The built environment is responsible for roughly 40% of global energy consumption and more than one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe alone. Within these structures, space heating and cooling represent the single largest slice of the energy pie. Despite decades of architectural evolution and the widespread adoption of modern hardware, the vast majority of commercial and residential structures remain trapped in a reactive paradigm. Traditional heating systems operate on an obsolete premise: they wait for a room to get cold before burning energy to heat it back up, or they overshoot targeted temperatures when the morning sun floods a space with natural warmth.
This systemic lag incurs deep financial and environmental costs. While multi-million dollar architectural retrofits focus heavily on insulation and triple-glazing, a silent, operational drain continues uninterrupted at the room level. By failing to account for the thermal dynamics of individual rooms, weather fluctuations, or variable occupancy schedules, global real estate remains tethered to a static, high-emission control model that treats 21st-century skyscrapers and historical brick-and-mortar buildings with identical, indiscriminate inefficiency.
The Trillion-Dollar Legacy Blindspot
The fundamental friction point in building energy management stems from the high complexity and immense fragmentation of existing real estate assets. Roughly 93% of buildings across Europe are classified as light commercial or multi-family residential structures that entirely lack a dedicated, sophisticated Building Management System (BMS). Instead, these properties rely on traditional, water-based hydronic heating loops regulated by mechanical or low-tier digital thermostats.
Historically, solving this at an enterprise scale required hard alternatives, each presenting a distinct market barrier:
- Prohibitive Capital Expenditure: Upgrading older properties with full-scale building automation networks demands invasive rewiring, proprietary sensors, and deep capital outlays that rarely align with immediate real estate payback periods.
- The Physics-Modeling Bottleneck: High-end engineering controls like classic Model Predictive Control (MPC) depend on bespoke thermodynamic models of the structure. Constructing these models requires structural blueprints, precise insulation values, and months of engineering labor, an approach that is impossible to scale across millions of unique, aging European properties.
- The Reactive Overcorrection Loop: Standard smart thermostats operate on simple, reactive algorithms. They cannot calculate a building’s thermal inertia (the time it takes for a structure to absorb, store, and release heat). As a result, systems heat spaces long after they have cleared occupancy or fail to lower energy inputs ahead of solar heat gains, resulting in a systemic energy waste of up to 40%.
This structural gap creates an enormous addressable market. In Europe alone, the segment of older, light commercial buildings facing aggressive net-zero regulatory mandates and volatile energy costs is valued at approximately EUR 340 billion. The real estate sector has long been in urgent need of an asset-light, highly scalable solution capable of introducing predictive, enterprise-grade intelligence into legacy hardware without demanding capital-intensive structural overhauls.
From Academic Rigor to Climate Action
Dr. Felix Bünning is the Co-Founder and CEO of viboo, a Swiss deep-tech company that specializes in data-driven predictive building control. Holding a Master of Science in Energy Engineering from RWTH Aachen University and a Doctor of Science in Automatic Control from ETH Zürich, Bünning has spent his career at the intersection of machine learning, control theory, and urban energy systems.
Before launching viboo in 2022, Bünning developed his expertise through deep-tech academic research, completing semesters at TU Delft and the prestigious Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He later served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Urban Energy Systems Laboratory within Empa (the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology).
As a recognized leader in the European PropTech space, Bünning was named one of Switzerland’s top “Digital Shapers” in the Energizer category by BILANZ and digitalswitzerland. His academic rigor and practical approach to commercialization have positioned him as a key figure in transitioning building automation from manual, reactive operations to cloud-native, self-learning networks.
The NEST Lightbulb Moment
Bünning’s entrepreneurial path was driven by an early awareness of the climate crisis and a growing frustration with the slow pace of commercializing academic breakthroughs. While completing his doctoral work at ETH Zürich and testing advanced algorithms within world-class research laboratories, he observed a glaring disconnect: cutting-edge control theories were yielding massive energy efficiencies in academic papers, yet the commercial real estate market remained entirely unchanged, continuing to rely on archaic heating systems.
The definitive “lightbulb moment” occurred during extensive field trials at NEST, the joint research and innovation building of Empa and Eawag, located in Dübendorf, Switzerland. NEST serves as a real-world modular testbed where new construction materials and energy technologies are validated under actual living conditions.
When Bünning applied his data-driven predictive models to the living spaces of the NEST facility, the real-world results exceeded expectations, demonstrating immediate heating energy savings of nearly 30% to almost 50% without compromising occupant comfort.
For Bünning, this validation turned a research project into a societal mission. Recognizing that buildings generate a massive share of global greenhouse gases, he chose to step away from a traditional academic career path. Backed by a BRIDGE Proof-of-Concept Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and Innosuisse, he committed to translating these laboratory algorithms into an accessible, mass-market cloud platform.
Pioneering Predictive Control as a Service
In March 2022, Felix Bünning co-founded viboo AG alongside fellow Empa researcher Benjamin Huber (who assumed the role of Chief Technology Officer) and veteran energy entrepreneur Matthias Sulzer. The company name itself represents their core technical objective: Viable Intelligent Building Operation Optimization.
From its inception, viboo’s go-to-market strategy was distinct from typical smart-hardware startups. Instead of manufacturing proprietary thermostats and entering a crowded hardware market, Bünning structured viboo as a pure software play, pioneering a model known as Predictive Control as a Service (PCaaS).
The early execution phase focused on building direct, cloud-to-cloud integrations with established international thermostat and building automation manufacturers. Rather than selling directly to individual building tenants, viboo chose to integrate its self-learning algorithms straight into the cloud ecosystems of major industry partners like Danfoss, Siemens, ABB, Schneider Electric, Feller, and Netatmo.
This enterprise-level approach allowed Viboo to deploy its software directly to existing IoT devices already installed in properties worldwide, eliminating the friction of new hardware installations and unlocking rapid scale across entire real estate portfolios.
Proving the Algorithm in the Real World
Transitioning a deep-tech company from a controlled research environment to the messy realities of legacy real estate presents significant operational hurdles. Early on, viboo had to prove that an algorithm optimized in a modern facility like NEST could perform reliably in older, unmapped commercial buildings.
To bridge this gap, Bünning initiated a landmark pilot project during the winter heating season with the City of Schaffhausen, targeting a conventional administrative office building built in the 1960s. Operating over a four-month period, Viboo integrated its cloud platform with Danfoss Ally smart radiator thermostats, testing its self-learning capabilities against standard heating controls.
The successful pilot delivered a 23% reduction in heating energy consumption compared to the previous year, significantly outperforming standalone smart hardware and proving the product’s value in legacy structures.
This real-world validation helped accelerate the company’s growth and fundraising efforts. Viboo quickly built momentum by winning the Venture Kick finals and securing the prestigious EXPO Real Impact Award in the “Impact Building” category.
By scaling its operations across Germany and Switzerland, the startup grew its internal team to 25 professionals, secured over 50 enterprise customers, and brought in hundreds of thousands in recurring revenue.
To support its expansion into broader European markets, viboo successfully raised millions in capital, drawing oversubscribed seed rounds backed by major venture firms, including High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), Swisscom Ventures, and Rainmaking Impact.
The Decarbonization Cockpit
At the heart of Viboo’s success is a proprietary innovation that sidesteps the historic limitations of advanced building controls. The company’s platform utilizes physics-informed machine learning and mathematical optimization to completely automate the modeling process of a building’s thermal behavior.
When connected to a building’s IoT sensors and smart thermostats, the platform follows a sophisticated, continuous closed-loop cycle:
- State Assessment: The algorithm tracks real-time indoor climate data, including room temperatures, valve positions, humidity levels, and historical actuator behaviors.
- Predictive Modeling: Over an initial one- to two-week learning period, the system builds a localized, physics-informed model of each individual room’s specific thermal inertia without requiring manual engineering inputs or blueprints.
- Disturbance Forecasting: The platform pulls external real-time data streams, including localized meteorological weather forecasts (ambient temperature and solar radiation), occupancy patterns, and dynamic energy-tariff prices.
- Optimization: Looking up to 12 hours ahead, an internal mathematical optimizer balances energy costs against user comfort preferences. It anticipates solar gains to lower heating curves before a room overheats and calculates the exact moment to initiate night setbacks or pre-heating sequences.
Through this asset-light framework, facility managers can monitor portfolio-wide indoor air quality, view AI-generated heating schedules, and automate hydronic optimization through a single web-based application called the viboo Cockpit. This approach ensures total compliance with evolving international energy mandates, such as the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and Germany’s Building Energy Act (GEG), requiring minimal upfront investment from property owners.
Cultivating a “Smart and Cozy” Culture
Felix Bünning maintains a deeply collaborative and modern leadership philosophy that mirrors the agility of a deep-tech startup. He actively rejects rigid corporate hierarchies in favor of an open environment where scientific curiosity and engineering excellence drive company strategy.
Bünning frequently describes viboo’s culture as a balanced blend of “smart and cozy.” He emphasizes that a sustainable workspace should be welcoming and warm while still maintaining exceptionally high intellectual standards.
This approach is reflected in Viboo’s low employee turnover and its ability to attract top-tier machine learning engineers and building automation talent from elite institutions like ETH Zürich and RWTH Aachen.
Bünning prioritizes internal operational transparency, utilizing advanced digital platforms like Notion integrated with corporate AI tools to maintain a comprehensive, easily searchable internal knowledge database. This structure flattens learning curves for new hires and allows distributed technical teams across Zurich and Cologne to collaborate seamlessly.
Guided by a core personal philosophy that emphasizes resilience through the natural cycles of entrepreneurship, accepting that market highs and lows are both inevitable, he focuses his leadership on long-term value creation and building sustainable societal impact.
Real Estate as a Grid-Stabilizing Asset
The long-term vision for Viboo extends far beyond simply optimizing single radiator valves in commercial properties. Under Bünning’s guidance, the startup is positioning its cloud platform to serve as the foundational orchestration layer for complex, decentralized urban energy networks.
As real estate increasingly adopts complex, multi-energy systems, viboo is expanding its predictive control capabilities to manage a wider array of building systems, including heat pumps, rooftop solar installations, and local thermal storage units. By coordinating these interconnected systems through a centralized, predictive cloud network, buildings can move beyond simple energy conservation to actively stabilizing the broader electrical grid. Leveraging the thermal inertia of large building portfolios allows viboo-controlled structures to act as flexible demand-side buffers, shifting their power draw in response to volatile renewable energy production and frequency regulation demands.
Backed by recent accolades like the FRETI Award and a nomination for the Green Business Award, Bünning is focused on scaling viboo’s market footprint across Germany, Europe, and eventually the United States. For forward-looking industry observers and the team at Modern Construction 360, platforms like viboo represent the vanguard of property technology, proving that turning the existing built environment into an intelligent, responsive ecosystem is no longer a distant engineering ideal, but a scalable, immediate path toward a fully decarbonized, net-zero future.
