Cadillac Fairview Implements KODE OS to Drive Predictive, Data-Driven Building Management
TORONTO, June 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- KODE Labs, an innovative global leader in autonomous smart building technology, announced today that Cadillac Fairview (CF), a long-standing leader in Canadian commercial real estate, has deployed the KODE OS smart building platform in two leading office complexes in Toronto, Canada: Toronto-Dominion Centre and RBC Centre. KODE OS, an award-winning cloud-based enterprise platform from Detroit-based KODE Labs, synchronizes data across all building systems and software within a real estate portfolio through advanced analytics, real-time monitoring, and full command and control, enhancing building performance.
KODE Labs' support aims to enhance CF's operations by providing highly effective tools and seamless access to property-level insights, thereby enabling CF teams to make informed decisions with actionable data. This support will drive a shift from reactive to proactive maintenance strategies, empowering stakeholders to create more efficient building environments and elevate client experiences. KODE OS will be used to help CF expand its property technology program, integrate existing data streams, and leverage real-time insights and predictive analytics into its core business operations.
"Cadillac Fairview has been a leader in real estate for decades, and we're proud to partner with them to bring their vision for Predictive Operations to life," said Etrit Demaj, Co-Founder at KODE Labs. "Using an 'automation-to-intelligence' approach, KODE drives smarter operational decisions, helping CF create buildings that are more intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable for everyone."
Since the initial pilot deployment at two flagship office properties in Toronto, CF has leveraged the KODE OS platform to optimize equipment runtime and tenant comfort through dynamic HVAC startup sequences. Additionally, proactive maintenance strategies have been implemented, utilizing equipment runtime and building conditions to identify further opportunities for enhanced asset performance and improved tenant comfort.
Through this collaboration, CF will continue to optimize its operational capabilities in energy and metering, vertical transportation, and janitorial cleaning, reinforcing its commitment to modern building management.
"Cadillac Fairview is committed to adopting technology that aligns with both our operational goals and our broader vision to deliver market-leading and high-performing buildings," commented Arv Gupta, Senior Vice President, Operations Services at Cadillac Fairview. "Our partnership with KODE Labs represents a significant leap forward in how we approach building management and the experiences we provide to our tenants."
About KODE Labs
KODE Labs specializes in transforming real estate management and experience through its innovative, data-centric operating system, KODE OS. This smart building platform leverages a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to optimize building performance, integrating data from building management systems, IoT, and operational systems into a unified, cloud-based solution. At KODE Labs, the future of efficient and sustainable real estate management is being redefined. For more information, visit kodelabs.com
I recently had a chance to talk to Etrit Demaj, Co-Founder at KODE Labs, about his company and how they are helping institutional real estate investors optimize their operational capabilities in every aspect of building management.
Before I get to my interview, a couple of background articles.
First, Tim De Chant of TechCrunch reports Kode Labs makes a bid to become the Salesforce of commercial building automation:
Like many immigrants, the New York City skyline was one of the first sights young brothers Edi and Etrit Demaj took in when they arrived in the U.S. more than 20 years ago. The pair, along with their family, had fled violence in their native Kosovo, and they still remember the view as their plane flew overhead.
“The first building that we saw was the Empire State Building,” Etrit recalls.
The Demaj family soon settled in Detroit, where the brothers completed their education and started various companies, including their latest, Kode Labs, which integrates and automates various systems in commercial buildings — including the Empire State Building.
“That’s the American dream,” Etrit said.
When the Demaj brothers founded Kode in 2017, they sought to bring building management into the cloud era. They set about developing a suite of software that digests data from various internet-connected parts of a building’s operation, including air handlers, fire alarms, elevators, occupation sensors, EV chargers and more, and then controls them in a way that wrings efficiency out of the systems. Kode claims that it can talk with more than 130 different systems.
The brothers liken it to an OS that integrates building systems like a computer OS integrates various circuit boards.
“What we’re trying to do is bring in data and normalize it, index it, use that data to build applications on top of it to make the operating system more useful, to drive energy efficiency, while creating amazing experiences,” Edi told TechCrunch.
Commercial buildings might seem like clean neighbors, but they generate 16% of all carbon pollution in the U.S., according to the EPA. The way many are operated is not just environmentally damaging, it’s also fiscally unsound.
Today, commercial buildings are riddled with inefficiencies of the sort that automation could address. In the process, owners would not only stand to trim their carbon emissions, but save piles of cash. Between 2020 and 2050, global adoption of automation could cut carbon by 9.5 billion to 14 billion metric tons and save owners at least $2.3 trillion, according to Project Drawdown.
Kode has also developed a range of applications to run on its platform, allowing customers to monitor energy use, track carbon emissions and keep an eye on water consumption. Not only do these help keep a lid on costs, some of the data is necessary to comply with laws in various cities, including New York City, where Local Law 97 will require buildings over 25,000 square feet to cut their carbon emissions by 40% by the end of the decade.
“With all the goals and the laws in place in many different locations and areas, they have no choice but to continue going this route,” Etrit said.
Already, the company’s software is used by building managers and owners on five continents, and its customers include Fortune 100 companies and higher education institutions, Etrit said. The company has been profitable from day one, he added. Customer churn is “zero percent,” Edi said, and annual recurring revenue has grown 200% every year for the last three years.
Kode’s business model is similar to Salesforce’s, Edi said, with customers first paying an implementation fee that’s negotiated based on the size of the property portfolio and then paying recurring fees based on how many square feet are under management and the number of applications the customer chooses to use.
Kode has grown significantly since raising its $8 million Series A in 2022, with more than 40 employees in Detroit, 150 in Kosovo and a handful more in other countries.
Sensing an opportunity to grow quickly, Kode recently raised a $30 million Series B, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The round was led by Maverix Private Equity with participation by I Squared Capital and Telus Ventures. The startup plans to use the funds to expand its app marketplace and further develop its use of AI to optimize building operations.
Back in April, Philip Russo of Commercial Observer wrote an article, Kode Labs’ Edi Demaj On Proptech and Life Sciences Development, which is available here (subscription required).
Edi is Etrit's older brother, I didn't get to speak with him but enjoyed my discussion with Etrit.
Discussion With Etrit Demaj, Co-Founder at KODE Labs
A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by Carolyn Artman of Crimson Agency who informed me of Cadillac Fairview's partnership with KODE Labs stating this:
Cadillac Fairview (CF) has just completed a 5.5 million square foot retrofit in Toronto, deploying KODE OS (from Detroit-based KODE Labs), an advanced building operating system, across both the Toronto-Dominion Centre and the RBC Centre.
This isn’t just a tech layer; it’s a digital transformation of two of Canada’s most iconic office towers. With KODE OS, CF is integrating HVAC, janitorial, vertical transport, metering, and more into a single cloud-based platform to drive predictive operations and real-time decision-making. What stands out:
- CF is embedding intelligence into the core of building operations, not just adding green tech on the margins.
- The retrofit covers millions of square feet across two landmark assets, marking an ambitious smart building deployment in Toronto.
- The partnership with Detroit-based KODE Labs is setting a new standard for data-driven building management in legacy infrastructure.
I normally do not do these interviews but John Ruffolo, founder and Managing Partner of Maverix Private Equity, had contacted me on LinkedIn some time ago to tell me about KODE and I respect him a lot so I agreed to it.
To be really truthful, the whole aspect of managing buildings better is something that fascinates me, commercial real estate is a big part of the global quest to decarbonize and I wanted to learn more about what KODE does (name comes from Kosovo where they came from and Detroit where they settled).
I began by asking Etrit to give me a brief background on KODE labs and he replied:
I co-founded KODE with my brother Edi and close friend and partner, Gentrit Gojani, in 2017.
We are refugees from Kosovo. We moved to the United States at a young age, and what really drives us toward real estate is we come from a war where everything was burned down. Coming here, you see this amazing future and all kinds of stuff.
Since our childhood, we always wanted to be entrepreneurs, we just didn't know what and how.
I would say, Canada, America and many other countries give you the ability to do that with relative ease.
As we were getting older, we tried a few things and had some good success.
As we were doing that, obviously I was part of another company that was in the industry and at the time the industry was based on making integration easier through combining different platforms together whether it's a seamless platform, a Honeywell with an analytics on top, trying to combine a bunch of different companies where you can build different solutions and build something else on top, which I kind of noticed there could be an opportunity here.
It's really hard to do that because typically you're getting that type of data or asked to implement it inside of a building somewhere inside of a basement. And we just thought there has to be a better way than this and obviously looking at all the other industries outside of real estate, cloud was becoming a bigger and bigger thing but in real estate, cloud wasn't considered secure to have a connection outside the building which is really not the case.
That's what got us to start cold since 2018 but we started the company in October 2017.
From my understanding, they saw a need to address an integration problem in commercial buildings and have the systems talk to each other and then put it securely on the cloud to operate as an OS:
They also kept in touch with people in Kosovo and hired tech talent there to help them solve integration challenges.
He added:
We changed things around, we started to see the world differently so what we were doing and what are backgrounds were helped us think outside the box. As well, we were always very, very passionate about real estate altogether.
They have 230 team members, their main office is in Detroit as well as Kosovo. They also have team members in the US, Canada and England.
I asked him if he can explain in very basic terms what KODE does and he replied:
What KODE really does is provide a smart native cloud building operating system. It integrates various building systems like HVAC, lighting, energy management, IOT as well as RP platforms into a single pane of glass and it allows the building end users from the local building engineers, the property managers to the regional executives to look at their buildings and enable different applications and modules to help them monitor to help them control and optimize performance in real time.
What we've done from a differentiation perspective is build a cloud first solution versus what most of the others have had in this space. that really differentiates us because we are not just an analytics package, we are actually able to write back to the buildings as well as now because we have breadth of 200+ API connections, we can integrate with almost any type of vertical or any type of building even if they are are older buildings that need less hardware.
So we are very software centered -- software first -- and we've made these connections easier. Then we turn on the technical applications that build the workflow for the optimization depending on the systems that are there.
Importantly, when we started doing this at the beginning and ongoing, we always had this data first mindset. All of our clients own their own data, we obviously use that data in an anonymous way and that's allowing us now to have some of the richest data sets and the right type of structure to enable not only our large language models, AI agents and Gen AI, and really work towards a different way in how buildings should be operating but it also allows the end users and our clients and our partners to use their own AI models in the future because we have the best data sets.
I asked Etrit if he can give me an example of how that data is being used specifically to help building managers decarbonize and he replied:
In many different ways, right now what the large institutional investors and smaller corporate players and others are trying to do is really connect with the same systems and data sets in buildings and buy these data sets and solutions 5, 6, 7, 8 ways. Because they buy something for ESG, they buy something for their operations team, they buy something else but are they really buying the same data or trying to see it in a different way?
So, the first thing we do from an ESG perspective is allow them to see the whole picture in an organized way and it allows them to see what they meet their different reporting and allows them to gather data on Scope 1, Scope 2 (they don't do Scope 3).
It allows them to meet that and while meeting that, it also gives their local end users the same type of view in a different way to actually operate that way where they're not doing two separate things, at the top building reports and on the operation side they're doing what they have always done, running the building and that's not really connecting when you think about ESG and the new regulations coming into place.
It's becoming more real because when you spend all this money and the results are not that great and you can't fully integrate those workflows for it to happen, it's hard to point fingers.
Think about pension funds, they're a perfect example, they invest hundreds of billions all over the place. They need to get these reports, they need to meet some guidance, so they drive that down to their operating companies and investments. The operating companies say we need to get this over to the funds so let's go build out our reports but then there are groups they hire first. But the operations teams, IT and others don't really connect well.
What our platform does is it makes this more fluid but it allows them to operate the building based on the kind of goals they want to set in place and to make the changes so they're not just installing random hardware and solutions but they're making data driven decisions that are way more open which allows them to go step 1,2,3, 4 in a more transparent way but it also allows them to think how the future of buildings should be like.
The data they get is more comprehensive and integrated allowing them to make better decisions at all levels of the operations.
You can operate any building from your phone and make decisions in real time since it's a cloud based system:
I then asked Etrit how John Ruffolo got involved and how they raised money in different rounds.
He replied:
Since inception, we thought about the company in a way where wanted to be sound from a financial perspective because we are always thinking about the people we are bringing on board and also our clients. We want to be the number one client service team in this industry and in order for us to do that, some of the decisions we made at the early stage seemed like high risk but for us they were actually the best decisions. They turned out to be very fruitful allowing us to build what we needed to without having to raise until 2022.
In 2022, we raised a Series A and at the time, we brought on some great investors, one of them being I Squared out of Miami and another being QuadReal Property Group they followed on round because we were doing some great things with them. Their leadership and their CEO Dennis (Lopez) liked what we were doing and obviously the rest of his team.
During Series A, we had conversations with John Ruffolo and his team but we were a bit too small at the time for someone like Maverix. We stayed in touch with him and when Series B came around in early 2024, Maverix ended up leading the Series B round which was about $30 million along with Telus Ventures and many others that were part of the company.
John and the Maverix team, I couldn't say better things about them. A lot of people know how good John is and his passion about making Canada better in every single way but that really resonates with the rest of his team. He and everyone else are extremely supportive, extremely helpful. They're not just a private equity firm that invests, they're a group that really supports you, they make the right introductions, they really want to follow through.
And they're not just there when the company is doing great, they are there when you are experiencing challenges.
That doesn't surprise me, John Ruffolo is a very smart guy who rolls up his sleeves to help his portfolio companies through thick and thin and expects everyone on his team to do the same.
I also told him that QuadReal (BCI's real estate subsidiary) is a great shop and Dennis Lopez is a great CEO and asked him if they were the first to implement their cloud based operating system for buildings.
Etrit responded:
For Canada, they were our client number one. QuadReal is the client for us that really helped us stamp our idea and our vision. We had all these thoughts about doing things, going deeper, having more integration than just your typical systems. QuadReal came along and we ran into some RFP and specifications, and it was basically written exactly how we would have developed and continue to develop. We got lucky, we didn't win our first attempt with QuadReal but we won our second try. And from there, it was during Covid and they stuck by us.
QuadReal is a leader of digitizing real estate and we've done millions of square feet with QuadReal already. They not only believed and bought the product and are power users, but at that early stage in Series A, they found out and wanted a stake in the company.
I told Etrit "you couldn't have picked a better institutional partner" and having them as an early investor is a huge endorsement.
Not surprised that they got meetings with Cadillac Fairview and Etrit commented:
Cadillac Fairview being who they are and being part of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, just like all the others, we take them seriously.
He told me they took their time, got to know and understand their requirements really well and "the platform has matured so much that it really meets Cadillac Fairview exactly where they want to be but more importantly, where they're looking to go."
He added: "Cadillac Fairview is one of the best at how they operate. We've had the pleasure and opportunity to continue learning from them but also we've had the opportunity to keep innovating with them at the same time."
I told Etrit QuadReal and Cadillac Fairview are two fantastic partners to have in Canada and I wouldn't be surprised if after reading this comment others including Oxford Properties, La Caisse, CPP Investments, HOOPP, AIMCO and PSP Investments also take a closer look at their cloud based OS.
There are also many large US, European and Asian pension and sovereign wealth funds interested in their building operating system.
I remember in March 2021, Ivanhoé Cambridge (real estate subsidiary of CDPQ now known as La Caisse) announced a strategic partnership with Fifth Wall to capitalize on emerging trends in proptech but nothing ever came out of that (as far as I'm aware of).
There is competition in the space, it's evolving, and Etrit was very honest about this but he seems very focused and confident that they can compete and address the needs to large institutional investors making sure they service them extremely well.
I'm very happy I had a chance to speak with him and thank him again for taking the time to speak with me.
I also thank Carolyn Artman for contacting me and setting this all up, emphasizing it was John Ruffolo who thought it would be a good idea to talk to Etrit.
It certainly was and I like talking to entrepreneurs and first generation American immigrants working hard pursuing their dreams and passion, a very enlightening conversation.
Below, Edi Demaj, Co-Founder of KODE Labs, talked to Startup Grind sharing his insights into the journey of building a global smart building software company from the ground up. From humble beginnings in Kosovo to scaling operations across multiple continents, Edi discussed the company's growth, mission, and future aspirations (he flips to English around minute 10).
Also, Mark Allen, Gaper.io, interviewed KODE Labs co-founder Edi Demaj where he shares the story behind KODE Labs, its mission, and the transformative role it plays in commercial real estate through smart building software.
Smart brothers, I wish them much success and hope to follow up with them in the future.
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