We’ve all seen them. The inspector walks through a building with a clipboard and counts off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked or whether all the lights are working. You work in the TICC (Testing, Inspection, Certification and Compliance) space and literally tick boxes. And while the work may seem simple enough to be done physically, it’s a completely different matter when it has to be done remotely.
Founder Ben Lambert realized exactly that when he had to run his wife’s real estate auditing business remotely after moving to Portugal. “It was no longer easy to verify on-site inspections and obtain reliable information. It could take weeks to get a final report,” he told me. In addition, the actual scheduling of inspections proved to be at least as big a problem.
Seeing an opportunity, Lambert founded an AI-powered workflow tools startup, Checkfirst, that not only enables remote inspections but also allows companies to schedule inspectors based on geographic location and skills. This leads to less travel, a smaller ecological footprint and ultimately higher employee satisfaction. The company has now raised $1.5 million in pre-funding led by Lisbon-based early-stage venture firm Olisipo Way and Hiero VC (a solo GP firm). Notion Capital and angel investors from companies such as Source Point, Busuu, Swogo and FaceIT also participated.
“As [the product] During development, we saw that the biggest problem wasn’t necessarily data collection alone, but where companies make or lose money was in scheduling. It is timely as AI is perfect for scheduling tasks,” he said.
“The biggest problem in the industry is scheduling, and the cool thing is that with AI you can easily schedule,” he told me. “Suppose an inspector is in London but needs to be in Munich to inspect a building. With AI you can understand what they are doing and put it all together. We are developing a planning tool for all these large companies. It’s not just about staying compliant; it is also planning. They can then easily use the compliance tool to collect data to comply with legal standards.”
“It turns out that the TICC industry is constantly moving people around the world,” Lambert explained.
“For example, an inspector might be in London today, but the company sends someone from Munich to London because they don’t really understand that they already have a man in London. If an inspector then flies from Munich to London, he immediately loses his entire margin. With our tools, the man the company actually wanted to send from Munich no longer has to come to London. This saves the company thousands of euros, if not more.”
Lambert said they “originally used a mix of open source and commercial AI models” and are now developing their own “based on proprietary data for image recognition and planning.”
In terms of competition, Checkfirst competes against some large incumbents in the compliance space, such as Intact Systems, Lumiform, Safety Culture (a unicorn), and Happy Co (focused on property management).
The difference with Checkfirst, according to Lambert, is that it is an API-first solution and uses AI for image recognition and automation, report summary generation and appointment scheduling.
The startup is working on proof-of-concepts with several customers, one of which has 30,000 customers, the company said.
The co-founder team includes Lambert, CPO Oyvind Henriksen (who founded Poq Studio) and CTO Rami Elsawy. Lambert was previously at Nexmo and Agora.