ABOUT DIREK

Built for the distance between evidence and action.

Founded at the University of Surrey in 2017, DIREK combines patented research with building operations expertise. We help organisations turn what their estates reveal into decisions that retain their value across teams, buildings and time.

Recognition

WHO BUILDS IT

Small team. Serious problems.

Scientists, engineers and operators. Several of us have run buildings, and it shows in what we build.

Research that became infrastructure

Every programme listed was competitively won. Named project partner on two EPSRC research programmes, in urban decarbonisation and AI for urban health.

Meet Our Founder

The problem was never seeing the building. It was acting on what we saw.

I spent fifteen years developing sensing and positioning systems to understand how people use buildings. I believed better visibility would lead to better outcomes.
I was wrong.
The sensing worked. What failed was the journey from evidence to action. A useful finding moved between systems, departments and budgets until its value expired. The building had revealed the problem, but the organisation was not structured to decide across it.
We built D-XPERT to make better decisions repeatable across an estate, without repeating the cost and complexity at every property.

15+ Years

In AI, sensing and IoT for built environments

PhD, Electronic Engineering

Environmental Systems & Human Comfort

Awards

Surrey Businessperson of the Year, highly commended, 2024 · Surrey 40 under 40, 2023

Why direk exist

A finding has no value if it expires before anyone acts.

PropTech made buildings observable. DIREK makes organisations capable of acting on what buildings reveal, turning fragmented evidence into decisions that travel across teams and scale across an estate.