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

Hello and welcome to the Scenic Europe Show. I'm Seb Jornson. Today I am with Johnny of Scope. Johnny is a CEO of Scope because I'm amazing in your 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 data lives may not be thinking about. Yeah, great. It's a $300 billion industry. It's a big number, $300 billion. And at every point on the supply chain, from when minerals are taken out of the ground to the food you put on the table, the base of the economy, inspection is the most common way that physical data is collected. People look at things, they capture data around 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 out of this equation. The way that people really capture data today is still predominantly pen and paper. So that's why we don't have 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 a user, how are you transforming the industry? Yeah, great. So one thing that we do, for example, we work with companies that do pressure equipment inspection. For example, one of our real use cases on the platform today, they serve the largest fertilizer company in the world. And so the go on site, they'll use Scope, they what we call Clipped Up. So they have a microphone attached, they'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 try and do 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 could take photos, videos, they press one button at the end, and we generate a compliant report that they can center the customer. Very cool, 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, it's really excited to partner with them. Amazing, and who else you've got on board? Yeah, so we had a Suisse Ventures lead the precede and seed that I'm very excited to partner with, they've been really important to us. So we had the company out of entrepreneur first, which is I think people familiar with the show will know it, to London based accelerator. Absolutely, and the company is not old, right? Did you come out of the F18 months ago, something like that? Yeah, that's accurate. And so to go through EF, to raise the preceded seed, you're now 20 million, let's bend, index, ventures. What's going on behind the scenes that is enabling you to accelerate at this rate? I think we relaunched last July August, and we essentially rebuild 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 the low shutdowns one month, and then not much the next. And we provide 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 many hundreds of inspections per day, and really powering this group to do it. So we've seen more than 10x usage growth and in line with that 10x error growth as well over that launch in August. That's phenomenal. That's phenomenal. So is it, you know, I'm not that familiar with the industry. Is this like a classic go-to market we were trying to outbound people? How are you finding these customers and users that are now making the most of your platform? Yeah, it's a really good question. Originally it was just LinkedIn, cold outbound, getting uncalled with people. So 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. Interesting. Cool. Okay, 10x, what, less than a year? Yeah. Have you got full cast of where you think you could get to by end of year or in another 12 months? We're excited to 10x again this year. One of the big reasons to raise the round, want to build, you know, one of the biggest companies in this space and really in the physically eye space. We would do, you know, 15 mil by the end of the year and there are, and so we're scaling and on track to do that. That's phenomenal. That's absolutely remarkable as I was saying. You must be, yeah, one of the break out companies of the year. Excited. Yeah, brilliant sighting. And I guess I, in many ways, the traction point was probably convincing to index. And you, both you and your co-founder, I've 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, was it just traction? Was it, you know, did you like really connect with them with a looking at this space anyway? Can you touch a bit more on how that raised when 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 had previously done a lot of work in the inspection space. So before he even started his career index way back 20 years ago, he worked with General Antic and he partnered with a lot of major, you know, testing inspection certification companies there. That drew us a lot to him, you know, is rare to find people who actually know the space. Then I think they saw one how you bake with just 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 I want 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 plan, you don't have to look at pan and paper. You can access information about the plant as easily as you access your emails. That's really an exciting world to live in. It's world very different to the one that we live in now. Even if you're a landlord, you know, 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 that. Amazing. And how did you find the process of fundraising? I guess you know, 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 you were interested were index or already interested before? What did that look like? Was this, yeah, how did you find the process? Yeah, the round actually got preempted. And so we had a couple of offers from different funds. And so it was exciting to understand what the market looked like, understand, you know, what we should do to get over the line. I think, yeah, it was pretty cool. And then, you know, after that, you have to go through, you know, full diligence process. No, no, we tell you about that. But that's also a bit of a slog. But it was all getting in the under and we've closed now. And when did you, you know, always find it interesting because the announcement for a fundraiser is always like probably months after the round closed. Like when did that watch the coast? It was closed a month ago. Okay. And so now, okay, so now it's just sort of getting everything ready. Can we talk about the industry more generally then? Because this is not, this is not an industry where you think, like there's going to be a thousand founders fighting for this space. You know, there's, there's certain industry, certain companies where you see that there are lots of companies cropping up. In this kind of, yet, testing inspection, certification industry, huge industries mentioned. But it's not like a sexy snazzy industry. What, what pulled you in that? 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 sharing them like an early demo. And this lady came in with this huge binder. Really. I was hardly around the company. They did nine figures in turn and she like drops it on the table, which is like, you know, I've never seen anything like this before. And the demo wasn't that good. You know, I like to pretend that it was, but it was just an early version of what Skate would become. And I think we, it really excited us. We'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 it's just a massive deficit here. And I think for many years it was 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 inspection or fire safety, but never really something that could scale across the industry. And with the advent of language models, and you know, especially sort of multimedia ones and agents, it allows us to really speed up the implementation and deployment process. So you can build a workflow for every type of inspection. And how, 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 this time two years ago, if you asked me about the inspection space, I really wouldn't be able to tell you much. Last year I was Kino's figure at one of the largest inspection conferences. We spend basically, I spend maybe a day a week at least, on-site with the customers if not, you know, 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, not sure if I would recommend it, but, you know, we know these people, we know their kids. We really care a lot about the individual customers we work with and building better software for them. And yes, it's amazing. I feel like there's probably a founder mode. You mentioned that before, there were like, vertical solutions for different inspections and testing, kind of, software or how able, 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 look work? Yeah, so we, at the core of scope is a set of building blocks, you know, you might have one for sensor measurements, you might have another one for, you know, visual to where you're taking photos of 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 mirror 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 vehicles do and build workflows that exactly match, you know, for one country. We really believe the future of software is going to be much more personalized than software is today. And so, you know, 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. And why do you think this hasn't been built in, you know, why is the industry so hard 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 company is starting to really see an aging workforce in one specific type of, you know, inspection, NET, 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, his, you know, excel online, but you need to invest in software that's going to be really transformative. And what about in-sashting expansion, right? So it seems like you want to go after personalized vertical graph to the whole market. How does this 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 Europe actually has, you know, headquarters, you know, most of the top 10 largest inspection companies. 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 is, yeah, is in Europe. And so this allows us to be really close to them. That being said, you know, industry and physical assets are everywhere. And so we'll have customers from Singapore to Boston to LA, predominantly still today in Europe and in the UK. And so you mentioned that you raised this money to essentially to scale to move quicker, to service, to 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. We want to be, you know, 40, 45 people by the end of the year allows us to better build out, you know, the visualisation 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 in great ways, but it's exciting as it continues to grow. Yeah, amazing. And really, the wind is in your sales, I guess, it's really cool. And 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, you know, sort of have the saying that internally, you know, every engineer is a four-deployed engineer. We really deeply care about, you know, building out engineering, engineering in a way that everyone spends time with customers, everyone deeply understands what their pain is, 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 sea 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 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 worked for the market so, you know, the really hard bit, based on what it sounds like, being a founder. So it's very early days trying to get the product from zero to one, trying to get product market for those early customers. What's going wrong? What big mistake have you made that you've got from looking back? Yeah, I think it's useful to does number so many. But I think one big mistake is, you know, you need foresight 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 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 when you think about getting 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 stinglein. How are you scaling your own business 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 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 the customer in under two days now. That's amazing. Wow. And any personal favorite AI tools that you're using? Of course, you've got a shout out Grinola. That's a classic. Yeah. I think I also, I really big fan of a, I really big fan of superhuman. I think it's still underrated as a email message, especially if you set it up correctly. You have like, you can just move so much faster. They really like to 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. Pretty good. But yeah, I love Grinola as well. Well, one final question. What is the biggest challenge or problem that you're going to face this year? And how are you thinking about attacking it? Yeah. I think something that's really critical, you know, to every company is the, 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, you know, unparalleled autonomy and ownership over their accounts over the product that they ship. That's something that we think is like core to scope culture. And it's something that's going to be really hard, you know. We see that the talent market in a very exciting way is progressing a lot in London, becoming much more competitive and say that's a big reason for the raise to, you know, be even a more competitive for places, even more mission driven place for for people to join scope. It's super interesting. I put all of my interviews of all time through AI to try and allow all the key themes. And it was like 80% of founders say their biggest issues 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. So it makes it very critical. 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. Anytime you've gotten use or update so you want to share let me know because it seemed like you're going to have a big big year and I'm very excited to follow along. Thank you so much sir, have a great day.