The air we breathe in enclosed spaces is often invisible even to those who design and manage them. But today it can be monitored, predicted and managed with greater precision — protecting health and optimising energy consumption. This is the promise of Radoff, a scaleup born in a small village in Sardinia and grown in Emilia-Romagna, where it develops and manufactures its technology in collaboration with universities and research centres. From its origins to joining the LifeGate Way ecosystem, taking in the technological challenge and forecasts for the next five years, Radoff CEO Domenico Cassitta explains why the indoor environment is about to become one of the decisive infrastructures of the ecological transition.

We spend around 90 per cent of our time in enclosed spaces, yet the impression is that awareness of indoor pollution remains low. Do you agree?
I do agree. And it is a gap that is, first and foremost, a failure of vision. In recent years we have built a mature language for talking about transition: energy security, competitiveness, environmental resilience. These are the pillars around which national strategies and the policies of major utilities are now organised. But that language is still missing a decisive variable: the indoor environment of buildings. We measure everything outside. We measure almost nothing inside. We govern the flows that pass through buildings, not the quality of the environment they produce. And as long as that quality remains unmeasurable and unpredictable, it stays invisible — even to those who design, manage and inhabit those buildings.

At what point did you realise that existing technology was not sufficient and that a radically new approach — like Radoff's — was needed?
While working on our first monitoring projects, we noticed something simple. Even good data, on its own, changes nothing. It tells you there is a problem. It does not solve it. It was like having a seismograph without an evacuation plan. From that realisation came the conviction that what was needed was a system, not a device: a technology capable of reading the environment, predicting how it will evolve, and intervening before risk becomes exposure. Bologna was the initial laboratory, while New York was the proof of concept: in a place where environmental complexity is at its maximum and no single device can govern it, the system still works. From that moment on, everything else followed naturally.

How do your devices work, and what technically differentiates them from traditional mechanical ventilation solutions?
Traditional mechanical ventilation is not a solution that works badly, but today it is no longer enough. It acts after the fact, on a static threshold, with no memory or predictive capacity. By design it arrives late, operates discontinuously and wastes energy. It is a thirty-year-old paradigm applied to a present-day problem. The difference with Radoff is not that we ventilate better. We do not ventilate: we govern the environment. The system works through four integrated levels: a continuous measurement infrastructure, an environmental digital twin of the building, artificial intelligence models that generate probabilistic forecasts, and an automated decision that triggers mitigation with the appropriate method and duration. Each cycle feeds the next: data generates the model, the model generates the forecast, the forecast generates the action, the action generates new data. This is why we do not describe ourselves as a ventilation technology. The product is not the device — it is the environmental decision. It is the shift from air that is exchanged to air that is governed.

How can an integrated approach combining advanced hardware, artificial intelligence algorithms and data management optimise the energy consumption of buildings while simultaneously safeguarding the health of their occupants?
This is the strategic question of the next decade. For years we told ourselves that the relationship between energy and environmental quality was a trade-off: either consume more to guarantee better conditions, or save energy by accepting a less controlled environment. That was twentieth-century thinking. Artificial intelligence moves beyond it: it anticipates risk and triggers a response only when, where and for as long as necessary. Targeted interventions rather than continuous ones. Dosing rather than constant action. Energy efficiency as the natural outcome of predictive environmental governance. It is the difference between reacting to data and governing a phenomenon: not automation, but predictive control. And in a building, predictive control means simultaneously energy security, operational competitiveness and environmental resilience — the trilemma finally applied to the one infrastructure that every day directly touches people's bodies.

Radoff offers solutions suited to both domestic and industrial use: what was the most complex engineering challenge you had to overcome in order to make your products adaptable to such different contexts?
The challenge was not to build an adaptable technology, but a coherent one: capable of operating with the same precision in a thirty-square-metre room as in a railway station. It sounds like a problem of scale — it is actually a question of architecture. Achieving this requires end-to-end control: hardware, firmware, cloud, AI, actuation — all designed to operate within the same paradigm. No integration of third-party components. Proprietary infrastructure, developed entirely in Italy. That is the condition that allows us today to speak of technological sovereignty in environmental governance.

Radoff is an example of how technology can be put at the service of health prevention: do you believe that technological support is now increasingly indispensable for guaranteeing people's health?
Health prevention today, without technology, no longer exists. The complexity of contemporary environmental threats — radon, fine particulate matter, emerging chemical agents — is beyond the detection capacity of any uninstrumented approach. But there is a point that matters deeply to me, and it concerns the way we talk about environmental resilience. Today that concept is articulated around critical infrastructures: networks, supply chains, raw material security. One level is missing. And it is the most direct one: the resilience of the environment in which people actually breathe. Environmental resilience that stops at the outer perimeter of buildings is incomplete. Prevention, without predictive capacity or indoor mitigation, remains a declaration. Technology today enables precisely this transition: from reading the present to actively managing risk.

LifeGate Way recently completed an investment in Radoff. What strategic opportunities does joining the ecosystem now open up for you?
The entry of LifeGate Way is one of the most significant moments in Radoff's history. Over nearly thirty years, LifeGate has built something rare in the Italian landscape: a coherent vision of sustainability, expressed as a system rather than a narrative. Communication, energy, investment, culture, mobility — an ecosystem in which every element speaks to the others. For Radoff, entering this design means far more than receiving capital. It means bringing the topic of the indoor environment into a public conversation that is already structured and credible. Making the indoor environment measurable, predictable and governable is a step that was missing from the Italian architecture of sustainability, and LifeGate had the capacity to see this before anyone else. For us, being part of this design means joining one of the most credible conversations happening in Italy today on the relationship between sustainability and infrastructure.

In the medium term — say, the next five years — do you envision new applications for Radoff technology, and what social impact do you hope to have generated in terms of public health?
Over the next five years, Radoff technology will expand into areas where the environment is a critical and currently under-governed variable: healthcare, schools, major public infrastructure, historic building stock. But the social impact I truly hope for is deeper. For too long we have talked about public health by focusing on care systems. The next decade will be decided by prevention systems, and a substantial part of that prevention passes through the environment in which people spend 90 per cent of their time. Above all, I hope that in five years the very concept of environmental resilience will have been extended. Today it is the resilience of the systems that supply buildings. Tomorrow it must also be the resilience of the spaces that buildings create. It is in this transition that the operators who today manage energy, water and networks will need to redefine their perimeter. Those who do not will remain at the margins of the transition they helped to build. I also hope that in five years the indoor environment will have become a measurable right — not a concern for a handful of experts, but a variable that every building declares, every manager governs, and every citizen can access. Giving form to the invisible: that is where true resilience begins.