Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept that you were working with while you were pursuing your one-year MBA at INSEAD in the 2008 timeframe?

Mads Jensen: Peter Krebs and I had a a lot of experience in software and technology and we both have worked in the construction industry. Peter is a Civil Engineer and my family had been in that business. We knew that there was a big opportunity within sustainability in the sense that buildings are responsible for more than a third of the carbon emissions.

They are a big part of the problem of climate change, but they’re also a big part of the opportunity. We can build much better buildings and that will really address that, but far too many buildings are not sustainable. We thought that it was a good opportunity. What if we could make buildings more sustainable. That was a couple of years after Facebook took off. Web applications were all the rage.

We thought, “Why don’t we use these new technologies to create software that can help building designers make better buildings?” That was the genesis of the idea and we spoke to a lot of architects. The pattern we saw, again and again, was that sustainable buildings are really complex to design because they require a lot of analysis, building physics, and expertise. That means that only the top projects have enough resources and budget to bring all that expertise in. We thought, “Why don’t we use cloud computing to build a new class of software for the industry and help them make better buildings with that?”

Sramana Mitra: Did you start right after leaving INSEAD?

Mads Jensen: Yes. We spent the year there writing the business plan. We won a business plan competition and we thought, “Maybe this idea has some potential.” Immediately upon graduation, we kicked off the business.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean kicking off the business? What were the first things you did to get this off the ground?

Mads Jensen: We interviewed more than a hundred architects to validate our ideas and software designs and the problems that we were looking at. That took us from July until late 2009. Then we felt that our designs were validated. We had a lot of positive feedback and then we started building the software.

Sramana Mitra: All this was self-financed at that point?

Mads Jensen: Peter had built a couple of companies before and had some savings. I had put some  savings aside. We had a bit of money to start out with and that was what we used.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get the first version of the product out?

Mads Jensen: It took us a long time. It was a lot more complex to build than we initially thought, in particular, because of all the physics and simulations. It actually took us three years before we had built the first commercial version of the software. We had beta programs before them that we were trying out with users, but it was three years before we could go live commercially in the summer of 2012.

Sramana Mitra: Who was building the software?

Mads Jensen: We were very involved on the design side and development work. We hired a small team. We were initially just a handful of people. There were software developers and some building physicists.

Sramana Mitra: These hundred or so architects that had helped you validate and get the specs together, how many of them became paying customers of your product?

Mads Jensen: Many did, if not all. Many certainly did. We, today, have customers in more than 40 countries. We have hundreds of firms, big and small. The first places we went to were those folks we had talked to. We learned a lot more about the industry as we went along because, although we knew about the construction industry, none of us were architects. Learning about the architectural industry and learning about the right customer segments was also part of our journey and certainly, something we spent a lot of time figuring out.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping, Fund Raising and Exit: Mads Jensen’s Journey with Sefaira
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