With €600,000 secured from DBIC Ventures, Evercam plans to grow the international sales team for its video-led construction analytics technology.
Dublin-headquartered Evercam has secured the first Smart Tech Fund investment from the venture arm of the Dublin Business Innovation Centre, DBIC Ventures.
On the back of the €600,000 investment, Evercam has announced the creation of 50 new roles at the company. This will effectively double Evercam’s current workforce, which is spread across Ireland, the UK, the US, Australia, Pakistan, Algeria, Poland and Canada.
Evercam’s timelapse and project management cameras service the construction industry, including clients such as BAM, Kingspan, John Paul Construction and Savills. The company offers features such as live site views accessible anywhere, marketing-worthy timelapse video and high-resolution images, as well as a simple, secure way to share the captured footage.
Last year, Evercam was among 10 participants in Intel’s Edge AI incubator, hosted in association with Talent Garden at Dublin City University.
Currently, the company is focused on sales growth with recruitment concentrated in this area. The sales team currently makes up about one-third of Evercam’s workforce, but co-founder and CEO Marco Herbst expects half of the company to be working in this area by the middle of 2022.
“We’ve recently hired in Austin, Texas and Brisbane and we plan to make further sales hires in those offices plus Poland, Denver and Boston,” he told Siliconrepublic.com.
Herbst explained that the company is “currently in a hybrid situation”, with Covid-19 restrictions meaning most of the team is working from home. Most if not all the new hires will be remote, and Herbst said this may not be a temporary measure.
“The companies I admire most are those that are fully remote, such as GitLab and where possible I will work towards that,” he added.
“What I’ve found is that a remote culture forces us to be very good at communications and, ultimately, Evercam is a communications tool. We believe that the lion’s share of construction’s unnecessary costs – delays and disputes – come from communications failures.”
Smart Tech Fund
Herbst founded Evercam along with his business partner, Vinnie Quinn. Its high-resolution time-lapse cameras integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence to help clients ascertain real-time project status and site activity.
As well as expanding the team, the investment will support the ongoing roll-out of Evercam’s construction analytics services, including its recently launched Gate Report feature, which can automatically identify all vehicles that enter and exit a construction site.
“Evercam has a very deep understanding of the intricate challenges and needs of large-scale construction projects,” said Richard Watson, managing partner at DBIC Ventures. “They have developed a highly evolved software platform employing advanced data analytics, which deliver significant cost and time savings, as well as a range of other benefits to their construction clients.
“Construction has lagged many industries in terms of the adoption of digital technologies and Evercam is well positioned to become a leading tech solution provider in this space.”
DBIC Ventures’ Smart Tech Fund launched late last year, having raised €23m to support Irish start-ups. Enterprise Ireland contributed €16m to the fund, and a number of Irish technology entrepreneurs and business leaders also participated.
The fund is targeting early-stage B2B software companies, particularly in the fintech, cybersecurity, healthcare, ICT, smart grid and digital transformation spaces, as well as medical device businesses. The Smart Tech Fund is set to back 30 high-growth early-stage Irish tech companies over the next four years.