Garima Bharadwaj, co-founder and CTO of Enlite Research, sits down with Rohit Yadav to explain why the buildings going up across India are beautiful on the outside and running on 30 year old control logic on the inside. Cooling that holds 24 degrees regardless of weather, occupancy or machine age. Systems that cannot talk to each other. And an operating layer that starts degrading from year two of a building designed to last twenty five.

Enlite builds an alternative stack for controlling machines, not buildings. Garima and her co-founders spent the first three and a half years building it: a single universal wireless controller that reads every signal type from every make of machine, paired with a cloud platform that learns from each new asset it onboards. The traditional approach meant 40 to 50 kilometres of cabling even for half a million square feet, with a desktop app at the end telling you what already happened. The first customer took 27 meetings and seven months to convince. By year two they had 5 million square feet. The year after that, 50 million, 70 customers, 12,000 controllers and roughly 3 billion parameters handled daily. They expect to pass 100 million square feet by March 2027, and they bootstrapped for six years before raising.

Whether you build, operate, finance or invest in the physical world, this one will change how you think about the gap between a well specified building and a well run one.

Chapters:

00:00 What Enlite is, and the gap that started it

05:13 Building the stack: cloud native and wireless, against the grain

09:00 Two customers, 27 meetings, and the first lighthouse projects

11:05 India's building boom, from tech parks to tier two towers

17:55 Why deterministic controls break by year two

24:02 Why the hardware had to be built, not bought

28:44 The moat: full stack, and what the patents cover

31:46 Who pays, and why they refuse to lead with savings

36:00 What retrofit buildings actually reveal when you audit them

39:00 The Blackstone building: complaints down, headcount down, energy down

41:53 From passive buildings to responsive grid assets

47:06 Six years of bootstrapping, and why PMF came before capital

53:28 Expanding to the Middle East, and into data centres

58:01 What autonomy looks like five years out

🔑 Key insights you will walk away with:

➡️ Why a control logic set on day one is already wrong by year two, once load, seasonality and machine ageing drift

➡️ What it means to control individual machines rather than a building envelope

➡️ Why cooling plants, occupancy systems and solar generation usually never speak to each other

➡️ How a company sold automation and uptime rather than guaranteed savings, and why that avoids the usual performance contracting fight

➡️ What incumbent automation coverage actually looks like in large premises, and why it cannot be fixed after day one

➡️ The case for owning hardware when you want to replace an incumbent rather than sit on top of one

➡️ Why India's 680 million square feet of retrofit stock is the harder and more interesting opportunity

➡️ How a building becomes a responsive asset rather than a passive load on the grid

➡️ Why building codes alone cannot deliver efficiency if the machines behave inefficiently every day

➡️ The argument for bootstrapping six years rather than finding product market fit on someone else's capital

Links:

Garima Bharadwaj: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garimabharadwaj/

Enlite Research: https://enliteresearch.com/

Rohit Yadav: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohityadav23/

Newsletter: https://yadavrohit.substack.com/