Vladimir Shcherbukhin: B2B2C SAAS Company That Provides Homeowners an Affordable Enhanced Climate Control System

We are Ceotech, a B2B2C SaaS company that provides homeowners an affordable Enhanced Climate Control System – VIRMA, finally solving the problem of uneven temperatures in different rooms of a home, a problem shared by millions of homeowners in North America.

Tell us about yourself?

I’m a father of three kids and an experienced software and system engineer with strong technical and business background. Led three small business startups in various fields.

I worked in the field of satellite navigation for more than 15 years, and my focus was to help my clients optimize their business processes, and save them time and money.

Optimization has become a part of my life and I began to pay more attention to the processes around me, including household ones. This prompted me to the current direction of work – to solve everyday household needs, optimize expenses, and make homeowners’ lives more convenient, comfortable, and affordable.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Don’t listen to others about what and how to do things, follow your personal feelings. No one knows better than you about your business and how it should develop.

What problem does your business solve?

The problem of uneven temperature in different rooms of a home is shared by millions of homeowners in North America.

A conventional thermostat measures the temperature in the room where it is installed and uses that one reading to control the airflow throughout the whole house.

This system is heavily flawed because it causes unbalanced heat and cooling distribution throughout the home. Inevitably some rooms end up being too hot or too cold.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

In winter 2016, I moved into a typical Canadian house where the whole process of balancing comfortable temperatures in the home became a real challenge for me.

One room was too hot, and another too cold.

I had to constantly run around the home opening and closing vents and some of the windows, playing with the settings on a single thermostat of the HVAC system. These ad-hoc solutions amounted to a huge waste of power and were incredibly inconvenient.

I did some further research and realized that this was a very common problem affecting millions of homeowners in North America. After 2 years of unsuccessfully dealing with this real problem in my house, I made a decision to bring a practical solution to the market.

That was the moment when the original Ceotech team was formed.

What is your magic sauce?

Our system effectively and efficiently manages the HVAC system, monitors multiple climate characteristics in each individual room, and controls airflow by opening and closing motorized vents throughout the house.

So, you can simply set the desired temperature in the room and let the system take care of the rest.

There are a couple of companies on the market with motorized vents that promise even temperatures in the home, but their solutions are not perfect.

Most customers report two major problems: the connections between the components are unreliable, and batteries need to be changed each month. The last issue especially affects people with physical limitations. Overall, these solutions are costly and don’t really solve the problem like we can.

Our most competitive advantage – is a fully wired complete system. It does not require batteries or any additional integrations like smart thermostats and other similar products, and it can operate without Internet or WIFI.

This means it is 100% stable, more convenient, and accessible, and it is also affordable to install.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

In 5 years we are expecting to make our system the new industry standard for most new homes in North America.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

As a startup, this is the first time we have encountered investments. All past projects of our founders were launched at our own expense and we understand well how to develop this kind of business.

This time we decided to attract investments, but it turned out that it is not so easy for a hardware startup, despite the fact that we have a post-monetization stage.

We believe in our project and we have a very professional team that has vast experience in hardware and software development, and manufacturing processes.

Despite all the difficulties, we continue to invest our own funds, and also continue to search for investments in order to speed up the current MVP validation stage.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

Our go-to-market strategy is multiple distribution channels, advertising, and scale through government programs, B2B partnerships, trade shows, professional expos, and more.

We are planning to install our product on new dwellings, retrofitted during renovation and existing houses. We want custom-build construction companies, prefabricated construction companies, HVAC companies, and builder suppliers companies to start collaborating with us.

We are always open for Radio, Television, and Bloggers.

Don’t hesitate to contact us here: https://ceotech.ca/contact