Jonathan Low and Jakob Cassiman, co-founders of Scope, were outsiders to the Testing, Inspection, and Certification (TIC) industry – and that’s exactly what gives them their edge.

They’re redesigning the inspection process for industries still reliant on pen, paper, and outdated tech. Scope builds AI-powered tools that cut cycle times by up to 45%, freeing inspectors to focus on decision-making over admin.

They’ve only just begun, but the potential to disrupt the sector is huge. We caught up with Jonathan to hear how Scope went from an idea to a fast-growing company working with some of the biggest names in TIC.

Could you be a key player in Scope’s founding team?

Generative has partnered exclusively with Scope to hire for key London-based roles in AI and engineering. If you're ready to help reshape the $250bn inspection industry, get in touch with Dan Clouting.

Let’s talk about the origins of Scope. How did you and Jakob come together?

Both of us are really ambitious people from technical backgrounds. I used to work at Conjecture, focusing on document processing and building tools to make AI systems more controllable. And Jakob was a machine learning engineer working with physical data.

We both knew we wanted to start a company, so we left our jobs and joined a start-up program called Entrepreneur First in London; they introduce you to other aspiring founders and you work on exploring problems and developing products together.

We started building AI tools to search documents like PDFs, Excels and other structured data formats, before leaning into the TIC market.

How did Scope end up getting into the TIC industry?

One of our early customers was a large inspection company and the positive reaction we got after working with them was incredible.

We spoke to an inspector on their team who carried a hefty manual of standards she had to reference during every inspection. After trying the tool for the first time, she said, “Wow, I don't need this anymore” and threw the book away.

It was a small moment that spoke volumes.

After this experience, we started talking to more people in the TIC space, and realised it's an industry that's been stuck with dated systems for far too long. We saw an opportunity to create value and solve real problems – so we decided to double down on TIC.

What’s the biggest problem that Scope helps inspectors solve?

Inspectors spend most of their time on planning, creating reports, and data retrieval for their next inspection.

We build tools that automate the time-intensive parts of the process, enabling inspectors to spend more time on decision making. This pays off for our customers: we reduce their cycle time by 45% and get average reporting times down to 12 minutes. Without compromising on the quality of the work.

We talk to companies with 100,000 people, who'll admit, “Yeah, we still do everything on pen and paper”. The reality is, the software that inspectors are using is built for other people. It's built for people in factories, it's built for maintenance experts. Inspectors have been incredibly underserved by tech solutions.

What's the most exciting technical challenge that you're dealing with at the moment?

Something that’s difficult in the inspection space is dealing with a lot of different workflows across customers. Inspecting a t-shirt on a production line is very different from inspecting a power plant. So, we build software that can work for different types of customers. That's a challenge that's been pretty interesting for us to adapt to.

We make bespoke systems for each customer. We've got machine learning engineers who ingest everything from PDF data to Excel data; we use that to automate their workflows. That’s why the companies we work with love our solution. We're embedded in their systems.

As a startup what are you finding the most difficult at the moment?

Good question. At the moment it’s hiring… we have a really high bar. We've hired people from DeepMind, Microsoft and Amazon and want every new hire to make the whole team better.

We're ambitious, doing big things, and striving for excellence. The people that join Scope are motivated and intelligent, so it’s a challenge to find people with the right skills and mindset.

The people we interview are always really excited about working with us. Obviously there’s the technical challenge of building these tools, which is attractive to lots of people. But it's about more than that: our users say that it saves them their weekends and gives them more time back with family. Making that difference is something we all find incredibly fulfilling.

In terms of scaling the product that you've built, what's the main challenge at the moment?

We've taken a very modular approach to development to solve different issues. It can be difficult because most inspection workflows are unique. So, we've been through many iterations.

Now, as we scale, the challenge is to make sure that the data layer stays consistent so we're able to onboard customers faster and make it easier for them to make adjustments to their reports and workflows.

As a small team, we've been able to stay very customer focused. As we scale, we want to keep that mindset – ensuring that everyone on the team gets the same level of customer involvement as we do now. It’s something that we're going to keep at the core of our business as we grow.

How do you see your technology evolving over the next few years? And how will it change what you've built so far?

We know that language models and AI systems will continue to get better. We've seen a steady increase in how these models perform, so I expect that more of our work can be automated in the future. That’ll create opportunities for the businesses we work with.

I see Scope evolving into a platform where businesses can take the data that we gather like all the instructions for a product, and then build their own custom analysis and calculations on top of the data.

You’ve got a clear vision for how the product will evolve as you scale - but how do you see the company changing?

At the moment, we’re looking to make a few key engineering hires to scale the team. We’re on the lookout for people with the right AI skill set, but mindset is just as important for us.

We know nothing worth doing is easy, so everyone on the team needs to be passionate about solving real world problems.

While we’re 10x oversubscribed on our Pre-Seed funding, we predict we'll be raising a Series A in the next 9-to-12 months. We're aiming to have more than a million dollars in revenue in 2025, and – if we hit our growth aims by mid-2026 – we’ll be on track to be doing 2-to-3 million dollars in recurring revenue, which is so exciting.

As a part of the Series A fundraising, we'll be expanding to the US. We have a couple of customers out there who are eager to get involved in what we're doing. One day, we'll have deployment engineers in the Middle East and Asia too. Our ultimate aim is to be working with inspectors around the world.

Scope is hiring!

Work on real-world AI with a pre-seed startup backed by tier-one investors. Contact Dan Clouting to learn more.

When it comes to AI trends, what are you most excited about?

What excites me? This is really niche, but I'm quite excited by OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

We’re getting really good at being able to interpret really ugly hand-written documents, which means we can take a lot of data that's just written down and locked away in a filing cabinet somewhere and turn it into really useful data.

And what do you feel is overhyped?

I think agent frameworks are overhyped. A lot of people talk about AI agents and making them work, but so far, we haven't really seen enough reliability to make it work in an enterprise setting.

While it may work for simple tasks, there's a lot of steps in more complex tasks where things can go wrong.

What's the best advice you've ever received about leading a tech company and a startup?

The best advice I’ve had while building Scope is to build a product that people actually need. Something that genuinely fixes a problem for people.

It’s easy to think about solutions and then try to find people that need that solution. But you should speak to people, find real problems, and then think about how you can build a solution to fix that problem.

You’re obviously incredibly busy. How do you switch off and relax outside of work?

Jakob and I do a lot of running. He recently did a marathon in Europe and I’d like to have a go at the London Marathon one day, but it’s just so hard to get into.

I also love swimming. I do a lot of in-pool swimming, but when I can, I’ll go open-water swimming. I’ve also tried my hand at some long distance swimming when I’ve had the opportunity. A few months ago, I went for a swim across a huge lake in Wales in the middle of winter, which was incredible, but also a big challenge and pretty scary at times!

Finally, if you weren't working at Scope, what do you think you would be doing now?

Before founding Scope, I knew that I wanted to start a business. That’s why I left my job and joined the Entrepreneur First program… but it’s interesting to think where I’d be if things turned out differently.

If I wasn’t building Scope and solving problems for the TIC industry, I'd probably be building another company doing something with AI. There's a lot of interesting problems out there that can be solved with technology and AI, so I’d like to think if I wasn’t fixing problems in the inspections process, I’d still want to be fixing problems elsewhere.

Want to be part of the team revolutionising TIC?