Experienced industry professionals set out to accelerate the reuse of building components
The circular economy is moving quickly to the centre of the real estate and construction industry, but reusing building components still runs into practical obstacles. A new Finnish start-up, Reround Oy, has been founded to solve exactly that problem and to make reusing building components easy and profitable.
Cutting the emissions of the built environment and using materials more efficiently have become the most important sustainability goals in real estate and construction. There is no shortage of interest in reusing building components, but putting it into practice is still difficult. Identifying reusable components, inventorying them, maintaining their data, coordinating logistics and finding new users all take a great deal of manual work and cooperation between different parties.
Reround was founded to remove those obstacles.
The company is building a service that brings the information management, the partner network and the hands-on execution of reuse together into one managed whole. The aim is to help customers manage the entire reuse chain, and to make that whole easy and smooth.
As part of the service, Reround will launch during the autumn an inventory and information management platform for the reuse of building components, together with a marketplace where inventoried components find their new owners and new uses.
“The challenge in reusing building components is not so much a lack of will as the difficulty of putting it into practice. Players in the industry want to advance the circular economy, but the processes, the business models and the wider ecosystem are only now taking shape. We want to make reuse a genuinely competitive alternative to buying new building components and products,” says Simo Skogberg, CEO of Reround Oy.
Experienced founders spotted the market’s next bottleneck
Reround’s founding team consists of CEO Simo Skogberg; Lotta Kauppinen, who leads commercial growth; Janne Rytkönen, founder and former CEO of EcoReal; Juho Mäkelä, founder and former CFO of EcoReal; and technology professional Joonas Toivanen.
The members of the founding team helped build EcoReal and Green Building Partners into significant sustainability specialists in real estate and construction, before both companies became part of the Sustera group. Between them, the team has decades of experience in leading companies, in sustainability consulting for properties and construction projects, in productising services and in developing digital solutions.
The founders see the reuse of building components as one of the industry’s most significant opportunities in the coming years to cut emissions, costs and the use of natural resources.
“We see the reuse of building components becoming an ever more important part of the industry’s sustainability work and business over the next few years. We want to build the tools and the ways of working that let that change happen efficiently and profitably,” Skogberg says.
Further information
Simo Skogberg
Co-Founder & CEO
+358 40 554 3579
simo.skogberg@reround.fi
Lotta Kauppinen
Co-Founder & CGO
+358 50 554 4967
lotta.kauppinen@reround.fi