Nuvola's Lead Proof Point Belongs to Another Vendor

Nuvola Media, a Singapore firm that pitches itself as a "translator" between siloed agentic AIs, sells the smart-city agent dream with one consistent case study: Keppel Bay Tower. The profile in CDOTrends (Winston Thomas, 2026-05-24) leads with the building, claiming "8% savings for the HVAC system... year on year" and a meeting-room-booking-driven pre-conditioning routine. It is the proof that Nuvola's choreography works.

The public record credits someone else.

According to the IES case study on Keppel Bay Tower, the Performance Digital Twin and its verified results were delivered by IES, the building performance software firm, as one of five technology partners in a Building and Construction Authority plus Keppel Land project backed by a S$1.28M grant. The IES case study reports a 7% reduction in kWh per square meter per year, eight of twelve energy conservation measures implemented, calibration above 99%, and roughly 2.2 million kWh or 30% lower consumption than the 2017 Green Mark Platinum baseline, about S$400,000 a year in cost savings, and a drop from 145 kWh/m² to 115 kWh/m². The measurements cite a sleb.sg PDF as the underlying source.

That is a clean disclosure on IES's part. The CDOTrends feature does not name IES in the excerpted portion. Nuvola's own corporate site is generic and gives no deployment specifics. The strongest reading of the available record is that Nuvola was not the vendor that produced the Keppel Bay Tower digital-twin savings. Whether Nuvola wraps IES tooling, layers on top of it, or has a separate later engagement at the same building is not nailed down by the sources that have been pulled so far. Each claim should stay attached to whoever made it.

That is not a gotcha. It is the market.

CDOTrends' profile of Nuvola CEO Felix Tan frames the pitch the way the company wants it framed: every agency runs pilots, each pilot stands up its own agentic AI, and "they actually fail to integrate data across the multiple agencies." The Bangkok flood parable is the centerpiece. A flood stalls traffic, traffic stalls logistics, logistics stalls GDP. One event, five ministries, five solo performers. Nuvola positions itself as the connective tissue.

The parable does real work, and it points at a real problem. Cross-agency integration is genuinely hard. Data schemas don't match, procurement cycles don't align, security clearances don't compose, and the political economy of any municipal IT shop actively punishes the kind of horizontal plumbing that makes a city actually feel like a city. The smart-city agent market is currently selling autonomy that does not exist end-to-end, and buyers are signing RFPs against a future state, not a working one.

But the Keppel Bay Tower case study is supposed to be the counter-evidence: proof that the connective tissue can be built, deployed, and measured. If the public record of the savings belongs to a different vendor, the pitch loses its only concrete anchor in the very article where that anchor is doing the most work. The fact that the article uses the building as a lead illustration without naming who did the work is the structural problem in miniature.

It is also the same problem every buyer is about to hit.

A second, separately confirmed Nuvola-Keppel relationship is real. TechCoffeeHouse reported on 2026-05-19 that Nuvola is working with Keppel Limited on Keppel South Central, a 33-storey Grade A office tower in Tanjong Pagar with Green Mark Platinum Super Low Energy certification, targeting more than 40% energy efficiency versus comparable buildings, around 6.2 million kWh and roughly S$1.2 million in annual operating cost savings, aligned with Singapore Green Plan 2030. Bryan Ong, Managing Director at Keppel Limited, and Felix Tan are both quoted on the record. The relationship is current and active. The savings target is an aspiration, not a measured result. Nuvola's own pitch elsewhere, per the CDOTrends profile, says deployments are SaaS for easy cases, on-prem for government and defense, and hybrid for pragmatists, with named regional partners SoftBank and Yokogawa in Japan, JLL and CBRE in Thailand, and claimed coverage across APAC, the Middle East, and North America.

Two Keppel buildings, one verification problem.

Buyers should walk into the next agentic pilot with a test. Not a checklist, not a vendor demo, a test. Ask, on the record, for each named deployment: which agents are integrated in production, with what latency between systems, what fallback when one of them goes dark, and what contractual kill switch lets the city pull a single agent out of the loop without toppling the rest. Ask which partner delivered which measured number. Ask for the calibration report. If the answer is "we wrap the leader in the category" or "we orchestrate the ecosystem," ask for the SLA on the wrap. Wrappers inherit every outage of the thing they wrap. They also inherit every outage of the integration they do not control, and they have no way to push the fix upstream.

A few specific things to watch.

The BCA-Keppel Land grant program that produced the original Keppel Bay Tower results is a public record. If a follow-on Keppel or BCA deployment names a different vendor for the digital-twin layer, that is the test running in real time. If Nuvola publishes a deployment-by-deployment accounting that names the technology partner, the measured baseline, and the post-deployment kWh/m² with a third-party verifier attached, the proof-point problem goes away and the pitch stands on its own. If neither of those happens, the next time a CDO sees "we did Keppel Bay Tower" in a deck, the right response is to ask for the case study on the partner's own site and read it side by side.

The smart-city agent market is not a fraud. Most of the people building it are sincere engineers staring at a real fragmentation problem. The criticism is of the market shape, not of the people trying to fix it. The market shape, right now, sells a city brain when it has a collection of pilot-scale agents with very good PR. The structural cost of that mismatch shows up the next time a flood hits Bangkok, or a heat dome hits Singapore, or a port chokes on a holiday weekend. Five ministries, five solo performers, and one integration tax that gets billed to the resident who lives through it.

Ask the question before the next RFP. The market will tell you what it actually has.