Buildings, Industry, Infrastructure - all types of projects are benefitting from digiQC and now we are gearing up to expand exponentially to become the default QAQC solution for construction sector.
Current Status
Construction project ecosystem has 3 major stakeholders and we have several paid & happy clients representing all 3: Owner, Consultant, Contractor.
digiQC is already used across project typologies like Infrastructure (bridge, roads), Industry and buildings.
Currently we have 25 paid business clients actively using digiQC on 75+ projects.
Market
Annually USD 10 Trillion worth of construction takes place of which approx USD One Trilion happens in India Annually. As per McKinsey report approx 15% of that is wasted due to inefficient systems and lack of digitisation. The four main parameters of construction are Quality, Safety, Time & Money. While several solutions exist for time & cost monitoring and control, there is not much happening in terms of Safety & Quality, which are primarily field-operations oriented function. So we believe a huge market opportunity exists by addressing this segment. Just in India alone approx 4 million site engineers are employed and if we extrapolate that based on annual numbers the global number would be approx 40 million.
Problem or Opportunity
QA-QC process on construction sites have several problems like: duplication of effort, paper-based system that can be tampered with, time-lag between identification of problem and seeking remedy from experts, retrieval of records, finding accountable person, etc..
Sometimes on-site inspection needs to be done by expert who may have to visit from some other city or country. That involves a lot of time and money.
Analysis of QAQC records is not possible in current scenario as it is fragmented and paper-based.
All these problems cost the construction companies 3-4% of project cost.
Solution (product or service)
All these problems are solved by our SAAS product digiQC. The site engineers use their smartphone (android/ios) to do the QC inspections which gets recorded in real time in a tamper-proof manner. All the checklists are set up by senior managers as per the project specifications and hence it is mandatory for the field team to follow the same protocols.
All the inspection records are saved on the cloud and hence available for audit, analysis from anywhere in the world.
This digital way catches mistakes before they become disasters and avoids losses while saving time & manpower costs.
Competitors
There are large enterprise software solutions like PROCORE, BIM360, CORECON, that have QAQC modlues within them. There are some apps that focus on inspections & punchlists or Snagging reports.
Advantages or differentiators
digiQC has its total focus on QUALITY. The entire workflow and its data structure is made such that no-tampering can be done to the inspection data. There are several analytics possible on the cloud based inspection data. The UI/UX of phone app is very simple and with the understanding of harsh site situations.
Finance
We are in the "Problem-Solution FIT" stage and feel have a few more months to reach "Product-Market FIT". So at this stage it is difficult to provide estimates of revenue streams. However relevant examples of other SAAS B2B indicate that approx USD12 per month would be subscription charges, which we may need to discount as per total number of licences by same organization.
Business model
We have a simple B2B SAAS business model wherein we are charging an Annual fee based on the number of smartphone users, while web-browser based users are included in that fees.
Currently we are directly selling thru out-bound method but do intend to build a partner network for exponentially spread our market reach.
Money will be spent on
40% on Product Development, esp. Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence 30% on Sales & Support Team 20% on Marketing, Branding & PR 10% General Overheads
Offer for investor
We expect to dilute maximum 20% The nature of investor will determine the type of deal structure, for eg; if there is a strategic fit (eg: investor may have existing relationship/clout to get us large enterprise clients) Our current valuation expectation is USD 5 Million
The biggest risk is that some competitor crops up with the same idea and using low-pricing to penetrate into the market faster.
Incubation/Acceleration programs accomplishment
TiE Nurture 9.0 equity free accelerator program run by TiE Pune chapter.
Won the competition and other awards
We were selected by CII (confederation of Indian Industry) as promising startup in construction technology space and giving an exhibition booth space at EXCON 2019 in Bangalore. We were semifinalist in BUILTWORLD startup competition in CONSTECH category. We were semifinalist in CORPGINI startup competition. We won $5000 AWS credits from MEARSK competition. We won STARTUPGRIND Surat competition.