AtechX, Aroundtown’s innovation and venture platform, is launching its fourth cohort. Over the coming months, eleven selected start-ups will further develop technological solutions addressing key challenges in the real estate sector. Focus areas include energy efficiency, operational excellence and the transformation of existing buildings, as well as new approaches to construction site automation, land remediation, workflow automation, planning efficiency and real estate management.
The fourth cohort marks the next stage in the development of AtechX. With the expansion of the partner network and its growing international reach, the program is sharpening its focus. Increasingly, this also includes later-stage start-ups and scale-ups with already advanced product developments. They can further develop their solutions within the portfolios of Aroundtown and the extensive AtechX network, apply them to specific use cases and assess their scaling potential in real real estate portfolios. Beyond the program itself, AtechX also continues to support particularly promising solutions in their further development.
“For me, the most exciting part of any start-up has always been the founders. Previous cohorts have already produced particularly strong innovative solutions, which we have successfully implemented across several properties. This fits with the direction in which we have developed AtechX. We are not only supporting companies in their early stages, but also scale-ups with already advanced solutions,” says Angie Mahtaney, Principal in the AtechX team. “The current cohort could hardly be more diverse. They come from different markets, solve different problems and bring very distinct perspectives. Beyond driving innovation, these solutions have the potential to improve how buildings perform, helping create more efficient, resilient and future-ready real estate portfolios. Spend a week working with founders like these and you no longer have to speculate about where the industry is headed. The next 16 weeks are where we get the ball rolling.”
Overview of the start-ups in the fourth AtechX cohort:
NAVOU – develops solutions for transforming existing buildings into energy-efficient, affordable housing. Its approach is based on a proprietary modular timber construction system and a fully digitized, data-driven refurbishment process.
SCALE ENERGY – develops full-stack battery storage solutions and its own energy management algorithm for industrial and commercial sites. The company uses the previously untapped potential of existing grid connections to build a decentralised battery storage network that is set to become one of the largest in Europe.
TEQUS – develops patented, F-gas-free, CO₂-based high-temperature heat pumps for cooling and heating, which can replace gas and oil boilers in commercial and industrial buildings.
REMEDY SCIENTIFIC – develops environmental remediation technology that uses automated, sensor-controlled systems based on chemistry and AI to decontaminate polluted sites, including PFAS, and make them available again for productive real estate use.
MUVAN – offers an AI-based platform for asset and property management that supports leasing, finance and operational processes through automated reporting and tracking dashboards.
ASTRACITE – produces climate-positive anode material for lithium-ion batteries from captured CO₂ and recycled battery graphite, reducing dependency on mined or imported graphite.
PARSEWISE – AI Infrastructure company that is building the underlying ontology that structures unstructured real estate documents into a common, traceable data layer; the foundation that lets workflow automation and portfolio-wide intelligence actually run on trusted, machine-readable data.
ORIGIN TECH – physical AI company building general-purpose robots for the built world - automating repetitive, labor-intensive construction tasks with hardware and engineered AI.
REPERKS – AI led platform for utility cost billing - automating the complex, error-prone work of calculating and reconciling service charges for residential and commercial real estate.
SMART SITE – develops an IoT and agentic AI platform that digitizes the “vertical mobility arteries” of construction sites, such as lifts, cranes and stairwells. Retrofit edge devices capture the movement of people, materials and tools in real time and feed a cloud platform with KPI dashboards, predictive maintenance and an agentic AI copilot that provides insights into productivity, safety and security.
EMULATE – develops AI-supported software for planning and permitting that automates building applications, review processes, design reviews and code audits.
With its fourth cohort, AtechX is once again placing the focus on topics that are central to the further development of the real estate sector: making more efficient use of existing buildings, applying new technologies in operations, and connecting sustainability, digitization and commercial viability. The cohort demonstrates how broad the understanding of innovation in real estate needs to be today.
