About Sefaira
Company History
Sefaira was founded in 2009 with a mission to promote more sustainable buildings by helping the building industry design, build, operate, maintain and transform all facets of the built environment. We do this by providing the industry with the world’s leading green building web-applications.
The Name
The name Sefaira comes from the Greek word sfera or sphere. This symbolises the Earth and indicates the way in which Sefaira takes a holistic approach to understanding and addressing sustainability problems, and to develop offerings which are globally applicable.
Sefaira's Technology
Sefaira’s cloud based technology offers an integrated approach to sustainable design analysis, knowledge management, and decision support. Sefaira helps green building professionals analyze and compare green building strategies for new build and retrofit projects. By providing sophisticated analysis via an intuitive web-interface, Sefaira helps users define, quantify and compare the energy, water, carbon and financial benefits of relevant design strategies. This helps users effectively balance the investment between various building strategies, to maximize capital efficiency, minimize energy and water use and create high performing green building designs at low cost.
Sefaira's Mission
Sefaira helps users design greener and better buildings, much faster and cost effectively than ever before.
From Sefaira's offices in London and New York, we have supported projects across the US, Europe through the Middle East and in Asia. Our results are created by a team who all share a passion for green buildings, and for the way in which technology can help transform the green building space.
Sefaira has won numerous awards –the latest is the Green Building Innovation of the Year award at Ecobuild 2011.
Executive Team
MADS JENSEN
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER CO-FOUNDER |
With more than a decade of professional experience in Information Technology innovation, management and leadership, Mads brings technology vision to the building and construction industry. He is especially passionate about the way technology can help drive industry transformation, bringing everything from better building materials, more powerful renewable energy systems and of course software that helps practitioners design, manage and optimise everything to make the most of Earth's limited resources. Mads was a Business Executive at IBM Global Services prior to founding Sefaira. He holds a BSc in International Business from Copenhagen Business School and an MBA from INSEAD. |
PETER KREBS
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER CO-FOUNDER |
Peter is passionate about technology, green construction and start-up enterprise. Having launched his first business (an Internet Service Provider) in 1993, he has since been a green engineer on prestigious building projects including The Solaire in New York City, America's first LEED Gold certified apartment building. He also founded and was lead architect of two successful software businesses: Webfood and UGryd. Combining a decade of sustainable building and technology entrepreneurship, Peter brings a unique combination of software development and construction expertise to Sefaira. Peter holds a MEng and BSc in Civil Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from INSEAD. |
SARAH WILLIAMSON
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER |
Sarah Williamson is an experienced, hands-on, Board level CFO, focused on growing, technology, media and telecoms businesses. She has a long track record of building successful technology businesses and realising shareholder value, and she has successfully sold two businesses as Finance Director (Silverwire SA to Hewlett-Packard in July 2006, and KWI Ltd to Global Energy Decisions Inc in 2005). Sarah has also successfully held the FD role at companies like Axis Network Technology and Espresso Broadband. She is a qualified accountant (ACMA) accredited by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, has completed the Corporate Finance Evening Programme at London Business School and holds a BA in Engineering Science from Oxford University. |
VARUN SINGH
VICE PRESIDENT OF ENGINEERING |
Varun is Sefaira’s Vice President of Engineering, and is responsible for engineering behind Sefaira products as well as client engagements. He has spent more than a decade in the energy modeling, building physics and green building retrofit space. Before Sefaira, he worked at Emcor Group where he advised Fortune 500 corporations, universities and cities on how to retrofit and optimise their real estate portfolios for minimum energy use and maximum sustainability. Prior to his work at Emcor, he led the work to develop CoilDesigner, the industry standard software for designing energy efficient heat exchangers and HVAC systems. He also initiated development of an analysis and recommendation platform for energy auditors to address the rising concerns of renovating existing buildings. He holds an M.S. from U.C.L.A. and a Ph.D. from University of Maryland - College Park, in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mathematics. He is a LEED Accredited Professional in building design and construction and is a member of the USGBC, ASHRAE, and the Association of Energy Engineers. |
ROBERT KAHR
VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, AMERICAS |
Robert (Bob) holds responsibility for Sefaira's business development initiatives across the Americas. With deep experience in the A/E/C space and with a passion and focus on customer satisfaction, Bob continues to grow Sefaira’s customer base. Bob has more than 20 years of sales management, customer development, and leadership experience with leading software firms like Softdesk and Autodesk. Most recently, Bob helped Newforma transition from a very early stage startup to becoming the number one leading Project Information Management solution for A&E design firms. He holds a BASc, Mechanical Engineering from University of Waterloo and is a registered Professional Engineer. |
RUSSELL HENLEY
VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, EMEA |
Russell Henley is Sefaira's Vice President of Business Development for Europe, Middle-East & Africa. Trained as an architect, Russell brings over 20 years of construction and design industry software experience to Sefaira. He has been the lead person in the successful launch of a number of leading architectural software firms, including: Graphisofts ArchiCAD, Autodesk's Architectural Desktop, Revit and Deltek. Russell is passionate about architecture, sustainability and rugby, and he is married with 3 children. |