Aonghus Stevens — Asseti: treating commercial property portfolios like living, breathing organisms
Asseti — helping commercial asset owners move from reactive firefighting to proactive operations
In this episode, I chat with Aonghus Stevens, founder of Asseti, an intelligent asset operations platform that lets commercial and industrial property owners predict, plan, and operate their portfolios. Globally, non-residential real estate spans a mind-boggling 72 billion square metres, yet the world's largest asset class is still overwhelmingly run by hand with clipboards and PDFs.
Aonghus shares his unique background as a university-trained biologist, which informs his contrarian view that buildings are essentially living, breathing organisms that respond to their environment. We dive into how Asseti builds comprehensive component hierarchies and defect registers to help property owners stop firefighting tenant complaints and start making proactive capital decisions that protect their net present value.
What’s in this episode
(02:52): Aonghus joins us fresh off a big night celebrating with customers at the PropTech Awards.
(03:22): The Asseti elevator pitch: an intelligent asset operations platform to predict, plan, and operate property assets.
(04:42): Asseti focuses on non-residential portfolios—industrial, big box retail, shopping centres, and government—spanning from 10 to 10,000 assets.
(05:55): The sheer scale of the market: 72 billion square metres of non-residential real estate globally, with major US portfolios dwarfing Australian warehousing.
(07:10): Why commercial real estate remains stubbornly manual, relying on clipboard inspections and contractors incentivised to replace entire assets.
(10:54): Redefining proactive asset management: it is not about preventing oil-and-gas-style catastrophic failures, but simply doing maintenance when needed rather than 12 months late.
(12:46): Viewing buildings as living organisms: treating the asset as a stakeholder that weathers the environment under human processes.
(14:41): US warehousing averages 42 years old, putting pressure on membrane roofing and creating massive operational leakage when work orders and sign-in logs do not align.
(18:18): Introducing AssetOS: an operating system and workflow engine that systemises internal organisational IP and widens the corporate knowledge hourglass.
(19:32): From university-trained biologist to drone pioneer: founding Measure Australia in 2015 and launching Asseti in 2020 during COVID, securing Mirvac as an early customer.
(22:23): The decade-long chasm between enterprise ERPs like Yardi and what modern data-driven asset teams actually demand.
(24:15): Splitting AI into two buckets: margin-increasing AI used internally across hundreds of millions of images, and customer-facing AI that must cut the fat to deliver razor-sharp inferences.
(31:14): Scaling to a lean 50-person headcount across Australia and South Africa while maintaining deep customer partnerships and multi-year agreements.
(34:35): Asset management maturity varies wildly: a customer with $10 billion in forward spend still using paper and spreadsheets.
(36:50): Competitive landscape: Asseti does not lose to rivals, but to customer indecision and the do-nothing status quo, sitting as the underlying ledger beneath ERPs.
(40:04): Why Asseti steers clear of the "digital twin" label, viewing digital models as a midpoint rather than an isolated solution looking for a problem.
(42:33): Operating as a solo founder with a stellar team in South Africa and Australia, driven by the core value to "own the outcome".
(45:30): The biggest lesson learned: ditching polished corporate behemoth facades in favour of radical transparency, shipping code and agentic features to staff within three hours.
(47:53): Five-year outlook: the operationalisation of AI where facility managers reclaim 20 to 30 percent of their day, alongside near-live asset views at affordable price points.
(50:18): Expansion plans: heading to the US in 10 weeks to target the top 50 asset owners, building on relationships with giants like Goodman.
In their words
“You put these human processes over and someone buys and sells it, acquires, sort of divests it, operate it, et cetera, but they're all just human processes over this living organism, and the way that living organism responds is super critical to the outcome for the asset owner.” — Aonghus Stevens
“No customer of ours buys AI. And that could be different in the future, like if we train a model and people are actually buying our AI models to do their own stuff, totally different thing. But at the moment, customers are using Asseti as an asset operations platform.” — Aonghus Stevens
“We would not lose to a brand, for example. And so that's where we might come up against an engineering firm or something in doing an asset assessment, but we're not an inspection tool or anything like that. We are a long-term asset operations solution for a customer.” — Aonghus Stevens
About the guest
Aonghus Stevens is the founder of Asseti, an intelligent asset operations platform for commercial and industrial real estate. A university-trained biologist, he pioneered commercial drone services in Australia and founded Measure Australia before launching Asseti in 2020. He offers grounded, practical insights into scaling enterprise PropTech, bridging ERP gaps, and applying AI to asset management.
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