We’ve all seen them. An inspector with a clipboard walks around the building, ticking off when the fire extinguishers were last checked and whether all the lights are working. They work in the TICC (testing, inspection, certification and compliance) space and literally tick the boxes. And while the job could appear easy enough to do physically, it’s a completely different game when it has to be done remotely.
Founder Ben Lambert just realized this when his wife’s property inspection business had to be run remotely after moving to Portugal. “It was no longer easy to conduct on-site inspections and obtain reliable information. “It could take weeks to prepare the final report,” he told me. Moreover, scheduling inspections proved to be at least as much of a problem.
Seeing an opportunity, Lambert founded a startup focused on artificial intelligence-based workflow tools, Check first, which, in addition to the ability to conduct remote inspections, allows corporations to schedule inspectors based on geographic location and qualifications. This results in less travel and a smaller environmental footprint, and employees are happier too. The company has now raised $1.5 million pre-seed, led by early-stage enterprise capital firm Olisipo Way and Hiero VC (a standalone GP firm), based in Lisbon. Notion Capital and business angels from corporations comparable to Source Point, Busuu, Swogo and FaceIT also participated in the conference.
“How [the product] we developed, we saw that the biggest problem wasn’t necessarily the data collection itself, but where companies made or lost money was in the schedule. There is time for this because artificial intelligence is perfect for task planning,” he said.
“The biggest problem in the industry is scheduling, and the cool thing is that AI makes it really easy,” he told me. “Suppose the inspector is in London but needs to be in Munich to audit the building. With AI, you can understand what they’re doing and put it all together. We create a planning tool for all these large companies. It’s not just about compliance; it’s also planning. The compliance tool then enables them to easily collect data to meet regulatory standards.”
It seems that the TICC industry is continuously moving people around the world, explained Lambert.
“For example, an inspector could be in London today, but the company will send someone from Munich to London because they don’t really understand that they already have an employee in London. If the inspector then flies from Munich to London, he will immediately lose all his margin. Thanks to our tools, the guy the company was supposed to send from Munich now doesn’t have to come to London. This saves the company thousands of euros, if not more.”
Lambert said they “initially used a mix of open-source and commercial AI models” and are now building their very own “based on proprietary data for image recognition and planning.”
In terms of competition, Checkfirst competes with several large players in the compliance space, comparable to Intact Systems, Lumiform, Safety Culture (a unicorn) and Happy Co (focused on property management).
The difference with Checkfirst, says Lambert, is that it is primarily an API-driven solution and uses artificial intelligence for image recognition and automation, reporting summaries and scheduling.
The startup is working with several proof-of-concept clients, one of which has 30,000 customers, the company says.
The founding team includes Lambert, CPO Oyvind Henriksen (who founded Poq Studio) and CTO Rami Elsawy. Lambert previously worked at Nexmo and Agora.