Built by People Who’ve Been Inside Hundreds of Buildings

Real estate has spent two decades adding smart systems to buildings: BMS, access control, energy meters, occupancy sensors. We’ve installed our share of them.

But most of those buildings still work like silent robots: sensors blink, meters tick, alarms beep, yet most of it never reaches the day-to-day workflows. Data lives in dozens of boxes, operations stay manual, and the efficiency gains stay smaller than they should be.

After 17+ years in building automation, we kept arriving at the same conclusion: the building, its systems and the workflow that runs them have to work as one. That’s why we built Fentrica.

How Fentrica Came to Be

As told by the founder, Reijo Sirila

Back in 2006, I spent months wiring, soldering, and coding what became Estonia's first truly "smart" home. A feat that sounded like science fiction at the time.

And that project sparked a thought:

"If one home can manage itself, why can't an entire office block, logistics centre or a port do the same?"

Together with Jüri Reitsakas (Fentrica co-founder), my long-time collaborator and founder of the Baltics' largest IT-infra firm (Võrguvara, now Oixio), we built a dedicated building-automation unit inside Võrguvara.

Some of our more known clients were: Port of Tallinn, Estonian Railways, SEB Bank, North Estonia Medical Centre.

While heading the building-automation division at Võrguvara, I noticed an important flaw in the field: even the "smartest" buildings behaved like robots without a brain — collecting data, blinking lights, switching systems on and off, but never actually thinking.

A BMS handled HVAC. Another tool managed work orders. Meters exported Excel. Every "smart" device was still a silo, and staff glued the gaps together by hand.

So I asked myself:

"What if a building could run, optimise and learn on its own?"
"What if it could plug straight into the business & management processes instead of sitting idle as infrastructure?"

The answer became Fentrica: a cloud layer that links every system, analyses every datapoint and triggers the work & automations no single point tool can. All from one place.

Reijo Sirila, Co-founder