ThoughtWire’s $11.5M Funding Injection Signals Momentum For The Building Digital Twins Market

ThoughtWire’s $11.5M Funding Injection Signals Momentum For The Building Digital Twins Market

On August 17, 2020, Toronto-headquartered building digital twin software vendor ThoughtWire announced it received an injection of CAD$11.5 million in funding from a syndicate of investors led by Yaletown Partners. ThoughtWire, with 64 employees, will use the funding to propel its international expansion strategy and invest in its product. This deal will bring ThoughtWire’s total funding to CAD $31.5 million.

ThoughtWire offers digital twin software for hospitals and commercial buildings built on graph database technology. Its heritage is in the healthcare sector, where it saw an opportunity to provide digital twin software to hospitals that improve patient experience and clinical staff productivity. Since 2017 it has also been targeting the smart building sector, where it provides apps to guide proactive maintenance, improve cost and energy efficiency, competing with IoT platform vendors.

ThoughtWire’s recent funding round flags growing momentum for digital twins for the built environment. In this nascent market, digital twins are emerging in many shapes and sizes, depending on the data being modelled. Our recent comparison of building digital twin vendors identified five categories of twin from those that provide 3D descriptive building replicas to autonomous building twins that make decisions on behalf of users. ThoughtWire is focused on the more practical applications of digital twins, leveraging its graph database technology to generate valuable insights from the ever-growing volume and complexity of IoT data and user data. The sweet spot for graph databases is complex and messy information from buildings, rather than highly-structured data.

While vendors are bringing increasingly sophisticated building digital twins to market, there is still work to be done in educating buyers. Recently, senior facility managers have admitted to us they are not sure what digital twins are, or whether they are already using one. Over the next year, vendors need to push extra hard on educating their target buyers on what digital twins are and their value. For more insights on the emerging digital twin market for buildings, read our report Smart Innovators: Digital Twins For Buildings.