Niklas Lindgren, Endra CEO on Rebuilding MEP Engineering with AI

**Grace Gong** (0:04)
Welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Niklas Lindgren** (0:05)
Thank you, Grace. Excited to be here.

**Grace Gong** (0:08)
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I want to start with your-
maybe we can briefly talk about your journey before starting your own company. Obviously, this is the second time you actually started a company. What were some lessons that you've learned in your first company?

**Niklas Lindgren** (1:00)
My lessons that I learned from my first company. Well, so yeah, the first company I started was a bootstrap one. Started at the Welland Law School. I think I was 18 or 19 years old, something.
Lessons learned has been to run fast as hell, do take a lot of risk, and do good work. Obviously, this space that I'm in now with Endra is adjacent to the company I started before, which was the Dasein Bill Contractor for security systems. I've been part of building the sort of, been building and supplying security systems to buildings throughout my career, but one lesson would definitely be sort of, one, don't run out of money and two, run very, very fast.

**Grace Gong** (1:51)
For sure.
I think the lessons is so new to me, so I love it. I actually, when I was listening to our Notebook OM about Endra, I heard that the Epidemic Sound founder is your Endra Vester. He was actually an OT guys on our pod as well.

**Niklas Lindgren** (2:10)
Really? Yeah.
Yeah. Oscar and Tom and Edward are our angel investors in Endra.

**Grace Gong** (2:18)
Maybe we could start with, since I feel like you guys are building in the MEP platform, maybe for the audience who may not be super familiar with anything in engineering, what does that entail and then maybe we could start from there.

**Niklas Lindgren** (2:36)
Yeah, sure. Well, it's the most sexy industry in the world. It's the systems where you never see them, but they're being installed in each and every building that you see across the globe. So everything from the electrical systems beginning and installed inside buildings to the mechanical or HVAC systems and the plumbing systems that gets installed inside the buildings. So MAP is sort of what makes buildings work and makes it possible to be inside them and live inside them. And it's also, as I said, that you don't necessarily see once you go into a building. Those are not sort of the systems that gets all the prices. That's usually for the architects of the building.
But those are the systems that makes buildings work. And also more mission critical buildings such as data centers, hospitals, are basically large boxes of MEP systems. So what gets installed in those are MEP systems. If you think about it, what is a data center at its core? It's basically cooling a lot of power and a lot of data and fiber cables going around. So it's those type of systems that a huge workforce across the globe are working to design 3D models for, as well as making calculations or to make sure that they work, run simulations on to understand that these actually are able to install in this way. So what we are doing is that we're building MEP purpose-built platform to make sure that these processes goes much faster and that you can apply modern technology into a sort of industry that works and operates on a platform that was built in 97, acquired by Autodesk in 2002
And not a lot has happened since. So we're taking sort of building a new infrastructure for these type of engineering organizations and they're huge organizations across the globe only working with doing this.

**Grace Gong** (4:48)
For sure.

**Niklas Lindgren** (4:48)
I love what you're doing.

**Grace Gong** (4:49)
I love it. Whenever you mentioned Data Center, I just got the hype because of nowadays, half of the physical AI company are build, have some sort of association with Data Center. So when you were thinking about, I guess from the technology perspective, what would you think is the most or I guess from the technology perspective, what would you think is the advancement from the last generation?