Interview with Alessandro La Fauci, Marketing Director of Sofia Locks
June 23, 2022
Interview with Alessandro La Fauci, Marketing Director of Sofia Locks, the startup that provides cloud-native access control solutions that support security, collaboration, and business development.
Times change, and technology is one of the factors that causes this change in a radical way, bringing solutions increasingly simple, fast and economical, optimizing operations and making them as transparent as possible. So is how a proptech works, offering an effective service, producing better results and, above all, at a much lower price than usual. That’s why today I want to talk to you about Sofia Locks!
What’s Sofia Locks
Sofia Locks is the startup that provides control solutions for access proptech that support security and collaboration. Thanks to Sofia Locks, real estate market leaders are supported in the digitalization and design of new businesses. What makes Sofia Locks a privileged partner is the mix of security offering with business know-how. Intelligent access control technologies rely on cloud and virtualization, providing enhanced security and at the same time providing all the means for the development of new activities. Thanks to the perfect integration with technology partners such as ISEO Ultimate Access Technologies, Cisco and others, Sofia Locks has been providing highly functional solutions that enable new business flows, maximizing real estate return on investment.
Today Sofia Locks has become part of the multinational ISEO Ultimate Access Technologies, taking access control innovation to the global market.
Sofia Locks solutions main feature is integration: on the one hand, all services and products are developed thanks to cloud technology, to achieve full integrability and scalability; from another, a series of competences are offered to help the customer in the formation of the business fed by proptech.
To find out more about the topic, we interviewed Alessandro La Fauci, Marketing Director of Sofia Locks.
Hello Alessandro, thank you so much for this opportunity. It is really a pleasure to meet you. Tell us more about Sofia Locks.
Sofia Locks is a PropTech company. We provide the real estate market with cloud native access control solutions that enable new business models and new ways of collaboration between people. Our solutions are designed to meet the needs of Flexible Workspaces (e.g., coworking), Flexible Living (e.g., co-living), and Flexible Retail (e.g., pop-up store), to enable a secure and flexible management.
Sofia Locks mission is to help the real estate industry into entering a new era of security, flexibility, and services to humans.
How and when was the idea born?
To be honest I was not part of the team in those days, but I know that Sofia Locks was born in 2015, and that the idea sprouted in the context of Politecnico di Milano. Founders tell that they felt like there hasn’t yet been a real revolution in the way access to spaces and buildings were managed. In other words, in a world where you have contactless pay methods or PayPal, and where you rent a car by a simple tap on our smartphone, the concept of traditional keys seems very obsolete.
How did you launch your startup? Did you use crowdfunding campaigns?
Sofia Locks bootstrapped from a software house the founders had already created a few years before, Bottega52. It leveraged on the competence and skills of Bottega52’s team, and on financing from opportunities for young start-ups.
Sofia Locks then established a four years long Open Innovation collaboration with ISEO Ultimate Access Technologies, an Italian multinational company operating in the security market for more than 50 years. In October 2021 Sofia Locks officially became part of ISEO, opening a new chapter in the innovation of access control solutions.
What services does Sofia Locks offer?
Sofia Locks developed and commercializes the most advanced cloud-based access control technology. With our solutions, companies, funds, and investors can integrate service models into buildings, or any kind of space, while keeping access to properties secure and flexible.
Sofia Locks solutions have been built with modern market needs in mind, following secure-by-design principles, and cloud first frameworks. Therefore our solutions are highly compatible, natively supporting access with virtual credentials (i.e. gate opening with smartphones and personal digital account), integrations with any modern software via RESTful API, and space usage analytics.
Sofia Locks’ HyperLocks and HyperGate technology make it possible to integrate a fully operational on-line access control system completely wireless, thus saving up to 75% of the material and up to 80% of the physical set up time.
What kind of technologies are used?
Our smart access control technologies are based on cloud and virtualisation, providing enforced security while giving all the means for new business development. Sofia Locks solutions include state-of-art digital technologies, while our team carries on the most secure practices, to provide customers with a fully managed access control infrastructure, free from maintenance burden. Thanks to seamless integration with technology partners like ISEO Ultimate Access Technologies, Cisco, and others, we are able to deliver highly functional solutions that enable new business streams and maximize the return on investment.
Goal for the future?
We just released the HyperTouch: a platform for real estate Apps, a revolutionary digital information channel that delivers interaction and services right into buildings. This is the most recent result of the company’s continuous R&D process that involves software development, interaction studies, and business design. Sofia Locks collaborates with its customers for designing successful real estate business modelsThe company is also involved in the development of acultur of innovation for the sector (e.g. Sofia Locks’ PropTech Perspective initiative).
Curiosity: do you agree with those who argue that proptech is the future of the real estate market and not only?
Information technology has already changed the world around us, and the way we interact with it. The real estate sector is traditionally slow when it comes to change, nevertheless proptech has hit a first maturity level, and I think we are going to see things change faster from now on. The future is not so far away right now, and proptech is taking it into the spaces we live in everyday.
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