Jonathan Low, CEO at Scope: BREAKING: Scope raised $20m

0:00Jonathan Low:Hello and welcome to the Scating Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today I am with Jonny of Scope. Jonny is the CEO of Scope. He's got some amazing news. What's going on? What are you announcing? Great to be on the show, Seb. Thanks so much for having me. Today we're announcing that Scope has raised 20 million of funding to transform inspection space forever to build AI for the testing, inspection and certification space. tell me more what does that mean for those who don't know the space at all what is the industry because it is a big industry that most people in their daily lives may not be thinking about yeah great it's a 300 billion dollar industry it's big number 300 billion dollars and at every point in the supply chain from when minerals are taken out of the ground to the food you put on the table uh the base of the economy inspection is the most common way that physical data is collected people look at things they capture data about it they capture measurements and then they make some judgments it's this good bad against different standards different codes and so we build software that helps people helps remove the admin you know out of this equation way that people really capture data today is still predominantly pen and paper and if they are using any software it's word or excel sort of in-house legacy platforms i really believe that there's a better way of doing it which is why we started scope and what does that look like then if i'm a user what how are you transforming the industry yeah great so one thing that we do for example we work with uh companies that do pressure pressure equipment uh inspection so they for example one of our real use cases on the platform today they serve the largest fertilizer company in the world and so they go on site um They'll use scope, what we call clipped up, so they have a microphone attached.

1:55They'll walk through all of the processes. We automatically download it onto their mobile app. We give them guidance about what sort of data they should be looking for. We extract key information from the standard. We evaluate the work that they do live in the field. Maybe they take a photo of a tank, and we give them some suggestions. This tank looks corroded. Against this section of the standard, here's some of the measurements that you should be taking. Then they can talk through the process. They can take photos, videos. They press one button at the end and we generate a compliant report that they can send to the customer.

2:29Jonathan Low:Very cool. And let's talk about the round then. Right. So you just raised 20 million. No small round. Who's leading the round? Index. Index is leading. Really excited to partner with them. Amazing. And who else you've got on board? Yeah. So we had Sousa Ventures lead the pre-seed and seed. they're very exciting to partner with um they've been really in partners to us and we started the company out of entrepreneur first which is a i think people familiar with the show will know it it's a london-based accelerator absolutely and the company's not old right i think you did you come out of ef 18 months ago something like that yeah that's accurate and so to raise the to go through ef to raise the the preceded seed you're now 20 million led by index ventures yeah what's going one behind the scenes that is enabling you to accelerate at this rate?

3:19Yeah, I think we relaunched last July, August, and we essentially rebuilt the platform so that you could build any type of inspection workflow on it. And very quickly, we started to see a massive amount of demand from the world's largest tick companies, world's largest inspection providers. They saw that one, they didn't have to change all of their workflow processes because we could build around it. two that we could serve their customers well and three we had a pricing structure that really worked for them inspection can be quite variable you know can be a lot one month and then a lot of shutdowns one month and then not much the next and we priced really to the value that we provide which is the reports that we generate and so it was easy for them to get started and they've seen really a lot of success you know we do you know many hundreds of inspections per day um and really powering this group to do it.

4:12And so we've seen, you know, more than 10x usage growth and in line with that 10x ARR growth as well over that, you know, launch in August.

4:20Jonathan Low:That's phenomenal. That's phenomenal. And so is it, you know, I'm not that familiar with the industry. Is this like a classic go-to-market where you're trying to outbound people? How are you finding these customers and users that are now, you know, making the most of your platform? Yeah, it's a really good question. Originally, it was just LinkedIn, cold outbound, getting on calls with people. Now, increasingly these days, it's word of mouth. It's conferences, meeting people where they are. We have inspectors who move around companies and they'll really, you know, encourage their leadership to take this up because they can't bear going back to spending their nights and weekends writing reports manually.

4:58Jonathan Low:Interesting. Cool. Okay. 10x, what, less than a year? Yeah. Have you got forecasts of where you think you could get to by end of year or in another 12 months? Yeah. we're excited to 10x again this year one of the big reasons to raise the round we want to build you know one of the biggest companies in this space and really in the physical ai space uh we would want to do you know 15 mil by the end of the year in era um and so we're scaling and on track to do that that's phenomenal that's absolutely remarkable results and you must be yeah one of the break you're going to be one of the breakout companies of the year um excited Yeah, very exciting.

5:35Jonathan Low:And I guess in many ways, the traction point was probably convincing to index. I know both you and your co-founder have got an interesting founder profile. I think you're like a math Olympiad. I think he's got some amazing accolades. What else was it that convinced index to come on board? Was it just traction? Did you really connect well with them? Were they looking at this space anyway? Can you touch a bit more on how that raise went and what they liked? Yeah, I think there are a number of things. So one thing that really drew us to Index and maybe also the other way around, one of the partners there, Jan Hammer, he'd previously done a lot of work in the inspection space.

6:14So before he even started his career at Index, way back 20 years ago, he worked at General Atlantic and he partnered with a lot of major testing, inspection certification companies there. That drew us a lot to him. It's rare to find people who actually know the space. then i think they saw one how ubiquitous this industry was they saw how it ties into basically every physical asset around the world and so you know if we really have a vision and one of the core scope sort of visions for the future is that physical information should be as easy to access as digital information you know a world where if you're running this fertilizer plant you don't have to look at pen and paper you can access information about the plant as easily as you access your emails.

6:56That's really an exciting world to live in. It's a world very different to the one that we live in now. Even if you're a landlord, you have no idea what's going on in your buildings. You have to go and check. Physical information is not as accessible as digital information. And I think they really saw this vision and they were excited to partner with us on it.

7:12Jonathan Low:Amazing. And how did you find the process of fundraising? I guess this wasn't the first round that you've raised. You raised a couple. What was that experience like going out to market? did you already have people that were interested were index already interested before what did that look like was this yeah how did you find the process yeah the round actually got preempted um and so we had a couple of offers from different funds and so it was exciting to you know understand what the market looked like understand you know what we should do to to get over the line i think yeah it was it was pretty cool um and then you know after that you have to go through you know a full diligence process no one ever tells you about that but that's also a bit of a slog but it was it was all good in the end and we've closed now and when did you you know i always find it interesting because the announcement for a fundraiser is always like probably months after the round closed like when did the round actually close we closed a month ago okay and so now okay so now it's just sort of been getting everything ready um can we talk about the industry more generally then because this is not this is not an industry where you think oh like there's going to be a thousand founders fighting for this space you know there's there's certain industries certain companies where you see that there are lots of companies cropping up in this kind of yeah testing inspection certification industry huge industry as you mentioned but it's not like a sexy snazzy industry what what pulled you in like why was this the space you thought there was an opportunity i think a number of reasons we started the company when we started the company one of our early customers was an inspection provider and we were showing them like an early demo and this lady came in with this huge binder really that's how they ran the company they did nine figures in turno and she like drops it on the table she's like you know I've never seen anything like this before and the demo wasn't that good um you know I like to pretend that it was but it was just an early version of what Skype would become and I think we we it really excited us.

9:09We'd never seen that reaction before, despite doing a lot of work across sort of old-fashioned, unsexy industries. And we thought, okay, this is really interesting. And then we spent more and more time, and we realized there's just a massive deficit here. And I think for many years, it just wasn't possible because essentially every type of inspection is different. And so you'd have people who built some specialized tooling for aerospace based inspection or fire safety, but never really something that could scale across the industry. And with the advent of language models, and especially sort of multimedia ones and agents, it allows us to really speed up the implementation and deployment process.

9:48So you can build a workflow for every type of inspection.

9:53Jonathan Low:And how close are you to the industry now? And how close have you been to them building the product? It's a good question. I think, you know, This time, two years ago, if you asked me about the inspection space, I really wouldn't have been able to tell you much. Last year, I was keynote speaker at one of the world's largest inspection conferences. We spend basically, I spend maybe a day a week at least, on site with the customers, if not every hour of every other day talking to our customers. In the corner of the office, we have a large group of hard hats and PPE. we go on site very frequently with our customers we know them by name we have dinners with them we do all of our customer support over whatsapp it's not a super scalable strategy i'm not sure if i would recommend it but you know we know these people we know their kids um we like really care a lot about the individual customers we work with and building better software for them and um yes it's amazing i feel like it's proper founder mode um like you mentioned that before it was probably there were like vertical solutions for different inspections and testing kind of software or how able like how able have you been to build a solution that can serve as all these different industries how easy is that being or have you found that maybe you're covering 80 of the tick market how does that work yeah so we at the core of scope is a set of building blocks You know, you might have one for sensor measurements.

11:26You might have another one for, you know, visuals where you're taking photos or videos in the field. And each of these blocks can be powered by a different set of language models. And so what that allows us to do is put these blocks together in a way that not only mirrors sort of the general standard like a tank inspection, but actually allows us to, you know, do better than what sort of these maybe legacy or these sort of specialized industry specific verticals do and build workflows that exactly match for one country. We really believe the future of software is going to be much more personalized than software is today.

12:00And so this sort of approach allows us to build different workflows that can almost be specialized at the inspector level or at the very least at the country or team level.

12:12Jonathan Low:And why do you think this hasn't been built in, you know, why is the industry so out-fashioned? yeah i think part of it is that it's statutory and so there's not great competitive pressure to invest in technology another reason is that this is almost in some way the ways that things have always been done and now that companies are starting to really see an aging workforce in one specific type of you know inspection ndt non-destructive testing there's you know 40 % of people are going to retire over the next five years and when you're faced with that sort of you know loss of headcount you really realize that you need to invest in not just okay here's you know excel online but um you need to invest in software that's going to be really transformative and what about um international expansion right so it seems like you you want to go after personalized vertical go after the whole mark personalized software to go after the whole market how does market vary from uk europe us rest of the world yeah so one big reason why we're based in london apart from believing that london's the best city on earth is that is that uh europe actually has you know headquarters you know most of the the top 10 largest inspection companies um and these companies are inherently global they have offices all around the world but the headquarters because historically you know they came out of you know national accreditation bodies um is yeah is in europe and so this allows us to be really close to them uh that being said you know industry and physical assets are everywhere and so we'll have customers from singapore to boston to la um but predominantly still today in europe and in the uk and so you mentioned that you raise this money to essentially to scale to move quicker to service of demand what does that look like in terms of actually spending that money yeah so we're going to scale up headcount with 12 people today uh we want to be you know 40 45 people by the end of the year allows us to better build out uh you know the visualization part of our software so one large part is that people collect this data today we want to think of ways that we can make this partner with inspection companies to make this data really usable to the end customer that's something that we're really investing in we're seeing a lot of sort of early traction and growth with but it's exciting um as it continues to grow yeah amazing i mean like yeah the the wind is in your sales i guess it's really cool um and what does what does it look like in terms of the split between r &d product investment sales go to market and yeah how you stretch the team going forward yeah so we do large enterprise sales we work with really large companies and so sort of have the saying that internally every engineer is a forward deployed engineer.

15:09We really deeply care about building out engineering, engineering in a way that everyone spends time with customers, everyone deeply understands what their pain is, and then can work with them more closely on building better product. We also hire deployment strategists. Their job is to understand customers on board and run implementation. A big part of why we've been so successful is we've really embraced doing you know bottom level work we don't find it you know we work directly on site every day with you know the core users the inspectors and at the same time the flip side of presenting to the boards of these companies presenting to c-level executives i think it's a really exciting role we're hiring for both of these right now and anything that you've done

15:55Jonathan Low:remarkably wrong through the journey so far right you've gone through i guess at the earliest hardest stage of like it sounds like you've got product market fit so you know the really hard bit based on what it sounds like of being a founder so it's very early days trying to get the product from zero to one try and get product market fit those early customers what's gone wrong what big mistake have you made that you've got from looking back yeah i think it's useful to there's a number there's so many um but i think one big mistake is you know you need foresight in in scaling you know we scaled our customer base massively with a very small team and i think now we really need to scale the team to meet that customer base that's something that we think a lot about another thing i think is you really want to have a you know in sort of the first month of the company we really focused almost too much on a small subset of customers instead of thinking about what scales across the market and so that's a big part of why we pivoted into building you know sort of workflow based software and that was really a good call interesting okay and how when you think about scaling the business right we're now in this kind of new ai world where it's no longer about headcount metrics and growth at all costs you know it's about efficiency and staying lean how are you scaling your own business to to sort of stay as lean as possible yeah so one is we really invest in productivity and so i think many people say this but people have unlimited token spend so they can just spend as much um on the coding tools as they like we also try and build tools that help other people within the company build faster and so for example traditionally we would have built a lot of these workflows manually we now have agents that automatically ingest standards and build parts of them and so that really unlocks a lot of you know faster deployment we can go live with a customer in under two days now that's amazing wow and and any personal favorite ai tools that you're using of course gotta shout out granola that's a classic yeah um i think uh i also i'm a really big fan of uh a really big fan of superhuman i think it's it's still underrated as a as a as a email message especially if you set it up correctly um you have like yeah you can just move so much faster uh don't really like to you know spend that much time in emails prefer talking to customers yeah amazing i've just started using whisper flow and that even that has been like pretty game-changing for me and like never having to type uh pretty good but yeah i love granola as well Well, one final question.

18:43Jonathan Low:What is the biggest challenge or problem that you're going to face this year and how you think about tackling it? Yeah, I think something that's really critical, you know, to every company is the team you build is the company that you build. The people that you hire is the company that you build. And so maintaining an incredibly high bar for the people that we hire, building a culture where people have really unparalleled autonomy and ownership over their accounts, over the product that they ship. That's something that we think is core to scope culture. And it's something that's going to be really hard.

19:17We see that the talent market in a very exciting way is progressing a lot in London, becoming much more competitive. and so that's a big reason for the raise to uh you know be even a more competitive for place and even more mission-driven place for for people to join scope it's super interesting i put

19:34Jonathan Low:all of my interviews of all time through ai to try and pull out all the key themes and it was like 80 percent of founders say their biggest issue is talent it's like that's the thing that they are most worried about they want to get right it's like that's the thing that's keeping them up at night um so it makes it so critical yeah yeah i mean it's never been more competitive for the best talent that there is. Well, Johnny, thank you so much for joining me. Amazing news. Congratulations to you and the team. And anytime you've got news or updates that you want to share, let me know because it seems like you're going to have a big, big year and I'm very excited to follow along.

20:06Thank you so much, sir. Have a great day.