The lights are on upstairs for Adura Technologies, which has just announced Mark Golan as its Chief Executive Officer after its last CEO left for personal reasons in October.
Golan comes to Adura from Johnson Controls, where he ran the Global Workplace Solutions Business Unit for the Americas region. The resume is similar to the last CEO, Jack Bolick, who came to the company from Honeywell. Bolick is still on the Adura board.
In the interim, Andy Wheeler had been acting CEO and CTO and will return to full-time duties as CTO. Golan is looking forward to the shift to the startup space. “I’m very excited about being here,” he said. “I think my role is to take what I believe is a company that now has a lot of valuable intellectual property and focus it as it goes to market."
Lighting accounts for nearly 24 percent of energy used in most buildings and less than 2 percent of commercial real estate lighting is networked. Adura says it can save its customers up to 70 percent in lighting costs.
Golan’s focus in the near future will be making strategic decisions and not spreading Adura too thin, a problem that many promising startups face. And while Adura is known for its ZigBee-based system for lighting, Golan said he sees Adura’s technologies as a platform that can have far more offerings than just dimming lights to save money or taking part in demand response offerings. “It’s still quite an immature market,” he said of networked lighting.
But even with the focus on the basics, Golan is already looking ahead to easy ways to add value for potential customers. An obvious one is HVAC controls, but he is even thinking of ways to not just save money but create opportunities for more revenue, like by using occupancy data in for companies to build metrics to be able to better understand their businesses -- something that a department store, for instance, could use to improve its customer experience.
Office buildings are the obvious target for networked lighting, but there are plenty of other opportunities, including hotels, convention centers and anywhere else where the occupants aren't the ones footing the energy bill. Adura was one of the early names in this space, but it’s certainly not alone, with other players like Lumenergi and Daintree Networks also making inroads.
Although Adura is facing increasing competition, it also could be an acquisition target -- something that Golan didn’t disagree with on a recent call. Large building controls companies like Honeywell and Johnson Controls have been scooping up smaller players in the demand response world, and the addition of a lighting network company seems like a natural fit.
Adura has more than $17 million in funding from Claremont Creek Ventures, VantagePoint Venture Partners and NGEN Partners.