Scout InsurTech Interview with LAIIER

LAIIER is a technology company. They seek to help owner operators of commercial and industrial buildings and equipment to detect liquid leaks at an early stage, defending them against damage and downtime. Chris Luiz sat with CEO and Co-Founder, Matt Johnson, to learn more about how LAIIER is impacting the industry.

Who are your clients?

At LAIIER, our customers fall into two broad categories: those who fear downtime and those who fear loss. The downtime side includes commercial real estate and industrial facility operators who are trying to prevent disruption caused by things like water leaks. On the loss side, we serve insurance carriers, particularly those with large P&C portfolios, who are focused on reducing claims. One of our most notable clients is AXA XL, and we’re working with several others that I can’t name publicly yet. In both segments, we aim to identify and mitigate risk before it becomes a bigger problem.

What does your product do?

Our product is a hybrid of hardware and software. The software is a dashboard that sends alerts through SMS and email and integrates with building management systems. The hardware is where things get interesting; it’s what our customers call “smart tape,” a flexible, adhesive water leak sensor with configurable sensitivity. Whether you’re placing it in a pristine data center or a dusty, open industrial facility, we can calibrate sensitivity via software to reduce false positives. That level of customization is critical for our customers who are often managing risk across a wide range of environments.

How much capital have you raised?

We just closed a $4 million seed round that was oversubscribed. Prior to that, we had raised about $2.5 million.

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

Definitely from outside. My background is in sensor technology, specifically printed electronics. I’ve been focused on making high-precision, low-cost sensors for years, and I started LAIIER by looking for the most valuable use cases for that technology. Insurance became a natural fit because it offered the ability to drive meaningful value across multiple stakeholders. Interestingly, my academic background is in econometrics, so maybe there was always some gravitational pull toward this industry.

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

Over the past year, we’ve seen steady traction. We’re now doing nearly one installation per week and onboarding a new customer each month. On average, our customers are receiving about 2.5 alerts per week, which makes sense, given they typically manage large portfolios of buildings. These insights help us understand not just where leaks are happening, but also how often, and that’s incredibly useful for both property owners and insurers. What excites me most is how we’re starting to capture data that’s predictive, identifying issues that fall below the deductible or happen before a major event.

Within your domain, what is the current challenge that the industry is facing?

Leak detection, as an industry, suffers from market fragmentation and imperfect customer information. Customers know leaks are a costly problem, and they know there are lots of products out there. But they often struggle to figure out which ones are right for their specific use cases. Too often, solutions get mismatched, like using a $5 leak sensor puck under an industrial machine because it works under your dishwasher at home.

That mismatch creates frustration and drives down trust. What customers really want is one solution that works across the board. Our challenge is to meet that need with a configurable sensor that adapts to different environments. We're trying to give customers a unified, flexible solution that simplifies their buying and management processes.

How does LAIIER take a unique approach to providing value?

We differentiate ourselves by offering that level of configurability. Our “smart tape” sensors are adaptable via software, which allows one device to suit multiple use cases. That gives customers more value, streamlines procurement and expands our market share. It also reflects genuine empathy for the customer. Nobody wants to juggle three or four separate vendors just to cover their leak detection needs.

We also recognize that digital integration is another pain point. It’s still hard to get building data flowing from systems like ours into the tools facility managers or insurers already use. While we’ve made good progress integrating with building management systems, insurers present more of a challenge, and solving that will be key to our scale.

What inspired you to start this company?

There’s both a personal and technical answer to that. Emotionally, I’ve always had a visceral reaction to water waste. I grew up in Colorado, where water is a precious resource, and when I moved to the UK, it shocked me how casually people left taps running. That stayed with me, and it made the idea of unattended leaks feel deeply wrong.

On the technical side, I’d been working in printed electronics and realized that we could build sensors that broke the rules: super thin, highly precise and easy to install. Water leaks stood out as a problem where this tech could make a huge difference. They’re common, expensive, unpredictable and usually discovered too late. I knew we could help solve that.

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?

The long-term vision is to become a smart ingredient brand for building materials. Our goal is for people to look at buildings and ask, “Why isn’t this sensor already built into the wall?” We want to make that happen.

Over the next 12 months, we’re working with manufacturing partners to embed our technology directly into building materials at the point of production. It’s a big step toward our “ubiquitous layer” vision, and we’re excited to have early projects already in motion. You might say the next big thing from us is one really big sticker. That’s probably how we’ll announce it when the time comes.

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