We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a constructing, ticking off the last time the fireplace extinguishers were checked, or if all of the lights are working. They work within the TICC (Testing, Inspection, Certification and Compliance) space, they usually literally tick boxes. And while the job could seem easy enough to do physically, it’s a complete different ball game when it must be done remotely.
Founder Ben Lambert realized just that, when after moving to Portugal, his wife’s property inspection business needed to be run remotely. “It was not easy to examine inspections on-site and get reliable information. A final report could take weeks to return through,” he told me. Plus, actually scheduling the inspections turned out to be a minimum of as large an issue.
Seeing a possibility, Lambert founded an AI-powered workflow tools startup, Checkfirst, that, along with allowing for distant inspections, enables businesses to schedule inspectors based on geographical location and qualifications. This leads to less travel, a lower environmental footprint, and the employees find yourself happier as well. The corporate has now raised a pre-seed $1.5 million led by Lisbon-based, early-stage enterprise firm, Olisipo Way, and Hiero VC (a solo GP firm). Notion Capital, and angel investors from firms like Source Point, Busuu, Swogo and FaceIT also participated.
“As [the product] developed, we saw that the largest problem wasn’t necessarily the info capture alone, but where firms earn or lose money was within the scheduling. It’s timely, as AI is ideal for scheduling tasks,” he said.
“The most important problem within the industry is scheduling, and the cool thing is, with AI, you possibly can schedule really easily,” he told me. “Say an inspector is in London but must be in Munich to audit a constructing. With AI, you possibly can understand what they’re doing and put all of it together. We’re making a scheduling tool for all these big firms. It’s not nearly meeting compliance; it’s also scheduling. Then the compliance tool allows them to gather data easily to fulfill the regulatory standards.”
It seems that the TICC industry is moving people all over the world on a regular basis, explained Lambert.
“For instance, an inspector could possibly be in London today, but the corporate will send someone from Munich to London, because they don’t really understand they have already got a man in London. If an inspector then flies from Munich to London, they lose all of their margin immediately. With our tools, the guy the corporate was going to send in from Munich now doesn’t need to return to London. That saves the corporate hundreds of euros, if no more.”
Lambert said they “initially used a mixture of open source and business AI models”, and at the moment are constructing their very own “based on proprietary data for image recognition and scheduling”.
When it comes to competitors, Checkfirst goes up against some large incumbents within the compliance space, similar to Intact Systems, Lumiform, Safety Culture (a unicorn) and Joyful Co (focuses on property management).
The difference with Checkfirst, says Lambert, is that it’s an API-first solution and uses AI for image recognition and automation, churning out report summaries, and scheduling.
The startup is working with several clients on proof-of-concepts, one which has 30,000 customers, the corporate claims.
The co-founding team includes Lambert, CPO Oyvind Henriksen (who began Poq Studio) and CTO Rami Elsawy. Lambert was formerly with Nexmo and Agora.
