Money is pouring back into smart building startups. New founders are not. In the first half of 2026, Memoori tracked 169 funding rounds worth $5.3 billion and 46 acquisitions of smart building startups.
That puts 2026 on course for a record year. Look beneath the headline, though, and you find a market that is concentrating fast. Fewer companies are being formed, a small elite is getting larger checks, and the big incumbents are circling.
This article summarizes our recent LinkedIn Live session and the key findings from our latest research.
We have tracked this market since 2009, and this is our 9th edition of the research. Because the method stays the same, the numbers can be compared from year to year. We have identified 1,498 firms founded since 2014. Our wider database, which covers more than 1,950 companies founded since 2009, is available to enterprise subscribers.
New smart building startups have almost stopped appearing
Company formation peaked in 2016, when 201 smart building startups were founded. In 2025 we have counted just 35, a drop of 83%. So far we have found six founded in 2026.
These recent figures will rise. Young companies often take 12 to 18 months to become visible. When we published in January, the 2025 count stood at only 11. Even so, the trend is clear. The operational side of the building technology market has largely stopped producing new challengers. Design and construction technology is a different story, and new startups are still appearing there.
Why does it matter? For incumbents: the pipeline of future acquisition targets is being built right now, and it is getting thinner. For founders: fewer rivals does not mean easier fundraising. As the next section shows, capital is concentrating in fewer hands.
$5.3 billion raised, but not evenly shared
The first half of 2026 brought 169 funding rounds with a total disclosed value of $5.3 billion. Compared with the same period last year, the number of rounds rose 34% and the value rose 71%.
Over the past decade, we have tracked about $61 billion invested in smart building startups. This half-year alone accounts for nearly 9% of that total.
But the headline flatters the market. Just 6% of deals took 60% of the money. The 10 largest rounds added up to $3.17 billion.
Europe is now home to the most smart building startups
Europe accounts for 42.8% of smart building startups founded since 2014. The Americas follow closely at 41.1%. The gap comes mainly from one area: building energy management. European startups won 54% of all building energy funding rounds in the first half of 2026.
Regulation is the engine behind this. Rules on building energy performance and sustainability reporting turn optional spending into compliance spending. Investors are more comfortable backing demand that the law guarantees, because it is predictable.
One viewer made a sharp point during the session. The same logic is now reaching statutory building compliance in the UK. There, the Building Safety Act makes compliance evidence a boardroom issue rather than a facilities management one.
There is a caveat. Europe’s lead rests on demand created by policy, and policy can be reversed. How strictly these rules are enforced will shape the market over the next few years.
46 acquisitions & a $3.6 billion signal
We tracked 46 acquisitions of smart building startups in the first half of 2026, up from 42 in the same period last year. This follows a record 2025, when 98 startups were acquired.
The wave of AI has sharpened buyers’ appetite. Incumbents are rethinking strategy and buying technology to bolt onto their platforms. One example is JCI’s acquisition of Nantum. JCI has folded its technology into the OpenBlue platform and gained Nantum’s backer, New York landlord Rudin, as a showcase client.
The deal of the half, though, was Autodesk’s agreement in May to buy MaintainX for about $3.6 billion. That price is roughly 18 times MaintainX’s projected 2027 revenue. On current revenue, the multiple would be even higher.
We think this is the first time anyone has put a serious price on operational building data. Design data is largely created once. Operational data keeps growing: every work order and every asset reading adds to it. That growing pool is what Autodesk bought, and it the fuel for training their AI models.
The idea behind the deal is not new. The construction industry refers to a concept called the “golden thread“, but the concept predates this, going back to the Latham report in 1994 and the Egan Report of 1998. Building information modeling (BIM) data that follows a building from design into operations. It has been discussed for years. The obstacle was never mainly the technology. It was the way the industry is structured, with misaligned incentives and contracts that break the chain at handover.
Outlook for the rest of 2026
We are already tracking smart building startups through the second half of the year. On current evidence, 2026 is heading for a big year in both funding value and acquisitions. The real question is whether the money spreads beyond a handful of scale-ups, or whether concentration becomes the new normal.
Get the full picture with our latest smart buildings startups research.
