Nextbitt aims batteries at retail chains

Miguel Salgueiro, Nexbiit's Chief Business Officer (CBO), worked for Sacoor and the WPP and Malo groups until he co-founded Nexbitt in 2015 with André Calixto (CEO) and Pedro Morais (CTO), a Portuguese software company specializing in physical asset management. In an interview with Hipersuper, he takes stock of the company's seven years of activity and talks about his intention to grow, specifically in the retail sector, and his commitment to internationalization.

Nextbitt was founded in 2015 by Miguel, Pedro Morais and André Calixto. In what context did you found the company?

Netxbitt emerged from the goodwill and experience of three partners specialized in three different areas that complement each other. Pedro Morais in information technology and programming, André Calixto in consultancy and project implementation and myself in networking and sales. At the time, I was working for a company in the health sector and was a client of both of them at Glintt. We developed complicities, common thoughts and crossed ambitions. In 2015, as a result of life changes and business dynamics, we founded Nexbitt.

What was the physical asset management sector like then?

Physical asset management was a sector with little momentum. There was a big gap between two types of offer: small Portuguese software companies that had been in this market for many years, but were not very dynamic, and then there were the big technology companies, such as SAP and IBM, among others. We felt that, between these two realities, there was an area we could explore and where we could position ourselves, in the enterprise market, with an offer focused on large national and international companies.

They chose Microsoft as a partner straight away?

Yes, if we wanted to win business in large companies in Portugal, we had to invest in a programming technology that allowed for strong capillarity and included the cloud right from the start. We chose Microsoft because it's a world leader, has a great deal of knowledge around the world and because we had a great ambition to internationalize the business from an early stage. It was a winning bet. A year and a half after we set up the company, we were in Washington, USA, receiving the Microsoft partner award. And after another year and a half we went to Las Vegas to receive another award. This gave us visibility and credibility.

What does the partnership consist of?

We have our own platform, developed entirely by us, and we program in Microsoft technologies. Then, within our offer, we use Microsoft's Azur cloud to offer an integrated solution, ready to use anywhere in the world, all you need is internet access.

Which large companies in Portugal do you manage physical assets for?

In the first two or three years, we won over companies like Vodafone, Brisa and the Champalimaud Foundation, for example. Then we started to get into retail, with Sonae Fashion, with brands like Salsa, Mo, Zippy, then later with Sonae MC, with the Modelo and Continente brands. We also worked a lot in specialized retail and with shopping centers. Then we started to focus a lot on the leaders of the different industries. Why do we think this way? Because if we want to internationalize in a solid way, we have to work with the companies with the greatest geographical dispersion of their assets.

How does technology manage buildings?

Nextbitt has always defined itself as an integrating technology that allows the user to look at a single solution that talks to different buildings, hardware and software, and provides a dashboard with real-time information from different sources. To give you an idea, at EDP we are talking about managing 250 buildings that are registered with Nexbitt with thousands of users.

What about retail?

We currently work with hundreds of stores and are winning more and more business within this sector. When we set up the company in 2015, not only was there no middle ground between smaller companies, focused on just one area of business, and large multinationals, but physical asset management was an area that was little explored. That's why Nextbitt created a technology focused on asset management but also on the facilities component. In our view, we offer a technology that brings together all the skills that a building manager needs and which are the priority areas for your company.

Can a chain with hundreds of supermarkets, for example, manage all its assets from your platform?

Yes, imagine a group with 500 supermarkets. You can register all the stores on the platform, i.e. represent the premises and their contents, monitor water, electricity and gas consumption, as well as provide evidence of air quality, temperature, CO2 and waste, among other things. In addition, the platform monitors response times between those who request a task and those who have to carry it out, in a maintenance logic, for example. We help monitor the maintenance work of service providers.

What equipment do you use for monitoring?

We place sensors or connect our technology to sensors that are already available. In this way, we can monitor energy, water and gas consumption, we can measure temperature, air quality and a whole range of legally required parameters. We are able to respond to the challenges of the carbon footprint, materializing indicators into KPIs [performance indicators] under the law implemented by the European community. We help manage all building maintenance activities, such as cleaning, security, catering and gardening, among other services, through our platform and mobile app for smartphones, which also works offline.

Does the solution also give you greater control over costs?

Yes, the application allows company administrations to have assertive control of the costs they are incurring in real time. They can, for example, have access to evidence about whether they are spending more or less per square meter in stores with commercial similarities and make decisions about problem machines, whether they deserve a repair investment or are obsolete. With energy cost increases the order of the day, our technology helps to monitor energy consumption or energy alarming in real time. In other words, if there is a voltage spike, the platform triggers a ticket directly to the service provider. It's a whole ecosystem that used to be manual in building management and is now all digital. We're talking about gains in operational efficiency and cost reduction. What's more, with our technology, companies can now register on a single platform.

What is Nexbitt's business model?

We have a SaS licensing model in which we provide the technology, but then we have consulting teams to help with the workflow and design the processes. Imagine, we take the 450 store floor plans, represent them on the platform, the floors, the areas, all the machines and sensors, so there's an advantage here because companies can have a corporate view of their physical assets. Inventorying is the first stage. Then we have complementary teams that do all the inventory of the stores, uploading a history of what exists onto the platform. All the equipment is photographed (make, model and serial number) and uploaded to the application. We also have an analytics component which, with the base we have today, allows us to be at the forefront of environmental sustainability, compliance and human resources.

With the data available on the platform, companies can calculate their carbon footprint?

Exactly. As we've been setting up projects since 2015 and the legal requirement for companies to provide evidence of sustainability is recent, we believe we're at the forefront because we already have the records, the sensors and we record the data in real time. In many cases, this work is done manually. In other words, the different building managers email these indicators to the corporate sustainability department, and what we do is connect the electrical panels to the platform which, in turn, "writes" them into the sustainability report.

Have you started internationalization?

We are investing a lot in the Spanish market, where we are growing, also in the retail sector. With Sonae's banners, we are leveraging our business in internationalization. We're negotiating with some chains in the Brazilian market too.

In 2022, they received five million euros from Explorer Investments to accelerate internationalization and sustainability. Where did they put the money?

The investment came into the company in September and is being invested in the internationalization of the company, reinforcing all the areas of competence within the organization. We're hiring 60 people. We're going to have a physical presence in Spain. And we're evaluating England and France, among other European countries.

They made three million euros in 2021. What was the evolution last year?

Turnover grew by 20% year-on-year, but we can't forget that we raised five million. It's not turnover, but we can't disassociate it from this influx of capital, which is an investment that will double or triple in profitability.

What is the growth forecast for 2023?

Our goal is to exceed 4 million euros.

Source: Hipersuper

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