Fueling Smart Building Operations with Developer-First Industrial Data

Commercial buildings are significant energy consumers, accounting for approximately 40% of the total global energy consumption. Properate's mission is to help its customers meet ambitious climate goals by reducing 10 TWh of energy from the existing building stock. Properate consists of a large group of professionals with in-depth knowledge of the challenges typical of buildings, both technical, operational, and commercial. and has been a Cognite partner since 2018. With Cognite, Properate provides decision-makers with faster access to accurate data, ensuring effective short and long-term efficiency improvements that make concrete and measurable contributions to the sustainability of society.

The Challenge: Outdated Systems and Siloed Data

The core challenge with existing Building Management Systems (BMS )is that they are often outdated, isolated, and highly siloed. Data from critical sources—like the BMS (BACnet, Modbus), utility meters, maintenance logs, and external weather/grid data—is trapped in on-premise systems, making it impossible to unify for high-level analysis or centralized control.

This data fragmentation prevents operators from obtaining a holistic view of portfolio-wide energy consumption, resulting in continuous efficiency losses and high operational expenditures. Furthermore, the lack of a unified data layer means critical systems remain locally controlled, making it impossible to deploy advanced cloud-based logic, machine learning models, or automated grid flexibility programs.

Simon Funke, Chief Product Officer and Head of Data Science at Properate, along with the rest of Properate's team of skilled solution architects, system developers, and programmers, started the company to solve this problem. “This is the core idea of Properate. Essentially, we want to lift this siloed data up into one common platform."

However, before they could begin to engineer their solution, the inherent complexity in BMS posed an existential choice:

• Spend Years Building a Backend: Divert resources to constructing a reliable industrial data backbone, including custom data ingestion, standardization, and a high-availability time series database.
• Focus on Domain Value: Find a platform that abstracts this complexity, allowing the small team to focus solely on the domain-specific logic (such as AI or optimization) that differentiates their product.

Solution: Full Backend Leverage with Cognite Data Fusion

Properate chose to build their cloud-based Building Operating System (BOS) directly on top of the Cognite AI and Data Platform, treating Cognite Data Fusion® not just as a data repository, but as their entire backend infrastructure. This allowed Properate to implement their four-step process—collect, contextualize, insight, and control—with unprecedented speed and scale.

By utilizing core Cognite capabilities, Properate's developers eliminated the need to build and maintain the majority of their backend services, thereby accelerating their development time and ultimately enhancing the functionality of their solution. Some of these capabilities and benefits include:

Cognite APIs (Time Series, Assets, Events)

• Most of Properate's frontend API requests are sent directly to Cognite, rather than to Properate’s own APIs. This enabled the team to postpone building a full industrial backend.

Asset Hierarchy

• Utilizing Cognite Data Fusion’s pre-built asset structure to immediately contextualize raw sensor data into a standardized digital twin eliminated manual, error-prone data linking across more than 660 buildings.

Connectors & Extractors

• Leveraging Cognite's tooling for two-way data connectivity to protocols like OPCUA and BACnet allowed Properate to focus on the data transformation logic rather than the low-level communication mechanisms.

Datasets for Access Control

• Assigning a unique Cognite Data Fusion Dataset to each customer building enablement data segmentation and management of strict multi-tenant access rights across a single project securely.

Events API

• Used to log and track every operational activity, alarm, and setpoint change, creating a unified, auditable system of record for the building’s lifecycle.

AI Readiness

• With the Cognite AI and Data Platform, Properate future-proofed their backend infrastructure, enabling them to implement new platform functionalities, such as Cognite Atlas AI, and evolve their own offering to deliver more value to their customers.

Impact: Focused Innovation and Market Acceleration

The Cognite AI and Data Platform proved to be a critical accelerator, transforming Properate's small development team into a highly efficient, scalable PropTech company.

Developer Impact: Speed and Scale

The decision to leverage Cognite Data Fusion provided the single largest boost to development efficiency and speed: