Buildings That Listen - with Matias Acosta (Cosysense)

In this episode of The Reflective Impact Entrepreneurs, uMe speaks with Matias Acosta, co-founder and CEO of Cosysense, a venture helping commercial buildings reduce energy use and emissions while creating more comfortable spaces for the people inside them. What began during the pandemic, when Matias found himself repeatedly trying to work in shared spaces that were either too hot or too cold, became a service that combines sensors, AI, and building controls to help buildings respond more intelligently to their occupants. Along the way, Matias carried an early prototype in his backpack, tested whether people would share how comfortable they felt, and secured his first trials through cold messages. An early installation involving robotic fingers pressing air-conditioning controls did not work as planned, but it taught the team an important lesson: founders can fail by moving too quickly as well as too slowly. After stepping back to strengthen the technology, Cosysense demonstrated measurable energy savings and improved comfort. The team has continued to learn through real-world installations, become more hardware-agnostic, and build the processes needed to move from individual experiments to large-scale deployment. We talk about: • How an uncomfortable experience in a shared workspace became difficult for Matias to ignore • Carrying an early prototype into cafés, offices, events and airports to observe how people responded • Understanding the different occupants, operators, managers and landlords involved in a building • Why feedback is only useful when it helps a founder understand the underlying problem • What a failed installation taught the team about speed, readiness and quality of service • Deciding which experiments could create genuine value and which ones were not worth pursuing • Moving away from building proprietary hardware and becoming more hardware agnostic • Turning down investors and an accelerator when the terms did not feel right • Aligning the venture’s revenue model with its environmental and human impact It’s a conversation about experimentation, founder judgment, useful feedback, responsible growth, aligned incentives and learning how to move quickly without compromising the quality of what you are building. If you’re interested in impact ventures, startup learning, and what it really looks like to build something that does good and does well, this one is for you. — Episode Links • Cosysense https://cosysense.space/ • Matias Acosta on LinkedIn   / matiasacosta   — The Reflective Impact Entrepreneurs podcast is brought to you by HumanityAssist — supporting founders building ventures that help humanity thrive: https://www.humanityassist.com — Hosted by Umesh (uMe) Pandya   / umeshpandya   Original podcast music by Nimz — #ImpactEntrepreneurship #FounderJourney #SocialImpact #ClimateTech #SustainableBuildings