You co-founded Qflow in 2018. What were you working on before that?
I studied Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol and have been working in the industry for about ten years. I worked at engineering companies Mott MacDonald and then BuroHappold Engineering, mostly on the water side of the engineering world, but I got increasingly frustrated with the industry’s inefficiency. Many of the sustainability initiatives that we had worked really hard to produce got “valued engineered” out because it looks cheaper to do it another way – which usually isn’t the case.

How did you start working with Jade Cohen, the company’s co-founder and CPO?
We met in 2016 while volunteering for a charity called World Merit in New York, which was looking to tackle the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We bonded over our love-hate relationship with construction. Jade’s background is in the industry, too; she was working for one of the big contractors, Skanska, on Crossrail and HS2, both major rail projects in the UK. She was getting very frustrated that she was spending a huge amount of time collecting information about the project’s impact and that it was not being used to improve processes. After a few years as close friends, we decided that our industry is one of the core contributors to material consumption and carbon emissions, and wanted to tackle that head-on ourselves. In 2018, we left our engineering careers and founded Qualis Flow.

What problem did you set out to solve with Qualis Flow?
You may have heard the following statistics: 40% of the world’s raw resources are used in engineering and construction and 40% of global emissions come from the built environment. What people don’t know – which is quite terrifying – is that 13% of all those materials that go on to a construction site go direct to waste, without actually being used. We are very bad at managing the materials that we are consuming during construction. We order the wrong thing, or the wrong thing gets delivered, it gets damaged in the process, we order too much of it – and so there is this huge waste, not only from a material perspective, but also in terms of time and cost, and it is damaging the planet. Jade and I started digging into this problem and found that the process is very manual and fragmented across the industry. Before we could even contemplate reducing the amount of materials being used, we needed to understand what was being used and why it was being wasted – and that is where Qflow really comes in.

How is what you are doing new from what has been done before?
Legacy approaches rely on humans to manually collect pieces of paper and type them into spreadsheets, which is what most organisations are using today. The problem is that around 60% that information goes missing or is input wrong, so you are not even getting a slightly good picture of what is actually happening onsite. Some other companies are looking at this space, but they only work in one core area of materials because it is so time consuming and expensive to install bits of hardware or barcodes across the supply chain. The unique thing about Qflow is that our clients aren’t required to install any of those. We work with the existing workflow, instead of overhauling it: automatically digitizing those pieces of paper with the deliveries written on them and waste transfer notes, to ensure that we capture that information across the supply chain, regardless of how digitised it is. It gives us that universal reach and significant ease of deployment.

“There is the added benefit for clients of being able to make strategic decisions using data.”

What value do you bring to clients?
Firstly, we save clients time and money by preventing a human from having to manually type in data, which saves hours and hours. One client says that Qflow has saved them between 60 and 80% of their reporting time on a project, which they estimate is around GBP 35,000 over the course of a year – a massive impact.
Secondly, we notify clients when something has gone wrong. We do this with both materials and waste. We might say: “You have had a timber delivery and it does not meet the project specification for responsibly-sourced timber, so you either have to replace this material or find that certification.” This is saving companies huge amounts of time and cost, too.
Thirdly, there is the added benefit for clients of being able to make strategic decisions using data. This is really hard to quantify, but there is so much value in having that data. Companies can use it to identify where in their supply chain they have risks and where there are opportunities to eliminate carbon and waste throughout the process. Using the Qflow data, they can home in on specific suppliers to ensure that the project meets the required sustainability standards. The information gives them targeted, specific actions that they can take, as opposed to saying “we don’t know what’s going on”, which is typically what happens in our industry.

How does Qflow fit into the wider need for digitisation in the construction industry?
The industry has been on this digitisation journey for quite a few years now. One of the key things that Jade and I experienced personally onsite is that trying to enforce too big of a shift at once upsets people and ends in it not happening effectively. While we were onsite, we saw the introduction of many different apps and tools where you have to manually input lots of different data. It wasn’t actually saving people time onsite; instead, it was causing stress and getting obstructive. In contrast, Qualis Flow’s approach is to fit in with companies’ existing workflows that are undigitised – paper tickets and so on – but enable them to transition gently towards a more digital process. We capture that information from paper, but we turn it into digital information and we push it out via an API into these other reporting systems. It is enabling them to go down that digital journey, but without having to force their entire supply chain to shift at once, which causes a huge amount of friction and results in really poor-quality information. Qflow is part of that bridging process, and also makes sure that that information is accessible and valuable.

What kinds of companies are interested in this type of data?
Insurers are extremely interested in having this information. They need to ensure newly-built buildings against things like fire, water damage, volatile organics, and that kind of thing. Knowing what materials have gone into the building is a critical part of being able to ensure its safety and being able to certify that it will be all right for people to live in, which has become increasingly important since incidents like the Grenfell Tower disaster here in the UK. It is all about having confidence in what has gone into the building. It is not enough to design a building to the right standard; you have got to make sure that it is built to it. Qflow verifies what materials have actually gone into the building. Investors are interested, too, especially on the ESG side. They want to know that the assets that they are investing in have been built environmentally and socially consciously, not using virgin rainforest material or slave labour. The data captured by Qflow is a critical part of having that chain of evidence. Those are just two kinds of companies that are interested in this data, but there are so many more.

How would Qflow share this data with them?
There are many ways we can make this data accessible, by the most likely way would be selling the insights, rather than the raw data itself, which is owned by the contractor. We keep a copy of the anonymised data to train our algorithms and develop insights. Where we see Qflow going in the future is selling the insights that have been aggregated to these organisations. An investor might come to us and say “I want a picture of the top ten contractors” or “I am investing in this project and I want to know how this contractor has performed in terms of ESG”. They will be able to purchase reports and insights around specific parts of the industry, which will enable them to make better and more focused decisions.

What’s next for Qualis Flow?
In terms of geography, the short-term focus is about scaling across the UK. We are starting to look into international expansion via some of our customers, first to Australian market, and then also to Europe and the United States. On the technical side, we are integrating with other tools and systems, but the next step is to integrate with building information modelling (BIM), a large piece of work with a lot of data science behind it. That is one of the next focus areas for us.