Arjun Gupta, founder and CEO of Smart Joules, sits down with Rohit Yadav on TheOnePoint podcast to unpack why buildings, factories and homes waste roughly 20 to 30 percent of the energy they consume, and what it actually takes to fix that in India: performance contracts, cooling as a service, ten years of real chiller data, AI-run building management, and the unglamorous work of getting a large organisation to say yes.Smart Joules exists to put efficiency first in the built environment. It took a year and a half to sign the first customer, a hospital within walking distance of Arjun's home, and the first cheque came in at three to four times what the team had modelled. The company stayed bootstrapped and profitable for roughly six years, funding its first projects with debt before it ever raised equity, then tripled in size in about a year after signing a single ten-year contract covering 20 Apollo hospitals. Today it runs three businesses: retrofits, cooling as a service, and a building management system built on top of the closed-loop control it had already solved for its own sites. More than 50 hospitals are customers, greenfield is now over half the business, and the company is expanding into hotels, food and beverage, pharma, manufacturing and commercial buildings.Whether you are a founder, an operator, an investor, or simply curious about how AI lands on real physical infrastructure, this episode will change how you think about the demand side of the energy transition.🔑 Key insights you will walk away with:➡️ Why you cannot sell energy efficiency directly in a growth market, and why selling cooling works instead➡️ How a business stayed profitable and bootstrapped for six years by funding projects with debt before equity➡️ What actually changes when you move from one owner-operator building to a large corporate with its own engineering team➡️ Why a performance contract is easy to dream up and very hard to run for a decade➡️ Why over delivering on savings can make a customer unhappy rather than delighted➡️ Why hospitals are better customers than hotels: 24/7 load, commercial tariffs, low humidity theatres, and one decision maker➡️ Why the largest square footage of green rated buildings in the world still leaves 30 percent on the table➡️ How ten years of minute-level chiller data across 28 cities beats a manufacturer's ten-point design curve➡️ How AI turns a complaint in an operating theatre into an already triaged job on a technician's phone➡️ Why 60 chiller plants are not just a consumption story but a future grid assetLinks:Arjun Gupta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjun-p-gupta-5746ab10/Smart Joules: https://smartjoules.co.in/Rohit Yadav: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohityadav23/Newsletter: https://yadavrohit.substack.com/