asia’s buildings green

Anacle founder and CEO, Alex Lau. Photo credit: Anacle.

When news came out that Anacle, a Singapore-based startup that specializes in property and energy management for buildings, was going public in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s Growth Enterprise Market, my first question was, “Who?”

Founder and CEO Alex Lau concedes the company could trumpet its presence a little more, especially now that it’s filed for an IPO. “We’re the best unknown company,” he laughs.

I really should know better. Established in 2006, Anacle can be considered one of the oldest Singapore startups, up there with companies like Viki. But like its founder, Anacle prefers actions rather than words.

Smart energy

Anacle makes money by building enterprise management software for sectors including real estate, healthcare, oil and gas, and more. Its heart, though, lies in energy management products that can paint old buildings green.

We’re the best unknown company.

This means it makes them more energy efficient by retrofitting them with smart sensors and wireless equipment. These gadgets measure and regulate energy consumption, wastage, and quality of the power used by the building.

“Our customers don’t know how much energy is being lost in their buildings,” explains Alex. “To do it right, they need an effective real-time monitoring system.”

One major difficulty building owners face is that retrofitting an old building to be energy efficient is costly and complicated (turns out, you have to tear down a lot of building in order to rewire it). Anacle solves that problem through a wireless infrastructure that can be installed at a third of what it would cost to do it the old-fashioned way.

Anacle’s system, called Starlight, is a combination of hardware and software designed by the company. The team had to make its own equipment because it wasn’t easy to find the type of sensors and meters needed for the job back when it started researching and developing its products.

“We needed a lot of computing power as well as independent power supply to the wireless communications systems. That wasn’t something you could just find on the shelves,” Alex says.

Now Anacle is building a new energy management system, called Tesseract, that will take advantage of the internet of things. Despite the ominous name, Tesseract will not open a portal for Loki’s alien armies to swarm over Earth. Rather, it will feature increased computing power, an Android-based operating system, a capacitive touchscreen, and a variety of connectivity options like NFC.

Early bird

Future growth