Facilio's rise from slow build to global presence in property management

Having spent nearly 17 years managing Zoho's IT and Telecom division at software-as-a-service (SaaS) unicorn Zoho, Prabhu Ramachandran is no stranger to enterprises and their technology needs. But of all the areas he ran the rule over, none felt more in need of a technological intervention than real estate. Even as companies grew increasingly digital, the way they ran their offices was decidedly low-tech.

Along with three other former Zoho colleagues, two of whom were of the same vintage at Zoho as Ramachandran, the team decided to don their entrepreneurial hats and incorporated Facilio in Atlanta, Georgia, in mid-2017. The idea behind Facilio was to build solutions based on the Internet of Things and machine learning, offering these via the cloud to owners and operators of large buildings.

Since its inception, Facilio has been rather measured in its approach to building and scaling. Just over six years on, the SaaS property operations firm is still only in the $5-10 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) category. However, Facilio’s revenue belies the huge opportunity in the spaces it operates in—building management systems and computerised maintenance management systems.