A Year in Review from our CEO, Ana-Paula Issa

As I sit here and write this, I can’t quite believe that the New Year is just days away. Not to be cliché, but it feels like only a few months ago we welcomed 2024, though I have just experienced the busiest year of my life, so that probably explains the last twelve months going by in a bit of a blur.?

This time last year I became the owner and CEO of Encycle . The idea of owning the company that has been so deeply woven into the fabric of my life, still feels kismet.

When I started at Encycle in 2008, I was in my twenties, new to the industry and dialing for dollars, while our then controllers were being built next to me. Mark and Roman had a dream to save the environment one HVAC unit at a time and I was desperate to be successful and not another struggling Canadian immigrant. It was a match made in Heaven in a lot of ways. Our first sales and installs, were some of the best learning experiences we had too…and because we were a startup of 3 back then, I was selling, Mark was installing and Roman was coding. Yes, it was the wild west, and we were all flying by the seat of our pants. Back in those days we used to talk about our little controllers as installing brains on HVAC units, allowing them to talk, make decisions and ultimately load balance the units to reduce peak demand. Today Swarm Logic, (our brain) is now 100% cloud based, deployed via several EMS vendors and we are successfully driving peak and consumption savings for both electric and gas usage. Encycle is not at all the company it once was, we have grown up both as a team and as a technology provider. All I can say is, I’m very proud of how far we have come and the path that we are on.

We kicked off 2024 with the decision to refresh the company. It had been years since the company had undergone any brand changes, and while we respect the efforts of our predecessors, we needed our branding to reflect that we were in fact a cutting edge, utility endorsed, machine learning company. I wanted the branding to be reflective of the people and the work we do. I wanted it to be something we were proud of and that reflected our success. With all of that in mind and in what must be record time, we completely rebranded Encycle, settled on logo, palatte, built a new website from scratch, rewrote and published all our content and were show-ready in less that twelve weeks. We unveiled our rebrand at Edison Electric Institute in April, which was incredibly exciting, providing the platinum sponsorship for the EEI NKA show in Seattle. Now talk about an experience, walking into the venue like the Amazon Climate Edge Arena and seeing our new logo and graphics plastered all over it, and because we never do anything half-heartedly, the graphics were fully animated and choreographed. That stadium was a sight I’ll never forget, and I couldn’t have been offered a more perfect opportunity to show what we are made of. Big thank you to J. Scott Traweek , Jacqueline Elliot and Amber Wihshi for that opportunity.

We believe our new brand reflects our innovation, growth and market position as the industry-leaders in HVAC energy optimization software. While we used to be timid in promoting our successes, we decided to be bold and dynamic in both our colors and approach going forward. I do believe that we have been successful in that and that as success breeds success, this will continue to proudly carry us forward as we look towards 2025 and beyond.

As soon as we relaunched, we won our third consecutive Silver Stevie Award for Energy Innovation, from the 22nd Annual American Business Awards. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the judges this year; the recognition motivating us as we continue to evolve and excel in our commitment to environmental sustainability and operational efficiency. As a company we have never participated in paid for awards, we believe that hard work and dedication to excellence will eventually be rewarded so for us, awards like the Stevie mean the most, as you truly compete on merit.

Looking to the future, knowing that HVAC systems are responsible for approximately 40% of total building energy consumption, with the number of air conditioning units expected to triple from 1.6 billion units today, to 4.8 billion in 2050, we need to seriously consider the impact this increase is going to have on our climate and overall grid stability. Deploying advanced intelligence solutions, like Encycle, drastically improves commercial HVAC management and operational health, reducing operating costs, carbon footprint, and reducing overall grid demand. We were incredibly grateful to Tridium for allowing us to present our technology findings and deployment paths at their bi-annual conference in Anaheim, as well as being able to support our partner Distech Controls during their show in October. It’s partnerships like these, as well as our partnerships with 霍尼韦尔 , ENTOUCH , Willdan and Lightstat that allow us to deploy our machine learning technologies that drive a sustainability impact not only today, but as we see the increasing future impact of HVAC adoption world-wide.

Using our multi-patented self-learning software, Swarm Logic?, provides customers with the ability to autonomously optimize each building’s HVAC. Factoring in the internal building conditions, HVAC operational status, weather and the location’s historical operating parameters, the software continuously formulates real-time demand strategies. The results, fully autonomous HVAC Energy reduction strategies that help extended the life of your rooftop units, significantly reduce HVAC energy usage and carbon footprint by up to 30%.

At the end of the day, numbers don’t lie and I’m incredibly proud to say that we had a record year, with revenues, deployments and load under control more than doubling. Our growth included new customer acquisitions, as well as continued expansions with Burlington Stores, Inc. , Barnes & Noble, Inc. , Dave & Buster's Inc. and our utility programs NV Energy , Duke Energy Corporation and Mass Save programs. Encycle also processed over 250 utility incentives for Swarm Logic deployments for 百思买 , 宜家 and Ulta Beauty . And we were incredibly proud to be able to support our customers 家得宝 , 史泰博 and Dave & Buster's Inc. at their own corporate events and fundraisers.?

Demand Response will continue to be a space that we will see growth in 2025 following the successful dispatched of nearly 3000 DR events in 2024, which reduced grid load by 41.7 MW’s. We are looking forward to publishing our reliability metrics in 2025, as we have had several customers move from traditional dispatch methods to SwarmDR?, due to the significant improvement in program performance we provide. 2025 will also see us announcing new partnership in this space which we are incredibly excited about!

Even as we reached the end of the year, momentum was not lost. The start of December saw us awarded a groundbreaking patent for our advanced methodologies of detecting and diagnosing HVAC fault conditions. Broken HVAC units are inefficient HVAC units, that waste energy, money, impact comfort negatively, all while also increasing carbon footprint. Often these units go for months without detection. Encycle’s developments in this space mean customers know a unit is failing 60 days before a hot call is received. The impact to budgets on a 60-day deferential is massive, because less energy is wasted, less emergency truck rolls, and parts ordered before the summer rush. All the above means better site comfort, happier customers and a stronger bottom line. These types of advancements change the conversation around hot calls and service, and we are thrilled to bring these advancements to our customers.?

Thank you to our entire team for all their hard work this year, we would never have done all we did, without this amazing group of people. In November Team Encycle travelled to San Diego for a few in-person days. It was so incredibly wonderful to have everyone from the UK, Canada and the US in one room, all hanging out, sharing ideas and building comradery. I look forward to what 2025 has in store for us as we continue to grow, develop and change the HVAC world for the better!

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