We've all seen them. The inspector is walking around the building, with a clipboard, checking the fire extinguishers one last time, or if all the lights are working. They work in the TICC (Testing, Inspection, Certification and Compliance) space, and they literally tick the box. And while this may seem easy enough to do physically, it's a whole different ball game when it needs to be done remotely.

Founder Ben Lambert only realized, after moving to Portugal, that his wife's property inspection business needed to be run remotely. “It's no longer easy to do on-site inspections and get reliable information. It can take weeks to get a final report,” he told me. Also, actually scheduling an inspection turned out to be at least as big a problem.

Seeing an opportunity, Lambert founded AI-powered workflow tools startup, Check first., which, in addition to allowing remote inspections, enables businesses to schedule inspectors based on geographic location and qualifications. This results in less travel, less environmental impact, and happier workers. The company has now raised a pre-seed of $1.5 million led by Lisbon-based, early-stage venture firm, Olisipo Way, and Hiero VC (a solo GP firm). Notion Capital, and angel investors from companies like Source Point, Busuu, Swogo and FaceIT also participated.

“As (the product) developed, we saw that the biggest issue wasn't necessarily just data capture, but where companies make or lose money is in scheduling. It's timeliness, because AI can schedule tasks. It's the best for,'' he said.

“The biggest problem in the industry is scheduling, and the good thing is, with AI, you can schedule really easily,” he told me. “Say an inspector is in London but needs to be in Munich to audit a building. With AI, you can understand what they're doing and put it all together. We have all these big companies. are creating a scheduling tool for. It's not just about compliance; it's also a compliance tool that allows them to easily collect data to meet regulatory standards.

Lambert explained that it turns out that the TICC industry is moving people around the world all the time.

“For example, an inspector might be in London today, but the company will send someone from Munich to London, because they don't really understand that they already have a guy in London. If an inspector then goes from Munich to London, flies to, so he immediately loses all his margin. With our tools, the man he was going to send from Munich no longer has to come to London, saving 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 own “based on proprietary data for image recognition and scheduling”.

In terms of competitors, CheckFirst is going up against some big players in the compliance space, such as Intact Systems, Lumiform, Safety Culture (a unicorn) and HappyCo (focuses on property management).

Lambert says the difference with CheckFirst is that it's an API-first solution and uses AI for image recognition and automation, dispersing report summaries, and scheduling.

The company claims the startup is working on proof-of-concepts with several clients, one of which has 30,000 users.

The co-founding team includes Lambert, CPO Oyvind Henriksen (who started Poq Studio) and CTO Rami Elsawy. Lambert was previously with Nexmo and Agora.