Spotlight Interview: Praysio

In our latest Spotlight Interview, we spoke to Howard Cook, COO at Praysio. Howard shares how Praysio is helping property and asset managers build a trusted foundation for energy management through reliable metering data, enabling more accurate tenant recharging, ESG reporting and energy performance insights while making complex building data easier to understand, trace and act on.“Too often metering is treated as an afterthought, and assumed to be something that should just work. Yet every tenant recharge, every ESG report and every energy efficiency investment decision rests on the underlying metering data being right.”

Q1. What inspired the creation of Praysio, and what challenges in energy management were you looking to solve?

Metering is the part of energy management that everyone would rather not think about. Too often it is treated as an afterthought, and assumed to be something that should just work. Yet every tenant recharge, every ESG report and every energy efficiency investment decision rests on the underlying metering data being right.

When we speak with the commercial property sector, the same patterns come up time and time again:

·     tenant submeters not installed at demise level

·     meters misconfigured, or simply broken

·     data gathered manually across different systems, including arrays of readings held in spreadsheets

·     no single source of truth, and no clear explanation of how it all fits together

Meanwhile, property teams are asked to recharge tenants fairly and report accurately for ESG. Against that backdrop, when a tenant queries a bill, or an auditor asks where a figure in the ESG report is derived from, the honest answer is often that the source cannot be clearly traced.

That is the problem we built Praysio to solve. Not by adding another layer of reporting on top of data that was never trustworthy, but by fixing the data itself as it comes from the source.

Q2. Praysio positions itself as the data layer underpinning energy performance, powering things like tenant recharge and ESG reporting rather than doing them directly. Why did you focus on getting that foundational layer right, rather than building a broader platform?

Because nothing built on top of it works properly without a reliable, trusted metering solution.

The best recharge and ESG platforms on the market do what they can with the data they are given. However, what they cannot tell you is whether the data arriving from site was accurate in the first place, or whether an error crept in during collection. Incomplete or misconfigured metering does not announce itself. It quietly becomes a number in a report, and every conclusion and decision relies on it from that point.

We like to think of it as an energy tech stack. Metering data is the foundation layer. Recharge, ESG reporting, net zero tracking and true cost analysis all sit above it. Get the foundation right and every layer above it becomes possible. Get it wrong and no amount of sophistication further up the stack can compensate.

That is why our Portal and our API are as integral to our platform as the hardware is. Clients and partners already have systems they rely on, so we integrate with what they already use rather than asking them to replace it. This means that our partners elsewhere in the energy tech stack using our meter data can conduct their analysis, knowing the underlying data is rock solid, and bring even more value to our joint clients.

Q3. Tenant energy recharging depends on accurate, trustworthy metering data. How does Praysio's data give property and asset managers the confidence to recharge tenants accurately, and where do you see that capability going next?

Confidence comes from being able to see and verify the data yourself, rather than receiving a number and taking it on trust.

Our Portal lets property and asset managers trace exactly how a recharge figure was reached, separated into demises, and even into separate meters within a demise. The platform's meter tree makes that relationship visual, so the structure of a complex site becomes something you can intuitively follow, rather than a number buried in a spreadsheet. Every reading is traceable and auditable, so if a tenant queries a bill, the answer is already sitting in the reports and visualisations.

That matters commercially, because recharge disputes are rarely really about the amount. At root they are about trust, and about property managers being unable to show their working.

From here, we want to keep building out our tenant focussed features. We think that engaging tenants on their own energy consumption is crucial for tenant relations. It’s important to remember that tenants will have their own ESG targets too. Our customers can already invite their tenants to access the portal; this way tenants can access their own filtered consumption and analyse it using the full set of portal tools. Already, a question that once took a chain of emails to answer has become something a tenant can check for themselves.

Q4. How does Praysio help organisations identify inefficiencies or unusual energy consumption before they become costly problems?

Most inefficiency is simply invisible because nobody has an intuitive way of seeing the site energy data as a whole. We address this by visualising power flow in the portal to show exactly how energy moves through a building. This way, any unmetered connections or unexpected loads become obvious the moment you look at the overview. We have identified a number of unanticipated issues for our clients this way, such as a server room drawing significant power that nobody on site had accounted for.

As well as better data visualisation, Praysio provide half hourly data as standard. This granularity matters more than people might expect, because a consumption pattern that is quite clearly wrong when viewed at half hourly resolution can disappear completely when the same metering data is viewed at a monthly level.

Beyond the visualisations, our analysis tools let clients interrogate their own data directly whenever they want to. And when something does not look right, they are not left to work it out alone. We join the call and dig into it with them, because being your metering partner means your meter problems are our meter problems.

To give a full picture of a site’s utilities from the outset, we undertake an initial survey and produce a Utilities Management Document. It surveys every utility on site and results in a snapshot report that does two things: it identifies problems early, and it gives the client an accurate, auditable reference point for every utility-based question and project that follows.

Q5. Looking ahead, what's next for Praysio and are there any new innovations or key partnerships being developed as organisations continue to prioritise energy performance and ESG reporting?

Providing dependable data as the foundation of the energy tech stack remains our priority. Energy performance and ESG reporting are no longer voluntary but expected, and recharge consultants, ESG platforms and in house sustainability teams all rely on the same thing underneath them: metering data that is complete, robust and defensible.

We continue to prioritise further improvements to this layer. We are building more tooling around proactive maintenance, so any emerging meter errors (e.g. drift or drop out) is something we identify and act on early, rather than something a client discovers at reporting time.

Alongside that, we continue to develop partnerships with others in the energy tech stack, which enables us to offer a deeper layer of insight and integration with the platforms our clients already use. Jeff Blaylock, Director of Client, UK at Deepki, made a point in his Spotlight Interview last November that we would echo: “decision makers should be spending less time collecting and auditing data, and more time acting on it.” We agree entirely. The part worth adding is that it contingent upon the collection layer underneath being genuinely reliable. Taking that collection and auditing burden away from clients and partners is exactly the job we have taken on.

The result is that a Praysio client can follow a published ESG figure all the way back to the individual meter it came from, with no additional reconciliation work required in between. For a sector under increasing pressure to prove it is delivering on its promises, that is where we think the value sits.