Jay Sadiq
Six Questions for Jay Sadiq – Co-Founder and CEO of FortyGuard in the United Arab Emirates
Jay comes from a family of scholars and is a bootstrapped serial entrepreneur from age 17 when he started hawking classified ads, which led to a startup in digital advertising. That led to his first exit, which then led to seven years in private equity and two more startups. Then, he was ready to dive into deep tech and started what would become FortyGuard in 2020, guiding it through some major and minor pivots, resulting in numerous recognitions such as the UAE Future 100 list, Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival Award, Etisalat SME Award, Make-it-in-Emirates, EGA Ramp-Up Award and major media coverage in Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur Magazine, Impakter.com.
1. What problem is FortyGuard solving and how?
One of the least micro-analyzed environmental markers is temperature. Most apps and data sets are based on official readings at an airport or very generalized historical data. But we know from our own lives, and science is validating, that experienced temperature at 2m to 5m above ground level can vary by as much as 10°C or more, depending on adjacent landscaping, proximity to shores and prevailing winds and many other factors. And globally “urban heat” takes more lives than other, more vivid, natural disasters such as fire and storm. Key point: global warming of 1.5°C is “global,” but studies show urban warming is more than three times greater than the global average.
However, no one is performing detailed modeling in this area. So, FortyGuard is very much of this AI moment, providing to civic and property management that which has become possible for medicine, agriculture and logistics – dynamic predictive precision modeling that allows better tailored and impactful responses to the silent killer of our time: urban heat.
2. What is your background that led you to co-founding FortyGuard?
Well, I have always liked challenging problem-solving, which perhaps comes from my father, who is a teacher with multiple PhDs. I just love to dig for answers. But I’ve also been very extroverted and entrepreneurial from when I started hustling classifieds for the local newspaper and coding websites, since I was 17, some of which are still in operation today! Perhaps, also from my father who seemed to never sleep between 2 jobs and 2 family businesses.
I also grew up on the Arabian Peninsula which, you may know, is REALLY HOT ALL THE TIME. I grew up with heat-triggered asthma, so I thought a lot about what to DO about temperature. FortyGuard actually started as a materials science company looking at heat mitigating pavement coatings. But customers asked where to apply it, and my over-eager response – “Everywhere!” – was simply not actionable. This was a rough form of the classic triage of addressable, serviceable and obtainable markets. To figure out the obtainable “low hanging fruit” required a granularity of temperature discrimination that no one possessed. If I look up “temperature in Abu Dhabi,” I get one number, 33°C, and just walking around you know that’s inaccurate. That provided the insight pivot – this is really a data problem. Understanding the problem is half the solution, and for many more topics than just road pavement. So, we had to build a measurement and modeling tool.
3. What is unique about your technology and what is its validation status?
Previously, temperature information was statically collected in a few spots. Rough analytical variance analysis was done, which, very oversimplified, is where animation, auto correct and wellness were a few years ago re: graphics, text and metabolism. Today we see the latest breakthroughs in AI leading to large topic models: language, graphics, genetics, chemistry. FortyGuard is building large-TEMPERATURE-models which, like those other AI, can train on massive, complex, subtle and fine-grained data sets to enable dynamic predictive precision modeling. We are calling this a Temperature Operating System or Temperature OS. Our core is not a “dashboard.” It is an AI “engine” that can drive a number of different models, apps and dashboards.
A great thing about our development and validation is this is largely NOT technology push from us but driven and guided by paying customers. Our approach has received great validation, and the specific products are kind of auto-validated by being bespoke solutions but developed with a wider scope in our minds.
4. What are your Go-To-Market ideas and traction received so far?
As I noted above, our Go-To-Market has been customer-driven. Our initial sales and financing have come from landscape architects, construction engineers, environmental assessment professionals, city managers and a new breed of strategic leaders, usually termed “Chief Heat Officers.” By providing incredibly granular heatmaps, detailed analytics to understand urban heat and tailored actionable recommendations for mitigating it, we empower all these customers to build heat resilience in their cities in the most efficient way. One key point: a city manager or real estate developer cannot solve “global warming,” but they can solve 100% of city or neighborhood warming with decisions whose benefits can be measured and hence monetized: greater leasing desirability, better opex, lower capex, more attractive retail experience and so on.
We are not going to market with specific end-deployment products that YOU see. We are no longer in the materials business or any physical products. We are aiming to be, as NVIDIA likes to say about its chips, a product that is “everywhere and nowhere,” or like BASF used to say, “we don’t make what you deploy, we make what you deploy better.” So, our aim is for Temperature OS to be a tool for those who make installations or even a tool embedded within other tools that folks use. And the traction has allowed us to be mostly bootstrapped, self-funded, so far, with a range of the professionals cited above coming to us, asking for and helping us design solutions for them.
5. What is next?
Well, we’re now finishing up a Seed round of funding that has attracted some of the world’s best strategic institutional, family office and angel investors. Our business plan is to have three products in our catalog by the end of the year. First, we now have a dashboard where professionals, such as urban planners, engineering consultants, landscape architects, can subscribe. There are many of those personas on our website. They can map, predict, monitor history, run analytics and generate insights by geolocation. Our Temperature OS can do this very quickly. We have launched the first version, but we’re working really hard, not only with our clients, but also with our scientists, advisors and partners, to make sure we deliver a better version almost every week.
Our second product is our Temperature API. If I may borrow another commercial AI term, we would like to become the “temperature co-pilot” in a lot of broader applications, e.g., route selection for walk- or bike-optimized not for length or time but for coolness; housing rental or purchase or week-ending based on heat load and actual impact (not inference) of natural shade or water features; insurance risk being adjusted, whether you’re in a frying pan or a landscaped breezeway; health apps based not just on steps but on heat and sweat. Today, millions of people do so much app-management based on location, age, equipment, speed, demographics. We believe “temperature” is the exciting missing piece variable that can enable much better living for everyone.
And our third product is a Digital Twin for urban heat, helping engineers, city managers or even a citizen to run simulations and understand, like, “okay if I put 10 trees at a location that is suggested by the AI, I want to see a visualization of where those trees are planted and does this actually bring the temperature down?” Run different predictions, like, “what if I increase the number of trees to 20?”
6. Tell us about your experience with XTC.
It’s been really great since we joined. We’ve been obviously tapping and accessing the XTC network, which is really extensive. I think what we enjoy the most is our access to other colleagues in the same sector, other startups who are also doing a lot of fantastic stuff. And this not only intrigues us or pushes us to do more, but also allows us to understand the ecosystem, allows us to understand how we can partner with others. I love the fact that this is more of an enablement ecosystem. We’ve really been taken care of in terms of exposure to the relevant audiences for us. We appreciate the mentorship and advice that we are getting at XTC and within your extended network. So, I think this is really great, a very good ecosystem to be part of.
