Building the first intelligence layer for industrial assets: Our investment in Scope

There's a type of founder we keep coming back to at Index: someone who works so obsessively to fix a problem they’ve identified that it becomes their only calling. Rather than a market to be sized, it’s a challenge they feel compelled to solve. That's how it felt the first time we sat down with Jonny Low, Scope’s CEO and co-founder.

When we met Jonny, it immediately became clear that he had an intimate knowledge of the industry he wanted to make more efficient. Jonny and his co-founder Jakob had spent months cold-calling Testing, Investigations and Certifications (TIC) companies, visiting sites and joining inspections themselves.

The result is a product that TIC firms love. Inspectors at 6 of the top 10 global inspection companies are using the platform. The company has experienced 9x ARR growth since launching and has a 100% pilot conversion rate — and the TIC industry's trajectory makes that momentum only more urgent. Certified roles take up to ten years to qualify for and it takes an average of 10 months to fill a lost role. 40% of inspectors are set to retire within the decade.

Scope starts by giving inspectors their time back: replacing clipboards and manual reporting with AI-powered workflows that compress days of desk work into hours, so they can spend more time in the field, doing what they were hired to do. The platform also allows new inspectors to enter any site and be guided by workflows, industrial context and historical data, all available at the tap of a screen so they can get up to speed, faster.

But the vision goes far beyond the inspection report. Scope is processing a new kind of data that has never been captured before, enabling the platform to understand how physical assets behave, degrade and are maintained. Over time, that will compound into something this industry has never had: a live intelligence layer for physical infrastructure that could transform how industrial sites are operated, maintained and kept safe.

It’s a big vision, but Jonny and Jakob have the urgency, intelligence and determination to take it on. They’ll fly across the Atlantic to close a single candidate and visit a new country and a new customer site at the drop of a hat. But they pair it with a rare honesty about what they know and what they don't. Where they have conviction, they move with extraordinary speed. Where they're still learning, they seek out the hardest feedback they can find, then show up to the next conversation having already acted on it; having already reached a new level.

Building a relationship with Jonny and Jakob, we've had a front-row seat to their evolution – and the upwards slope they are on. That trajectory, more than any single metric, is what convinced us to partner with them and lead this $20M funding round.