They’ve all been seen. With a clipboard in hand, the inspector strolls around a building, verifying when the fire extinguishers last underwent inspection and whether all the lights are operational. They do work in the area of TICC (testing, inspection, certification, and compliance), and they tick off all the right boxes. While in-person work may appear straightforward, remote work presents unique challenges.
After moving to Portugal, Ben Lambert, the company’s founder, realized that his wife’s property inspection business required management from there. “It wasn’t simple to get accurate information and check inspections in person anymore.” “The last report might not be ready for weeks,” he told me. Plus, setting up the checks was just as hard as the inspections themselves.
Lambert saw a chance and founded Checkfirst, an AI-powered workflow tool company that allows businesses to plan inspectors based on their location and skills, as well as for online inspections. This means less travel, which is better for the environment and also makes the workers happy. Olisipo Way, an early-stage venture firm based in Lisbon, and Hiero VC, a single GP firm, led the way in raising $1.5 million for the business. Angel investors from Source Point, Busuu, Swogo, and FaceIT, as well as Notion Capital, took part.
“As [the product] evolved, we realised that the main issue wasn’t just collecting data; it was also the scheduling, which was where businesses made or lost money.” “It’s timely because AI is great for planning when to do things,” he said.
He told me, “Scheduling is the biggest problem in the industry. “The cool thing is that AI makes scheduling really easy.” An inspector is in London, but he or she needs to be in Munich to check out a building. You can figure out what they’re doing and connect all of the pieces with AI. We’re developing a tool for all of these large businesses to use to create schedules. It’s not enough to just follow the rules; you also have to stick to the schedule. Then, the compliance tool makes it easy for them to gather the data they need to meet the government’s rules.
Lambert said it turns out that the TICC business moves people around the world all the time.
“For instance, an inspector might be in London today, but the company will send someone from Munich there because they don’t know they already have someone there.” The inspector will lose all of their profit right away if they fly from Munich to London. Our tools eliminate the need for the worker from Munich, whom the company was originally planning to dispatch, to travel to London. That helps the business save at least a thousand dollars.
At first, Lambert said, they “used a mix of open source and commercial AI models. “They are now making their own, based on proprietary data for image recognition and scheduling,” he said.
Checkfirst has to deal with big names in the compliance space, like Intact Systems, Lumiform, Safety Culture (a unicorn), and Happy Co.
Lambert says that Checkfirst is different because it is an API-first solution and uses AI for things like scheduling, picture recognition, and automation.
The startup is working on proof-of-concepts with a number of clients. One of these clients has 30,000 people, the company says.
Lambert, CPO Oyvind Henriksen (who started Poq Studio), and CTO Rami Elsawy are the co-founders. Lambert used to work for Nexmo and Agora.
