AIoT environmental monitoring · Republic of Korea
Anyone can install it.
We tell you whether it worked.
Airple designs and manufactures its own environmental sensing hardware, then turns the field data into independently verified evidence of what an intervention actually delivered — in degrees, not adjectives.
Verification is issued by our research institute, ACTRI — deliberately separated from any supply or installation interest.
The gap we work in
Cooling projects are being built faster than the evidence that justifies them.
Cool roofs, reflective coatings, cool pavements, shade structures and green infrastructure are now specified at municipal and portfolio scale. The supply side has matured. The evidence side has not — because in most cases the performance claim is produced by the same party that supplied or installed the work.
When the installer measures its own effect, nobody believes the number. We are not a player on the field. We are the referee. Tae Kyung (James) Kwon, Ph.D. — Founder & CEO, Airple Inc.
Instrument the site and a control
Solar-powered sensor stations on the treated surface and on a matched untreated control: surface and air temperature, humidity, radiant heat, solar irradiance, particulates, moisture. Continuous logging across a full cooling season.
Separate the effect from the weather
Our analytics engine weather-normalises the paired series, applies statistical testing, and attributes the change to the intervention rather than to a cooler summer. Uncertainty is quantified, not hidden.
Issue evidence that survives an audit
A signed verification report your client can hand to auditors, funders and councils — with the underlying time-series in open format so their own auditor can reproduce the result.
Capability
We own the whole stack — which is why we are not dependent on the data a client chooses to hand us.
Most verification providers analyse someone else's dataset. We build the sensors, run the loggers, hold the archive and wrote the protocol. That vertical integration is the reason our numbers are defensible.
Sensing layer
Purpose-built AIoT environmental nodes — surface and air temperature, relative humidity, solar irradiance, particulate matter, moisture. Designed and manufactured in house.
Data layer
Continuous long-duration logging with completeness auditing. A cumulative observation archive measured in tens of terabytes across more than 1,200 monitoring days.
Analytics engine
Weather normalisation, paired-series statistical testing, attribution and uncertainty estimation — executing a published protocol on a proprietary implementation.
Reporting layer
Structured verification reports and reproducible data packages, issued under ACTRI reference numbering with a stated validity period and re-verification schedule.
Two diagnostic capabilities in one house
Heat and water are the same problem seen from two directions — both are governed by what happens at the building envelope. A roof that has lost its waterproofing integrity cannot hold a cool-roof performance claim, because moisture in the build-up changes its thermal behaviour. That is why our roof verification begins with an envelope integrity assessment rather than assuming one.
Urban heat & building thermal performance
Measurement and verification of cool roofs, reflective coatings, cool pavements, shading, green roofs and façades, hybrid cool-green systems and evaporative measures.
Water ingress diagnostics
Leak detection, moisture diagnostics and building envelope failure analysis — delivered through the ACTRI Water Diagnostics Centre, with the diagnostic function kept separate from any remedial sales channel.
Evidence base
The protocol is not theoretical. It was developed on instrumented buildings and refined against the results.
A parallel field trial instrumented four roof surfaces under identical climatic exposure — logging roof surface temperature, interior surface temperature, interior air temperature and global solar irradiance continuously across a full cooling season.
| Surface | Condition | Role in the design |
|---|---|---|
| A | Reflective coating, one year aged | Degradation of delivered performance over time |
| B | Reflective coating, newly applied, white | Upper-bound reference case |
| C | Reflective coating, newly applied, grey | Colour and albedo sensitivity |
| D | Untreated | Control |
6.4 °C measured differential
Daytime roof surface temperature reduction against the untreated control reached 6.4 °C at the strongest measured differential.
Colour, not the label, governs the outcome
The newly applied white surface produced the strongest interior cooling response; the grey surface the weakest. Specifying a "cool" product is not the same as specifying a cool result.
Performance ages — measurably
The one-year-aged surface performed below the newly applied equivalent, quantifying degradation that vendor datasheets do not capture. This is the commercial argument for periodic re-verification.
Field references
Public-sector demonstration programmes, national monitoring networks and live instrumented sites.
Seoul National University Smart Farm
Environmental instrumentation in a controlled-agriculture research setting, in partnership with SNU.
Sorae Wetland Park
Ecological environmental monitoring in a coastal wetland protected area.
Korea Environment Institute — heatwave response
Instrumentation supporting national heatwave response research.
National river monitoring
Water quality and environmental observation across national river networks.
Hwaseong ecological restoration
Live instrumented site monitoring ecological restoration performance.
SLICED AI pilot, Seoul
AI-assisted stormwater management pilot — a 43% reduction in stormwater runoff was recorded.
Partner programme · Europe
We will not open offices across Europe. That is the whole point.
Local engineering firms and climate consultancies run their own markets. You get the platform, the methodology and the brand ammunition; you keep the customer relationship. Three tiers, in ascending order of commitment.
| Tier | What it is | Commercial shape |
|---|---|---|
| Paid pilot | An 8–12 week summer package: leased sensor kit, live dashboard and a verification report. Small enough to approve inside one budget line, complete enough to prove the point. | €15K – 30K fixed |
| Monitoring subscription | After a successful pilot the stations stay and the evidence keeps flowing — a monthly pack for CSRD disclosure and adaptation-fund audits. Compliance repeats, so the revenue repeats. | €500 – 1,500 / site / month |
| Partner licence | You sell and install locally under your own brand on the report cover. We provide the white-label platform, the ACTRI methodology, pre-configured leased kits, the report engine, training and pilot co-selling. | Revenue share / royalty |
You do not hold inventory
Pilot hardware is leased and shipped per project. No CE resale burden, no import risk, no stock sitting in your warehouse.
You do not write the reports
The platform generates them and you co-brand them. You also do not need to understand sensor electronics — stations arrive pre-configured and install in a day.
We co-sell your first two pilots
On your paper, with you in the room. After two or three references in your market, the licence lets you quote without us.
Who we are looking to work with
Our research institute
ACTRI — Airple Climate Technology Research Institute
The verification methodology, the conformance levels and the report quality belong to ACTRI, our independent research and verification arm. Verification fees are fixed and never contingent on the result, and no verification is issued for a project in which Airple holds an installation interest.
Company
Airple — from "Air" and "People".
The name states the purpose: air matters because people breathe it. Airple Inc. is a Korean AIoT company that has been profitable for fourteen consecutive years without venture funding, holds more than seventy granted patents across five jurisdictions, and works in research partnership with Seoul National University.
Tae Kyung (James) Kwon, Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Executive of Airple Inc.; Director of ACTRI. Ph.D., Seoul National University (smart city and environmental design). Approximately thirty years in the global semiconductor and embedded systems industry across six countries — including Samsung, LSI Logic, STMicroelectronics and MediaTek — prior to founding Airple. That background is the reason we treat verification as a systems and instrumentation problem rather than a consulting exercise.
Published, reviewed, partnered
A peer-reviewed publication record in international journals covering urban climate, building performance and environmental monitoring, including SCIE-indexed papers. Active peer reviewer for multiple international journals in the built environment and urban sustainability field. Research partnership with Seoul National University, where the institute's director holds a concurrent research fellowship at the Graduate School of Data Science.
Next step
Begin with a single building.
The most useful first step is one instrumented roof. It costs little, takes one season, and produces a document that either supports the claim or does not. Either outcome is worth more than another datasheet.
A 30-minute introductory call → pick one candidate site in your market → we quote a pilot together.
- Company
- Airple Inc. (주식회사 에어플)
- Base
- Dongtan, Hwaseong, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea
- Director
- Tae Kyung (James) Kwon, Ph.D.
- jim@airple.net
- Languages
- English and Korean correspondence both welcome