Commercial building automation has two markets right now, and a giant chasm between them.
On one end, you have the major BAS vendors — Siemens, Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Schneider — who serve buildings above roughly 50,000 square feet. Installations are six-figure capital projects, integration is months, and the software is enterprise in every sense of the word.
On the other end, you have smart-home gear — Ecobee, Nest, Honeywell Home — selling thermostats and a handful of accessories to small operators who run their building on one HVAC zone and an alarm panel.
In between is the Missing Middle: roughly 5,000 to 50,000 square feet. Small medical clinics, dental practices, microbreweries, gyms, dance studios, coffee roasters, regional retail, day cares, light-industrial workshops, faith-based facilities. These buildings are too complex for a thermostat and too small to justify a Siemens deployment.
What "too complex for a thermostat" actually means
A 12,000 sq ft medical clinic might have:
- 4–8 separate HVAC zones with different schedules
- Access control with after-hours rules for cleaning staff and inspections
- Lighting that needs occupancy-aware controls in patient rooms but always-on in corridors
- Refrigerated medication storage that needs temperature alerting and audit logs
- Energy demand that puts the operator in a small commercial demand-response tariff
None of that fits in a smart thermostat. All of it is overkill for a tier-1 BAS. What the operator actually needs is something in between: real engineering, but sized and priced for the building.
Why nobody's built for this market
Three reasons, mostly structural:
- Sales motion mismatch. Enterprise BAS vendors have $200K+ deal sizes; they can't economically chase a $30K commercial install.
- Install fragmentation. Smart-home installers don't do BACnet or RTU integration; commercial integrators don't do Z-Wave or consumer-grade sensors.
- Software architecture mismatch. Most "smart commercial" software pretends a building is just a bigger house — and it isn't.
How Cynact approaches it
Cynact's unified device graph covers both consumer protocols (Z-Wave, Zigbee, Matter) and industrial protocols (BACnet, Modbus, MQTT) in the same runtime. A site can mix a commercial-grade RTU with consumer-grade presence sensors and have them participate in the same automation rules.
The install side is handled by Wiztec LLC — a licensed California low-voltage contractor that can pull both a residential permit and a commercial low-voltage permit. Same crew, both worlds.
The pricing model targets the deal size that actually fits Missing Middle buildings: per-site licensing in the low thousands of dollars per year, hardware separately at capital cost. No per-data-point fees, no per-integration fees, no implementation services line item.
Why this market matters now
Utility demand-response programs are increasingly looking for commercial aggregation targets. Residential is hard (small per-site kW), and large commercial is saturated. The Missing Middle is the next frontier — and it's structurally underserved on the controls side, which is exactly the gap a behind-the-meter DER endpoint platform needs to fill.
If you operate a building in this range, or you're a utility program looking to aggregate commercial demand response, get in touch — info@routbox.com.