Our Story
We built Heatvelo because peak demand waste is a solved problem — buildings just lack the forecasting layer.
Most commercial buildings already generate the occupancy logs, BMS historian data, and weather forecasts that would be enough to eliminate the majority of their peak demand waste. The data is there. What's missing is the thermal model that combines those inputs into a forward demand curve — and turns that curve into a pre-cooling staging schedule a facilities manager can read and act on the morning before it runs.
Tobias Schulz
Founder & CEO
From building audits to a forecasting product
Tobias spent five years in building energy management before starting Heatvelo in 2025. During that time he conducted energy audits on over 60 commercial properties across the Upper Midwest — office portfolios, retail chains, university buildings, and mixed-use developments in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metro and across Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The pattern repeated at nearly every site. Utility bills dominated by demand charges. Facilities teams running fixed setback schedules designed for average occupancy. BMS historians full of useful data that no one was combining with weather forecasts or occupancy trends. The data to reduce peak demand charges by 15–25% was already being collected. No one was modeling it forward.
Minneapolis is a particularly acute context for this problem. Cold-climate commercial buildings face outdoor temperature swings of 40°F or more in a single day during shoulder seasons — March, April, October. These are the periods when demand charges spike hardest, because HVAC systems are cycling between heating and cooling modes within the same day, and the pre-cooling window before morning occupancy is compressed by a cold overnight that the BMS schedule never accounted for.
Heatvelo exists to close that gap — not as an automated black box, but as a forecasting layer that gives your facilities team a readable, per-window staging schedule 72 hours ahead. The schedule is overridable. The logic behind each window is visible. If the forecast is wrong, your operations team sees it and can act.
The Heatvelo Team
Three practitioners: a building energy manager turned product builder, an MS-trained load forecasting scientist, and a field-hardened BMS integration engineer. Not generalists — each person has specific depth in the domain they own.
Tobias Schulz
Founder & CEO
Tobias spent five years conducting energy audits on commercial properties across the Upper Midwest before starting Heatvelo in 2025. He saw the same demand charge pattern at property after property — useful data sitting in BMS historians, never modeled forward into an actionable schedule. Heatvelo is the product he needed to exist when he was doing those audits.
Maren Holm
Energy Data Scientist
Maren owns the envelope modeling and occupancy prediction layers of the Heatvelo forecasting engine. She holds an MS in Building Science and spent three years building short-term load forecasting models for residential and small commercial accounts at a regional Midwest utility. She joined Heatvelo to work on a harder problem: building-specific thermal dynamics, not portfolio averages.
Derek Vasquez
BMS Integration Engineer
Derek runs all BACnet/IP and Modbus TCP integration work for pilot customers — from network endpoint discovery through point mapping and historian configuration. He has 8 years of field commissioning experience across commercial BAS deployments in the Upper Midwest, including multi-tenant office towers, institutional buildings, and retail portfolios. When something doesn't connect, Derek is the one on-site.
How We Work
Building-Specific Physics
Every Heatvelo forecast is calibrated to your building's actual thermal mass, window-to-wall ratio, and envelope construction — not a generic load profile pulled from a building type database. We run a 30-day backtesting period on your historical BMS data before the live forecast begins, so the model fits your building, not a statistical average.
Interpretable Output
The staging schedule Heatvelo delivers is a structured document your facilities team can read, question, and override. Every window has a start time, end time, setpoint offset, and confidence score. We do not believe a building operations team should execute an HVAC schedule they cannot understand — and we don't ask them to.
First-Cycle Accountability
Every pilot is structured to produce a measurable demand charge reduction within the first billing cycle. We define the measurement methodology with the building operator before the pilot starts and share the results openly — including the cases where the reduction was smaller than projected and why. If the number doesn't move, we explain what we measured.
Want to talk about your building's energy profile?
Tobias is available for direct conversations with facilities managers and energy engineers. If you bring your utility bills and a rough sense of your BMS setup, he can tell you within 20 minutes whether the demand charge pattern in your building is one Heatvelo can address — and what the expected reduction range would look like.