Vertigris

Mark Chung, a principal engineer with experience at AMD, NetLogic, and P-P-Semi, founded Vertigris at the end of 2011 with two co-founders—both also engineers. One co-founder, John, had worked with Mark at their previous company which was sold to Broadcom. The third co-founder, Thomas, had started his own company before joining shortly after Vertigris launched. The founding team identified a clear market need: commercial buildings were wasting enormous amounts of money on electricity because they lacked real-time visibility into their energy consumption patterns and equipment performance.

Vertigris built a hybrid hardware-software solution. The hardware consists of small magnetic sensor clamps that clip onto individual circuits in electrical panels, daisy-chained together and connected to a gateway device (described as "like an iPhone") that listens to electrical signals across all connected equipment. For a typical two-bedroom installation, Mark estimated costs at roughly $1,000: about 20 circuits at $50 per sensor, plus a $400 gateway device. The software side provides analytics dashboards, predictive models, and automated recommendations that show facility managers exactly where they're losing money and when equipment might fail.

Instead of pursuing paid marketing or direct sales at scale, Vertigris took an unusual path. One of their venture partners was Verizon, and rather than just receiving capital, Verizon's regional sales teams discovered the product organically. When Verizon salespeople—a team of about 900 focused on Fortune 500 and Fortune 2000 customers—realized their clients needed energy management solutions, they began recommending Vertigris. This partnership became their primary growth engine, with Verizon's entire sales organization effectively selling on their behalf.

Vertigris deliberately avoided paid marketing. Over three months, they spent only about $10,000 on direct advertising tests—essentially zero in their view. Instead, they focused 90% of their 30-person team on engineering. Their unit economics made sense: they charged $50-80 per month per gateway for data plans (on top of one-time hardware costs), with most customers running 20-30 gateways. This created a sticky, low-churn SaaS model because removing the hardware made removing the software pointless. By Mark's own account, they had essentially zero churn—no paying customer had ever churned. The minimum economic justification was customers spending at least $10,000 per month on electricity; below that, the ROI didn't pencil out quickly enough.

Hardware remained the larger revenue stream initially, but the SaaS side was healthy. With 300 customers, about 80% paying, averaging $1,000/month in subscription revenue per customer, they reached approximately $260,000 in MRR. Their largest customer was J-Bull, a global manufacturing conglomerate, which publicly stated that Vertigris saved about 50% of their operational costs.

In 2016, Vertigris generated approximately $1.2M in total revenue. By the time of this interview in 2017, they were on track to 4x that figure to roughly $5 million—a bold goal that reflected confidence in their Verizon channel. They had raised $16 million in venture capital and were structured as a loss-leader on hardware (zero margin) to drive recurring SaaS revenue with very high retention. Verizon maintained a strategic partnership, providing both capital and customer referrals. Mark's vision extended beyond commercial buildings: he wanted to eventually bring the product to consumers through utility partnerships at under $10/month, unlocking home automation use cases like AC optimization, EV charging, and appliance automation. With deep technical roots and a differentiated distribution channel, Vertigris exemplified a hardware-enabled SaaS play designed for enterprise durability.