Meet the 20-year-old founder trying to make buildings less stupid with AthenaSpace

At 20, Tanish Dhillon has already learnt one of business’ more inconvenient truths: the room is rarely the hardest thing to enter. “The hardest room I ever had to walk into was the one inside my own head.”

As the founder behind AthenaSpace, an infrastructure technology company building what it calls an “operating system for physical spaces”, Dhillon spends much of his time selling to sectors that do not naturally reward youthful audacity. Property, hospitality, healthcare, retail and corporate real estate tend to prefer vendors with grey hair, long track records and an allergy to operational failure. When a building breaks, nobody wants charisma. They want certainty.

And so, for a while, Dhillon thought credibility meant learning how to perform seniority. “I thought credibility was a costume,” Dhillon recalls, “and that if I wore the right one, the room would eventually accept me.”

Then he realised the performance mattered less than the diagnosis. He had started working at 16. He had already been inside enough organisations to see how operational dysfunction accumulates, how small failures get normalised, and how often nobody can name the real problem because everyone owns only a fragment of it. “What I didn’t see clearly enough, at least in the beginning, was that I had already become my own harshest critic and most effective barrier.”

When small failures tell the truth

AthenaSpace begins with a deceptively banal problem: a broken lobby screen, a double-booked meeting room, a visitor kiosk with a handwritten “out of order” sign taped to it. None of these failures feels catastrophic on its own. Together, they reveal a building held together by mismatched systems, vendors and responsibilities.

Play

Dhillon remembers walking through a well-regarded commercial building and counting four things that had gone wrong before he even reached the lift. “A screen showing yesterday’s event. A directory still showing a tenant that had moved out months prior. A visitor kiosk with a handwritten ‘out of order’ sign taped to it. And a room booking display outside a glass-walled meeting room that said ‘available’ while a meeting was clearly in progress inside.”

That moment crystallised the company’s thesis. “The small failures aren’t the problem,” he theorise. “They’re the surface expression of a much deeper fragmentation.”

The signage belongs to one platform. The directory sits somewhere else. The visitor kiosk runs on another system. The room booking tool has its own logic, vendor and limitations. 

Nobody owns the whole experience. Everybody owns a slice. “The problem isn’t the people managing the building,” Dhillon clarifies. “In most cases, they’re competent, committed, and working hard with the tools they’ve been given. The problem is that the tools were never designed to work together in the first place.”

The AthenaSpace operating system, with limits

That is where AthenaSpace wants to sit: above the mess, but not in place of the people running it.

“What AthenaSpace controls is the layer of translation between raw operational data and human decision-making,” notes Dhillon. “We don’t replace the underlying systems. We make sense of them in a way that a building manager, an operations director, or a CEO can actually use.”

The phrase “operating system for physical spaces” sounds seductive, but it also comes with a warning label. Operating systems imply control, centralisation and dependency. Dhillon knows the risk.

“Where should our control end? At the decision itself,” comes the firm caveat. “AthenaSpace should never be the one deciding that a space gets repurposed, that a headcount changes, that a vendor gets replaced.”

Its job, he insists, is to “surface the right information to the right person at the right time and then get out of the way.”

That distinction matters because modern buildings already collect plenty of data. Their problem is coherence. A hotel may know its occupancy rate but miss how long guests wait at the concierge. A retailer may know how many transactions it processed but not how many people entered and left without buying. An office may know which room someone booked but not why nobody wants to use it twice.

Built from Asia outward

Dhillon believes many workplace and building platforms fail in Asia because they arrive with the wrong assumptions.

“What most of these platforms misunderstand is that they were built for a particular imagination of space,” Dhillon observes. “One that was formed in North America or Europe.”

Take a room booking conflict. In a Western system, the problem may look like a neutral scheduling issue. In many Asian workplaces, seniority changes the emotional and political weight of the booking. A room reserved by a managing director does not sit in the same cultural register as one booked by a junior executive, even if the software treats both entries as identical.

“A platform that doesn’t account for this — that treats all bookings as equal because the system sees them as equal — isn’t just technically naive,” comes the sharp critique. “It’s culturally tone-deaf.”

AthenaSpace’s response is not merely localisation in the cosmetic sense. The platform supports multiple Asian languages and dialects, but its larger bet lies in configurability. Organisations can adapt it around their processes without requiring heavy technical intervention.

“We don’t build your processes around us,” is Dhillon’s foundational promise. “We build ourselves around your processes.”

Space intelligence without surveillance

Any conversation about cameras, sensors, occupancy data and visitor flows now comes with a surveillance-shaped shadow. Here, Dhillon draws a firm line. “Our position is that the appropriate subject of space analytics is the space, not the individual,” Dhillon emphasises. “AthenaSpace is not designed to answer questions about who is moving within the space, but how they move within the space.”

That distinction sits at the heart of his argument. Organisations do not need to know who someone is to understand whether a lobby layout creates congestion, whether a meeting room has poor air quality, or whether a retail floor loses customers at a particular point in the journey.

“The moment you start attaching identity to movement, you’ve crossed a line — from managing a space to monitoring its occupants,” he cautions. “We don’t build for that.”

It’s why for Dhillon, the most interesting thing about physical spaces is how intensely people respond to details they never consciously register. “A waiting room in a clinic where the screen is showing outdated information doesn’t make patients think: ‘the signage is wrong,’” Dhillon points out. “It makes them feel, at a level they can’t quite articulate, slightly less safe.”

The same principle applies across sectors. A frozen screen in a premium retail store quietly erodes the brand. A confusing hospital corridor compounds anxiety. A stressful car park can taint an otherwise excellent visit.

“People are extraordinarily good at reading environmental cues and extraordinarily bad at knowing they’re doing it,” runs his observation. “The emotional contract of a space is written in dozens of small details.”

That may explain why Dhillon’s age now feels less like the central fact and more like an incidental provocation. He is young, certainly. But youth may be useful precisely because it still notices the absurdity that others have learnt to tolerate: the wrong directory, the broken display, the quiet operational failures that turn an expensive building into a bad experience.

Credibility, he has learnt, does not come from “looking the part”. It comes from whether the person across the table feels understood.

“When that empathy is genuine, it lands,” he offers as a parting thought, “and the year you were born becomes irrelevant very quickly.”