As cities face increasing pressure on critical infrastructure due to rising footfall and shrinking resources, VAELLA supports building operators and facility managers by serving as an extended, AI-powered operational brain for their expert teams. The privacy-first platform delivers the real-time situational awareness and predictive intelligence needed to create safer, more efficient, and more people-friendly experiences in the most complex and crowded spaces.
ESPOO, Finland | June 10: VAELLA, a new technology company developing an AI operator for buildings and public infrastructure, has launched as an independent spinout from KONE, a global leader in the elevator and escalator industry. The newly founded company VAELLA is focused on helping operators of densely populated, high-footfall environments, including transport hubs, airports, stadiums, and large commercial buildings, anticipate and manage disruption, maintain flow, and strengthen resilience. The platform acts as an AI operator that can help teams shift from reactive monitoring toward real-time situational awareness and predictive operational response.
Originally created within the technology and innovation unit at KONE, VAELLA addresses a growing challenge facing cities and infrastructure operators: public environments are becoming more interconnected, more dynamic, and more vulnerable to disruption, while the systems used to manage them remain fragmented and reactive. At the same time, safety and security threats continue to rise, and facility operators are being asked to do more with fewer on-site personnel, as public sector resources remain constrained.
“The world’s busiest public environments are becoming exponentially more complex, but most operational systems are still designed to react after problems emerge,” says Fabien Fédy, CEO and co-founder of VAELLA. “VAELLA was created around a simple idea: if operators can understand what is happening now, and what is likely to happen next, they can make faster, better-informed decisions that keep facilities running smoothly and absorb pressure before it becomes a crisis. This enables operators to keep people safe, and make even the most crowded public spaces easier to navigate for millions every day.”
Today’s control rooms often rely on disconnected inputs from cameras, sensors, access systems, equipment monitoring, and building infrastructure. Although operators have access to more data than ever, they frequently lack a unified operational picture that helps teams understand where pressure is building, how disruption may propagate, and what decisions are needed in real time.
Rather than functioning as another standalone software tool, VAELLA is designed to operate more like an extended, AI-powered operational team working alongside existing staff, across all functions of the facility. The platform combines sensor data, operational systems, and predictive intelligence into a unified real-time operational view designed to support faster decision-making, improve continuity of operations, and help teams manage increasingly complex environments under pressure. Unlike many conventional systems, which rely on invasive, camera-centric monitoring, VAELLA is designed as a privacy-first operational platform that connects the existing infrastructure rather than replacing it.
“Facility operators are not short of data. The challenge is that it’s scattered across too many systems and still requires people to interpret what matters in real time,” says Ulla Tikkanen, CCO and co-founder at VAELLA. “VAELLA isn’t replacing these people; it’s levelling up every aspect of the existing operational team’s capabilities by turning fragmented information into intelligence. Consider it like having an additional equivalent of your best facility manager, your most experienced security supervisor, your smartest energy analyst, and your most reliable accessibility coordinator, and having all of them working together, in real time, around the clock, on every floor and in every corridor of your facility at once.”
Initial pilots and validation work have already been conducted in real operational environments, including Helsinki and Brussels, where VAELLA has tested how real-time situational awareness and predictive operational insights could improve the management of complex public transport hubs. Tested applications included crowd build-up detection, passenger incident response, accessibility disruption management, demand-aware station operations, and adaptive energy management. Additionally, the technology has identified ways to save energy at the station and reduce unnecessary visits by security teams by using real-time data.
“Transport hubs and metro stations, for example, can experience sudden surges in passenger volumes following concerts, sporting events, or service disruptions, creating safety risks in busy transit areas,” Fédy explains. “According to one pilot customer, overcrowding contributes to nearly 30 percent of operational incidents. By identifying congestion patterns in real time, operators can respond earlier, increase train frequency, redirect passenger flows, or adjust escalator directions before situations worsen. Real-time occupancy insights can also help optimise lighting, ventilation, and other building systems dynamically, with some pilot environments identifying potential energy savings of up to 20 percent.”
For KONE, the decision to back VAELLA as a spinout is a deliberate initiative to give the venture the independence and autonomy to move quickly while connecting it to KONE’s global expertise in urban mobility and extensive worldwide customer relationships.
“KONE has spent decades understanding how people move through buildings and cities. The natural extension of that is understanding how equipment and the spaces around it behave as living systems: observing patterns, seeing where pressure accumulates, and anticipating and responding in the moments before something goes wrong,” says Amy Chen, Chief Innovation Officer at KONE. “VAELLA, our first ever spinout, is addressing that challenge with a completely new approach designed for the operational realities of crowded public environments. The way VAELLA has been designed to work reinforces KONE’s purpose to shape the future of cities, and by giving this innovation its own structure, we can solve our customers’ most pressing challenges directly, with breakthrough solutions.”
Urban infrastructure investment cycles are often measured in decades, yet the pressure on existing public environments is already intensifying right now. Cities and operators cannot expand transport networks, airports, and other critical infrastructure quickly enough to keep pace with rising demand, increasing passenger volumes, and growing operational complexity. As a result, attention is increasingly shifting toward how existing environments can be operated more intelligently, efficiently, and adaptively in real time. This is the operational challenge VAELLA was created to address.
Applicable anywhere people move fast and with scale, like airports, stadiums, shopping centres, university campuses, and civic spaces, which all face growing expectations for safer, smoother, and more resilient operations, creating a clear market for AI-assisted systems to support better real-time decisions.