Commercial real estate has a data problem. Not a shortage of data. Quite the opposite. Building owners and operators are surrounded by reports, assessments, compliance documents, and software systems. What they have historically lacked is a way to turn all of that information into a clear answer to one question: what should I actually do, and when?
That is the problem Sisu Insights was built to solve.
Founded in late 2025 by Don Kasper and co-founder Pirjo Tuomi, Sisu operates across North America and Europe, working with commercial real estate owners, operators, and asset managers who need to make high-stakes capital decisions in an environment where energy costs, insurance premiums, interest rates, tariffs, and regulatory requirements are shifting faster than traditional planning cycles can absorb.
“Commercial real estate has a translation problem,” says Kasper, who brings over two decades of industry experience to the company. “The operators know what is wrong with the building. The asset managers decide what gets funded. Between them sits a spreadsheet, a budget memo, and a lot of lost time. Sisu is the shared surface that brings them together and helps make those decisions.”
A Different Kind of PropTech
The property technology sector has accumulated a great deal of noise in recent years. Platforms have come and gone, AI claims have multiplied, and the industry has become increasingly skeptical of vendor promises.
Sisu positions itself differently, starting from the premise that the value of technology in commercial real estate is not in generating more data, but in generating better decisions.
“A lot of PropTech vendors have largely failed the industry,” Kasper says. “There has been a lot of technical debt that accumulated. If you already have a platform, you cannot just bolt AI on. We started AI-first from day one, and there is a meaningful difference in what that enables.”
That foundation centers on what Sisu calls its agentic AI architecture, a model where the platform is continuously active, not just responsive to user inputs. The company uses a simple test to explain the concept: if a customer walked away for 30 days, did something happen without them being present? At Sisu, the answer is yes. The platform monitors live signals, utility market data, insurance trends, local regulatory changes, and climate risk indicators, and continuously updates its analysis in the background.
“We do not update a customer’s capital plan without their consent,” Kasper clarifies. “But we make sure the data is always current. When they come back, the picture reflects reality as it stands today, not as it stood when they last logged in.”
This matters in a market where conditions have become genuinely volatile. US commercial real estate is currently facing utility cost increases of around 22% year over year and insurance premium hikes of approximately 40% at renewal, figures that make the steady growth assumptions baked into most traditional financial models dangerously outdated.
Built for Both Sides of the Conversation
One of the more distinctive aspects of Sisu’s design is that it was built to serve two audiences at the same time: building operators who understand day-to-day conditions on the ground, and asset managers who control capital allocation and are accountable for financial outcomes.
Most software in this space serves one or the other. Sisu’s argument is that the real inefficiency lies in the gap between them, in the communication breakdown that causes sound recommendations to stall, and urgent maintenance to be deferred until it becomes a crisis.
“The person operating the building knows the chiller has to be replaced in two years,” Kasper explains. “They might have an engineering or decarbonisation report sitting on their desk that is informative. But when they go to present that to the asset manager, there is not enough justification there. It gets deferred. And deferral is always more expensive in the long run.”
The platform combines external market data, including climate risk profiles, local utility trends, regulatory mandates, tax incentives, and insurance factors, with internal building data such as utility bills, insurance documents, and system information. The output is what the company calls IRR-ranked capital decisions: a prioritised, financially modelled action plan updated to reflect current conditions.
In one documented case, a 327,000 square foot commercial building in the Mid-Atlantic US was facing a 40% comparative insurance cost increase, energy consumption running 41% below market efficiency benchmarks, and $1.1 million in compliance exposure. Sisu’s analysis produced a ranked capital plan prioritising controls system upgrades, mechanical system upgrades, building envelope insulation, and LED lighting controls. The result was 11.5 percentage points of IRR improvement, elimination of the compliance liability, and a projected $3.6 million NPV swing with approximately $335,000 in annual savings by 2029.
“The big thing that happened was that they actually acted,” Kasper notes. “Before, they were paralysed. The default was to defer maintenance. We gave them the justification to move.”
Operating Across Two Continents
While Sisu was founded in the US, the platform is gaining traction internationally, with significant pilot activity across Europe. The European market faces many of the same pressures as the US, and in some respects, more acute versions of them. Energy costs in many European markets are significantly higher, geopolitical disruption has added volatility to energy sourcing, and regulatory requirements around building performance are generally more advanced.
“The modelling we do is custom to the jurisdiction,” Kasper says. “If you own buildings in different countries or different cities, the inputs are different. Regulatory exposure, utility cost trajectories, insurance markets. We can show you where your real exposure is, and where it is not.”
The company’s current focus covers commercial real estate broadly, meaning anything beyond single-family residential, including office, multifamily, hospitality, healthcare, retail, and mixed-use assets. Longer term, Kasper sees potential in other capital-intensive industries facing similar challenges around complex decisions and financial uncertainty.
The Next Two Years
For Kasper, the measure of success is not a head count or a valuation. It is a change in how an industry makes decisions.
“Right now, Sisu fits in as a decision layer, and that is what customers are not getting elsewhere,” he says. “In two years, I want us to have kept building on that data layer, unlocking innovation, taking in more data sources, and addressing more of the decisions that have to be made within a commercial real estate company.”
The timing is right. Approximately $1 trillion in commercial real estate debt is coming due in 2026, insurance and energy costs are spiking at the same time, and an industry is finally being forced to make decisions it has been putting off for years.
“The ground is moving underneath everyone’s feet,” Kasper says. “The smartest thing a building owner can do right now is make sure they have the most up-to-date information available to respond to whatever comes next.”
Sisu Insights is a commercial real estate decision platform providing live-signal capital planning and financial scenario modelling for building owners, operators, and asset managers across the US and Europe. CEO & Co-founder Don Kasper has over 20 years of experience in commercial real estate technology.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
