Building an industry standard: Founder lessons from WiredScore

We first met WiredScore’s founder, Arie Barendrecht, and William Newton in 2017, when property technology was still surprisingly nascent, even in cities like New York and London. The commercial real estate world tends to be insular, slow-moving, highly fragmented, and largely resistant to technological change. Sales cycles were long and messy, and landlords were notoriously reluctant to pay for anything labeled a "digital feature." These are the conditions that greet most founders trying to bring new software and technology into traditional industry verticals.

But WiredScore faced a more fundamental challenge than most. The team wasn't just selling into an old industry. They were trying to convince the world's most traditional landlords to care about something they couldn't see: digital connectivity.

Their solution was a certification system that evaluated commercial office buildings on internet connectivity, physical infrastructure, and future readiness. Landlords and brokers could then use that certification to market buildings to prospective tenants. When we first backed the team in 2017, we were confident in their ability to move the needle on commercial real estate with a genuinely novel approach.

"Our edge stemmed from knowing the language of the industry," said William. That meant designing a service that created clear value for every party in the market: property owners, landlords, and the tenants searching for spaces that could keep pace with an increasingly connected world. "With the language of certifications, WiredScore didn't just provide a service. We created a global standard that could be understood and implemented with ease across the real estate sector."

Nine years after Bessemer's first investment, WiredScore operates across 42 countries with over 1,000 clients. That journey culminated in an acquisition by Meter, the internet networking-as-a-service leader.

Building and scaling a company in property technology and commercial real estate, industries notorious for resisting change, is an experience full of hard-won lessons. To mark this milestone, we sat down with William, who reflected on four principles for founders looking to find their edge in industries that don't make it easy.

1. Align value and incentives to your toughest and most ideal customer.

"Too many proptech companies fail because they focus on the features of their technology rather than the bottom-line outcomes of their customers," shared William. "We realized early on that to make landlords care about digital connectivity, we had to link it to the thing they already cared about: leasing outcomes."

By creating a rating system, WiredScore turned a utility into a financial asset, translating fibre cabling into occupancy rates. This was a connection that external constituents, including credit agency Moody’s, went on to validate.

For anyone building in a traditional industry, success depends on this ability to act as a translator: aligning your innovation with your customer's existing incentives.

2. Deliver a public good for your industry, and your business will earn trust and influence in return.

"Coming from a background as a civil servant, I was driven by the idea of impact," said William. "I was thrilled to find that a nimble, private-sector organization could act as a de facto regulator. By setting a high bar for connectivity, we created a tangible public good, encouraging the built world to improve its infrastructure and ultimately benefiting millions of office workers."

This mission-driven approach became one of WiredScore's most durable competitive advantages. In an industry where trust is hard to earn and slow to build, having a clear public purpose gave the brand a stature and credibility that no marketing campaign could manufacture. It’s a model that founders in any sector can draw from: when your business raises the bar for an entire industry, the industry tends to reward you back for it.

3. Global expansion requires strategic hedging.

"Our international expansion wasn't growth for growth's sake—it gave us two things we genuinely needed. Certifications rely on legitimacy and trust, and a global presence transformed us from a startup into an institution,” William recalled.

That credibility compounded over time. Working with leading landlords in New York, London, Paris, and Singapore gave prospective clients in newer markets like Shanghai the confidence to adopt the standard—knowing that the world's most sophisticated real estate players already had.

The second benefit was financial resilience. "If the real estate market softened in one region, we were often accelerating in another," William explained. "When we were a team of just 13 people, we were already operating across four countries. By hiring strong local leaders across four continents and giving them the autonomy to succeed, we ensured that WiredScore was geographically hedged."

4. Plan to weather industry storms to future-proof your business.

The past three years have been particularly punishing for commercial real estate. High interest rates and the shift to hybrid working created a market contraction that many proptech companies couldn’t survive. WiredScore weathered it, and William points to two decisions that made this possible.

The first was learning to sell at scale. WiredScore expanded beyond its existing building-level relationships and developed a top-down approach to winning large portfolio clients, adding a new growth motion without abandoning what had worked before.

The second was what William calls “operationalized resilience,” where he says, “We adjusted our spending profile early, ensuring we were profitable exactly when the market demanded it. This discipline was a competitive advantage. By shifting our financial strategy early enough, we maintained the stability necessary to keep moving forward while others in the space struggled.”

For founders in cyclical or macro-sensitive industries, the lesson is clear: resilience isn’t something you find in a downturn. It’s something you build before one arrives.

Strong teams reach strong milestones

WiredScore cultivated a robust team culture, even across time zones, by hiring for curiosity and ambition over experience. This approach produced long employee tenures that mirrored the company's long-lasting relationships with its clients.

“I spent more time than anything else developing our people, and I am proud that almost all of our senior leaders grew up within the company,” shared William. “Watching them expand WiredScore into new verticals and geographies has been one of the great privileges of this journey.”

That foundation made the next chapter possible. "The acquisition by Meter feels like the natural conclusion to our mission, but also the start of something bigger," William continued. "WiredScore spent a decade defining the standards for how buildings should be connected. Meter has built the infrastructure to make that connectivity a reality. Together, we are not just rating the built world anymore. We are powering it."

For founders navigating deeply entrenched industries, the hardest work is rarely building the solution. It’s more often about convincing an entire industry that it needs one. WiredScore did both, and its legacy can be felt in cities around the world and in the standards that have quietly raised the bar for the built world.