Get Philip Cross

Litware

Building practical technology for a changing climate

Overview

Litware developed hardware and software systems designed to make energy use more efficient in buildings and small industrial environments. The company focused on the physical layer of climate technology: sensors, control systems, and connected infrastructure that could measure how energy was actually being used and make that information actionable.

Chapter

Role

Co-founder & CEO

Status

Acquired

Timeline

2016

2023

Venture

Founding

Independent

Team Size

11-50

Founded

2016

Website

litware.energy

The Physical Problem

Litware began with a problem that looked simple from a distance: buildings waste a significant amount of energy, but the people responsible for operating them often have very little visibility into where that waste occurs.

Software could show a building's energy consumption. It could produce dashboards, reports, and forecasts. But knowing that a building had used more energy than expected did not necessarily explain why.

We became interested in the layer between measurement and action.

The early idea was to build a system that could understand the physical behavior of a building in enough detail to identify inefficiencies as they happened. That meant combining inexpensive sensors, better control systems, and software capable of turning large amounts of physical data into useful decisions.

The first prototypes were built around a small number of commercial buildings.

They were not particularly elegant. Sensors had to be installed by hand, hardware failed in ways that software rarely does, and environmental conditions introduced variables that were difficult to reproduce in a laboratory.

Those constraints turned out to be valuable.

They forced us to understand the physical systems we were trying to improve rather than assuming the problem could be solved entirely through software.

Building Hardware That Worked

Hardware businesses are unforgiving because the product has to work in the real world.

A software bug can often be fixed with a deployment. A hardware problem can require a technician, a replacement component, and a visit to a building hundreds of miles away.

That changed how we built Litware.

Reliability became more important than feature velocity. Installation time became a product metric. Every additional component had to justify the complexity it introduced. We designed the system to work with existing building infrastructure wherever possible rather than requiring customers to rebuild their environments around us.

The company gradually moved from prototypes to a standardized platform.

Sensors collected information about temperature, occupancy, equipment activity, and energy consumption. The software used those signals to identify patterns and recommend or automatically make adjustments. Over time, the system became less about displaying information and more about continuously improving how a building operated.

Working with customers also changed our understanding of the market.

The technical case for efficiency was often straightforward. The organizational case was harder. Building owners, operators, finance teams, and sustainability teams could all have different incentives and different definitions of success.

The product therefore had to create value at multiple levels: measurable energy savings for operators, clearer reporting for management, and a credible path toward lower emissions for organizations making longer-term commitments.

That experience reinforced a lesson that stayed with me after Litware: climate technology is rarely only a technology problem. Adoption depends on economics, infrastructure, incentives, and behavior working together.

The Next Chapter

By 2022, Litware had reached a point where the company needed significantly more capital and distribution to scale the hardware platform internationally.

Rather than raising another round simply to preserve independence, we evaluated what would create the most value for the technology and the customers using it.

The answer was an acquisition.

In 2023, Litware was acquired by a larger energy technology company with an established installation network and international customer base. The team joined the acquiring organization, and the core technology became part of a broader building-management platform.

The acquisition was not the original outcome we imagined when we started the company.

It was, however, the right one.

Litware taught us that building a valuable company does not always mean building a permanent independent company. Sometimes the best outcome is to develop a capability, prove that it works, and put it in the hands of an organization capable of taking it much further.

The company ended as an independent venture, but the underlying work continued.