in this column we bring you the stories behind how startup founders got their business idea and the things events and actions that eventually led them to their big eureka momentmultiple tools scattered communication scrappy data silos add up to massive cumulative costs says prabhu ramachandran cofounder and ceo faciliothe idea smart facilities management solutions for the real estate industryeureka moment in 2017 exzoho senior execs prabhu ramachandran rajavel subramanian and yogendra babu felt it was time to bring technology to building management they believe that the last big disruption in real estate took place over 20 years ago multiple tools scattered communication scrappy data silos inefficient operations and wasted energy add up to massive cumulative costs of building management says ramachandran with a passion for solving global problems and decades of experience in building and scaling iot solutions they decided to leave their comfortable jobs and launch facilioearly days we found commercial real estate cre owners and facility managers use a handful of multivendor automation tools with different interfaces offered by different companies and struggled the complexity and inflexibility of legacy systems says ramachandran we set out to build facilio from the ground up keeping in mind property owners and facility managers by harnessing iot and ai to help them achieve continuous efficiency and deliver superior facilities experience in realtimemain challenge making cre owners look beyond standalone and traditional facility management applications the potential of ai iot driven solutions to bring in realtime operational efficiencies sustainability savings and roi without high upfront costs is huge and we are happy we could convince large institutions and enterprise customers opt for our product he sayswhere the startup is today facilio is involved in managing over 20 million sqft of space and more than 150 commercial buildings in the us gulf countries and india the greentech startup bagged funding of close to 15 million from accel partners in march 2018 2019 is going to be an exciting year for us and were hoping to be at the forefront of leading the techdriven transformation of the built world says ramachandran