Inside Optiml: Replacing spreadsheets with decision intelligence in real estate

Real estate has always been expensive. But the cost that gets talked about least is the cost of making the wrong decision.

Trillions of dollars in real estate assets are managed by institutional investors facing a growing set of simultaneous pressures: tightening regulation, rising energy costs, stranded asset risk, and increasing LP scrutiny on capital allocation. The tools most of them use to navigate those pressures have not kept pace with the stakes.

Optiml is built on a different assumption: that decision-making itself is the product, and that getting it right is not just a sustainability story, it is a financial one. A story about protecting Net Asset Value (NAV), defending yield, and making capital allocation decisions that hold up in investment committees and with lenders.

‍

The Interview: Inside Optiml

Q: What was the moment that made this the problem worth solving?

For Evan, it was not a single moment but a pattern that became impossible to ignore.

"When I started my PhD at ETH Zürich, my professor framed the core question in one sentence: how do you decarbonise real estate portfolios from an investment decision perspective?"

As he began working with large real estate owners, what struck him was not just the complexity of the problem, it was the mismatch between the scale of capital at stake and the tools being used.

"Decisions on trillions of dollars in assets were being made with spreadsheets and consultant intuition. There was no engineering-grade way to answer a fundamental question: given this building, this regulatory context, and this cost of capital, what should I do, and what will it cost?"

The financial exposure was already quantifiable - stranded asset risk, regulatory non-compliance, deteriorating Net Operating Income (NOI) - yet the industry remained largely backward-looking. The turning point came when early partners started asking not just for insights, but for repeated work.

"That is when we realised this was not just a problem, it was a scalable enterprise opportunity."

‍

Q: Can you share a recent success story where your technology made a tangible impact?

One of the clearest examples is Optiml’s work with PATRIZIA, managing a 20-country Article 9 mandate with real cross-border regulatory exposure across markets with very different frameworks.

"Traditionally, building a credible retrofit strategy at that scale would take months of consulting work and still result in a spreadsheet that gets debated in an investment committee."

With Optiml’s Real Estate Decision Intelligence (REDI) platform, the team was able to show - with engineering-grade precision - that the choice of renovation pathway could lead to a roughly 90% variance in Green Capex.

"That is not just a sensitivity, it is the difference between overcapitalising an asset and protecting its NAV. It fundamentally shifts the conversation. Instead of asking how much can we spend this year, the question becomes: how much should we invest, when, and in which assets, to avoid value loss, protect IRR, and ensure compliance?”

When a fund manager sees that the right versus wrong decision can mean tens of millions on a single asset, Evan explains, it reframes how they think about decision-making entirely.

‍

‍Q: What is the biggest risk you've taken so far?

There were two, and both mattered.

The first was operational. "Spinning out of ETH Zürich as an American, navigating visa challenges and complex IP negotiations, at times, that nearly killed the company before it even started."

The more consequential risk was strategic.

In 2022, the market was strongly rewarding ESG dashboards. Optiml could have grown faster and raised capital more easily by going down that path. Instead, the team made a deliberate decision to build differently.

"We made a conscious decision not to build an ESG reporting tool. Instead, we chose to build a financial decision engine grounded in proprietary engineering and optimisation - one that speaks the language of IRR, NOI, Debt Service Coverage Ration (DSCR), and capital allocation, not just carbon metrics.”

It was a contrarian bet, and it made early conversations harder. But as Evan reflects, the market has since caught up.

"ESG has largely become a compliance exercise - lots of disclosure, but little clarity on financial impact. That gap is exactly where we positioned ourselves. And it is why we are now working with institutional investors who do not need another dashboard - they need to make the right capital decisions."

‍

‍Q: What is the most unexpected lesson from working with traditional industries?

The hardest lesson was one that no amount of technical preparation could have taught.

"The best technology does not matter if you cannot speak the client's language."

Real estate is relationship-driven, and trust is built over time. But what surprised Evan was that this went beyond rapport, it was about financial fluency.

"Fund managers think in Internal Rate of Return (IRR), holding periods, exit yields, and risk premiums. The moment we shifted from saying here is your carbon reduction to here is how stranded asset risk impacts your NOI and exit yield in 203, and what that means for your DSCR, the entire conversation changed."

That insight reshaped everything, from how the product was designed to how the team was built.

"This is increasingly validated in the market: the maturity of a manager's decision-support tools is becoming a proxy for governance quality and future readiness. If someone cannot hold a credible conversation about capital allocation with a fund manager, technical excellence alone is not enough."

‍

‍Q: What are the broader ripple effects if Optiml succeeds?

Evan's answer to this question is straightforward.

"The way I think about it is simple: the future of real estate will not be defined by who reports best, it will be defined by who decides best."

Today, real estate operates on fragmented systems across acquisition, asset management, ESG, and financing often held together with manual processes. That fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to compare strategies or understand portfolio-wide implications.

"If Optiml becomes the standard decision layer, you can, for the first time, run consistent, apples-to-apples scenarios across entire portfolios, even across countries."

The implications are significant, he explains more efficient capital allocation, proactive rather than reactive compliance, and a clearer line of sight on NAV protection and yield resilience. But the most overlooked impact is on governance.

"Today, LPs ultimately bear the financial and reputational risk yet often lack real visibility into decisions. When decisions are driven by transparent, engineering-grade intelligence rather than subjective judgment, that relationship shifts, from blind trust to informed co-decision."

And that, he believes, is what ultimately enables real progress toward Net Zero.

"Not better reporting. Better decisions."

‍

Why this matters

Real estate decisions are still being made with spreadsheets and consultant intuition. Optiml is building the decision layer the industry has never had. More efficient capital allocation. Decisions that hold up in investment committees and with lenders. A credible path to protecting NAV and yield, with Net Zero built in, not bolted on.

Evan's answers point to a shift that goes beyond software. Optiml is not building another reporting layer. It is building the decision layer that the industry has never had, one that connects regulatory exposure, financial performance, and engineering reality into a single, actionable view.

What begins with a spreadsheet problem leads to a broader rethinking of how institutional capital gets allocated, how LPs engage with fund managers, and how the built environment moves credibly toward Net Zero. If that happens, the implications extend well beyond real estate - a template for how decision intelligence can replace intuition across any asset-heavy industry facing the same triple pressure of efficiency, resilience, and decarbonisation.

About Optiml

Optiml is a REDI platform that helps institutional investors make better capital allocation decisions across decarbonisation, compliance, and asset performance. Using proprietary engineering models and optimisation technology, Optiml enables fund managers to move from fragmented, manual decision-making to consistent, portfolio-wide intelligence, across borders and asset classes.

Continue reading more about Optiml and visit their website at www.optiml.com

---

Note. article written by Pauline Jimenez, Head of Marketing at KOMPAS VC

‍