Case study · Brooklyn portfolio
Where DaisyChain started. A founder who ran his own co-op board built the platform to align his building around sustainability and affordability, then brought it to co-ops across Brooklyn.
Brooklyn
Where DaisyChain began
Co-ops
Legacy multifamily
2024
Founded
Where it started
DaisyChain didn't start as a company. It started in a Brooklyn co-op. Our founder, McGowan Southworth, was president of his building's board, trying to square the two things every board does: keeping the building affordable for residents and making it more sustainable.
Electrification promised both — lower operating costs and a smaller footprint — but the economics were opaque and the incentives were misaligned. So he built the tool he needed: a way to monitor the whole building's electric load, turn that visibility into revenue through submetering, and size every upgrade by payback.
Aligning the building around sustainability and affordability stopped being a trade-off and became a plan. That tool became DaisyChain.
The portfolio
DaisyChain grew into a portfolio of legacy co-ops across Brooklyn, many of them in and around Sunset Park, running submetering, integrating solar, and laying the groundwork for storage and EV charging on the same platform. These are exactly the buildings the energy transition usually leaves behind: older, mid-sized, owner-occupied co-ops without a sustainability office or a budget line for experiments. DaisyChain gives them the same visibility and revenue tools as an institutional portfolio — building by building.
On the platform
Submetering
Each building becomes its own utility, turning whole-building load into a reliable new line of NOI.
On-site solar
Rooftop arrays integrated and tracked on the platform, measured against the building's real load.
Storage & EV charging
Batteries and chargers layer onto the same platform as the economics mature.
Future-proofing
Every upgrade sized by payback, so each move funds the next instead of landing as a cost.