Supporting construction innovation.
The winner of last year’s COINS Grand Challenge Ardalan Khosrowpour, CEO of OnSiteIQ, explains what COINS support means to him. COINS Grand Challenge is a global competition to support innovation within the construction industry www.coins-grandchallenge.com
My name is Ardalan Khosrowpour, I’m the CEO and founder of OnSiteIQ, a visual documentation and risk assessment software platform for the construction industry.
We use off-the-shelf 360 degree cameras and our network of data collectors visit the construction sites on a weekly basis, where they walk the site and capture everything. We’ve built a computer vision-based software where we can map the walk-through path to the floorplan. So pretty much like Streetview, you can log in from any location at any time and walk the site, and then we’re building an artificial intelligence platform that goes through that data and identifies different risk issues, safety and hazards.
COINS’ support is invaluable. It’s amazing that they are giving back to the construction industry. It’s a great opportunity for start-ups, young start-ups more specifically, like us, to be supported by larger tech companies in the construction industry. It helped us to gain more traction, it gave us access to the construction industry experts on the tech side and also on the construction side itself.
It’s an amazing thing that COINS is doing from two different perspectives. One is COINS stays competitive by working with start-ups like us who are more focussed in the artificial intelligence computer vision world, and also its great for us, because we can leverage the experience that they’ve got and all these years of business and construction industry software development. So, we benefit from their network, their business acumen, their business infrastructure, systems and operations, they benefit from the innovation in artificial intelligence and computer vision that we’re bringing. They benefit from our technology and we benefit from their customer base.
There were 300 companies and we won the award, so you have to work hard to get there, but it’s an amazing opportunity for people like us who are just at the beginning of the way, the whole journey. So, it’s brilliant, it’s amazing and it’s a really good support for the construction tech industry as a whole.
Could your idea improve the construction industry or the built environment? The 2019 COINS Grand Challenge is an opportunity to win funding of over £100k, business support and more.
COINS Grand Challenge is a global competition to support innovation within the construction industry. Open to anyone with ideas to improve construction - from reducing costs, increasing efficiency, improving sustainability, safety, quality or compliance throughout the built life cycle. The challenge has two entry categories, professional and undergraduate
Last year, 11 finalists represented 7 countries and a wide variety of ideas. The 2019 COINS Grand Challenge is now open for entries, with the deadline entries being 12 April – find out more and enter online at www.coins-grandchallenge.com
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