Think of any large construction project around Ireland over the past five years and more than likely Evercam was involved. 

The recently completed ESB building on Merrion Square, the National Children’s Hospital in Dublin 8, the Intel data centre in Kildare, have all been monitored by Evercam’s 4k resolution cameras.

In Dublin alone, the company is working on more projects than there are tower cranes, and according to the Construction Industry Federation, there are 120 tower cranes across the capital right now. 

And on most sites, Evercam’s cameras are there, monitoring the gate each day for what, and who enters, tracking movement, and constantly communicating back to stakeholders what is occurring on site. 

The aim is to protect against the three major enemies of any construction project: delays, disputes and rework. 

“The biggest lie on any construction site is that it is ready,” Marco Herbst, the CEO and co-founder of the company said in this week’s podcast.

“Construction is just so full of unnecessary arguments and disputes about really basic things and the beautiful thing about a photograph is that it is the trusted source of truth.

“Clients use us as insurance against dispute resolution, there is no project where nothing unexpected happens. Evercam reduces costs by six and seven figure sums.”

Growth and expansion

In the past two years, Evercam has tripled their number of employees and now has 385 projects live in 10 countries. Its customers include asset owners, contractors, and consultants.

Much more than a CCTV camera, Evercam presents clients with live intelligence about what precisely is happening on site, but also it makes it possible for clients to search a database of past events. 

Through their Gate Report technology, which allows for project owners to search a database of information to find out anything from the number of people on site 29 days ago, to the tonnage of soil that was removed by one company, or the number of delivery deadlines missed by another. 

But the other and perhaps more exciting area of growth is Evercam’s application of predictive technology.

Through their access to Building Information Modelling (BIM) Evercam is able to say when exactly something should be happening on site, in order for targets to be reached. 

“Most of the large projects today are completed digitally before they get built in real life, but they are also scheduled,” Herbst said.

“So it’s not just, this is the finished project, but, this is where we should be at every stage of the journey and this is what it should look like. This is the frontier of where we are right now.”

The technology is also able to predict and communicate when accidents are most likely to happen, a number one concern for project owners, according to Herbst. 

A millionaire in his twenties

Herbst is a lifelong entrepreneur, having sold jobs.ie, the jobs platform, which began life as nixers.com to Denis O’Brien in 2005. 

The deal made Herbst and his co-founder, Vinnie Quinn, millionaires in their twenties. 

Herbst – whose father Michael Herbst is German but runs a polo business near Blainroe, County Wicklow – took off for Berlin. 

Ostensibly he moved away to learn to play the piano, but he was really in pursuit of anything that wasn’t related to business. 

“I wanted to just step away from the world of business for a while, there was a feeling that if I jumped straight into another business, that was then what my life was going to be forever,” he said.

“I was doing anything except work, so as long as it was not productive I was there. They were some of the best years of my life.”

After five years of enjoying himself, the urge to get going again struck, and the earliest incarnation of Evercam was born out of making a video for a children’s gardening project across the road from his flat in Kreuzberg.

The initial idea was cloud security cameras, but security was not a passion of either Herbst, or Quinn. 

What became most interesting to them, as time and intelligence evolved, was the ability to layer AI with the footage they were recording on site and to use it as an intermediary and collaborative tool. 

Where the business is now, is at the frontier of what is possible and Evercam now has the potential to have a material impact on the construction sector. 

Aside from the development of the technology itself, the issue for Evercam is how to grow and where to grow next. Evercam is dominant in Ireland and in Europe but is only scratching the surface of the American and Middle Eastern market.

Evercam has raised €5 million so far and the time has now come for Herbst to look for Series A funding, which will be in the ballpark of €10 million.

The challenge, he believes, is to predict where the market will be in five years, and make sure Evercam is the biggest player in that space.

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