Construction / Infrastructure software · Deep dive

FYLD

AI frontline-intelligence platform for infrastructure fieldwork — crews film short videos at the point of work, FYLD's AI converts them into risk assessments and live job visibility, replacing paper forms and windshield-time supervision.

emerging

The question that decides it: FYLD's whole loop depends on reluctant crews filming their own worksites: video risk assessments are both the compliance product and the training data. Does frontline usage hold once executive mandates stop being enforced — the field app sits at 2.8 stars on Google Play against 82% corporate revenue growth — or does crew pushback cap capture rates and let checklist incumbents (SafetyCulture) and no-worker-input predictive models (Urbint, backed by FYLD's own Series B lead EIP) bracket it from both sides?

My take ★★ Very interesting ★ Interesting − Maybe ✗ Not interesting

Snapshot

FYLD sells what it calls frontline intelligence to gas, water, power and heavy-civil operators: instead of filling in a paper risk assessment, a field crew films a short video at the point of work, narrating the hazards; FYLD’s AI turns the footage into a structured risk assessment, flags what the worker missed, and gives managers live visibility of every job without driving to site. Born in July 2020 as an unusual three-way spinout — gas network SGN, BCG Digital Ventures, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan’s Koru incubator — it has become close to a UK utility-sector standard, deployed on 12 of the 18 UK networks (company, Feb 2026), and is now spending a $41M Series B led by Energy Impact Partners (Feb 18, 2026) to chase US contractors like Kiewit and Quanta Services. Revenue grew 82% in 2025 (company); Latka estimates ARR at $28.8M (2025). The tension worth watching: the buyers love it, and the Google Play app the crews actually use sits at 2.8 stars.

Founding story

FYLD was not founded in a garage; it was manufactured, deliberately, by three corporates with complementary motives. SGN — the gas distribution network covering Scotland and southern England, then part-owned by Ontario Teachers’ — wanted a productivity and safety step-change for thousands of dispersed two-person crews. BCG Digital Ventures supplied the venture build. Koru, the incubator BCG DV launched with Ontario Teachers’ in 2019, supplied capital and the mandate to spin ventures out of OTPP portfolio companies. A joint team of Koru engineers, BCG DV staff and SGN field personnel built the product inside SGN’s transformation program and launched it as an independent company in July 2020, claiming up to 20% workforce productivity gains from the pilot (launch release, Jul 2020).

The two people fronting it map to the two halves of the sell. Shelley Copsey, CEO, is a commercialisation specialist rather than a field veteran: corporate venturing at PwC Australia, then new-ventures lead at CSIRO’s Data61, recruited to run the venture as co-founder. Karl Simons OBE, co-founder and “Chief Futurist,” is the field veteran: a former armed-forces mechanical engineer with 35 years across defence, oil and gas, and utilities, and Thames Water’s long-time chief health, safety and wellbeing officer, with an OBE and a seat advising the UK Cabinet Office. Copsey sells the ROI to COOs; Simons makes safety directors comfortable that this is a safety product, not a surveillance product. That the founding story contains no field worker is worth noticing — the user was never the customer.

How it works

Start with what it replaces. Before every job on a gas main or water repair, UK rules require a point-of-work risk assessment: historically a paper or PDF form, often filled in from the van, sometimes from memory, reviewed rarely, audited after something goes wrong. Supervisors verify quality by driving site to site — windshield time — and idle time between jobs is invisible to everyone.

With FYLD, the crew walks to the actual point of work and records a short video — roughly 30 seconds and up — panning the site while talking through hazards and controls: traffic, buried services, trench condition, weather. Speech-to-text and computer vision process the recording; the AI generates a structured visual risk assessment with a bullet list of hazards and proposed controls, and prompts the worker or manager when something expected is absent — the model has seen thousands of comparable jobs and knows what a site like this usually contains. A remote manager reviews the video and signs off, which is the mechanical unlock: one first-line manager can supervise more crews without driving. SGN’s deployment lifted spans of control from 1:5 to 1:6 and cut supervisor mileage 36% (FYLD case study). Every action is logged for compliance and audit. The same capture loop feeds dashboards on job blockers and idle time — FYLD’s analysis of 16,000+ hours of SGN blockers found over 75% addressable with process redesign — and a customer-facing module, ShowMe, lets utilities triage end-customer issues by video before rolling a truck. The subtle point: the videos are simultaneously the compliance artifact, the management product, and the training data. Everything depends on crews actually filming them, honestly, job after job.

Product and business overview

The platform bundles four things. First, video risk assessments (VRAs) — the wedge product described above, with AI hazard flagging and remote sign-off. Second, digital work execution: permits, forms, wrap-up documentation and job records replacing paper packs, with a June 2026 app release reworking workflows, uploads and permits. Third, manager visibility and analytics: live job status, risk-ranked site-visit prioritisation (so supervisors visit the riskiest sites, not the nearest), blocker and idle-time analytics, and predictive safety interventions — the SGN program under that name won recognition at the 2025 Utility Week Awards. Fourth, ShowMe, the customer-facing video triage tool expanded in 2025. It is sold top-down to utilities, their tier-1 contractors (Morrison Water Services, M Group-style alliance partners) and heavy-civil builders, then rolled out across entire field workforces — FYLD’s customers now include organisations managing 30,000-40,000 field workers (company, Feb 2026).

Business model and pricing

Enterprise SaaS, priced per deployed field workforce; FYLD publishes no price list, and no per-seat figure has been reported. Field-workforce platforms of this type generally land between $50 and $200 per user per month at mid-market and negotiate down at volume (industry pricing guides, 2026), and FYLD’s economics are enterprise-shaped: multi-year contracts with utilities and contractors, expansion by rolling from one region or activity (repair, connections, mains replacement) to the next. The company’s counter to enterprise-software deployment pain is speed — time-to-value “as short as four weeks” versus multi-year legacy rollouts (company, Feb 2026). Two financing details signal the model’s cash profile: a $10M NatWest debt facility (Oct 2024) to fund growth without dilution, and a Series B press release datelined Houston, marking where the expansion budget is going. More than 40% of total revenue is expected to come from the US by end-2026 (company, Feb 2026).

Traction over time

• Jul 2020 — launch out of SGN/BCG DV/Koru; SGN as anchor customer.
• 2021 — SGN crews record 31,000+ VRAs in the year; SGN reports a 20% decrease in safety events and £2.9M of realised benefits; 10,400 fieldworker hours saved via VRAs (FYLD/SGN case material).
• Nov 2021 — £10M Series A (Koru, SGN).
• 2023-24 — international push; £12M round led by Ontario Teachers’ (Apr 2024) explicitly “to take the platform global”; $10M NatWest debt (Oct 2024).
• 2025 — 82% YoY revenue growth (company); Latka estimates $28.8M ARR; US customer adds: Kiewit, Quanta Services, Emery Sapp & Sons, Sulzer, alongside Ferrovial; platform live on 12 of 18 UK utility networks; named a Sample Vendor in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Frontline Worker Technologies; Deloitte UK Fast 50 and Sifted top-250 listings; Mohan Sadashiva joins as Chief Product & Technology Officer, Lee Griffin as CRO.
• Feb 2026 — $41M Series B (EIP, Partech); cumulative claim: serious worksite injuries and incidents down up to 48% across customers since launch (company).

Headcount is not precisely disclosed; press and LinkedIn point to roughly 100-150 (2025-26). No independent revenue figure exists — the 82% and the $28.8M both trace to the company and to Latka respectively, and neither is audited.

Market analysis

FYLD straddles two overlapping categories. Connected-worker platforms: $5.9B in 2024, projected to $18.6B by 2032 at ~17% CAGR (Verified Market Research, 2025); the more conservative Verdantix pegs connected-worker solutions at $3.2B by 2028 after a slow start. EHS software: $8.2B in 2025 growing ~8% annually to $12.2B by 2030 (The Business Research Company, 2025). Safety monitoring is the largest connected-worker subsegment (~38% share, 2025), pushed by OSHA and ISO 45001 pressure. The structural tailwind FYLD’s Series B lead is explicitly betting on is the buildout wave: data-center-driven grid expansion, water-main replacement and energy-transition capex all require more fieldwork from a workforce that is aging out, which makes per-worker productivity software a capacity story, not just a compliance story (EIP statement, Feb 2026). The UK regulated-utility niche that birthed FYLD is nearly saturated by its own 12-of-18 count; the US contractor market is the TAM that justifies the round.

Competitive intel

See the competitor set in the sidebar for scale figures. The shape of the threat is a pincer. From below, SafetyCulture’s checklist empire and Safesite-style SMB tools make digital inspections nearly free and are bolting AI onto enormous installed bases — if video-narrated assessments become a feature of a $30/seat tool, FYLD’s premium needs the analytics layer to carry it. From the side, Urbint predicts utility field risk from external data with no crew participation at all — a philosophically opposite architecture that avoids FYLD’s adoption problem entirely, and one whose cap table (National Grid Partners, EIP) overlaps FYLD’s own new lead investor. From above, enterprise EHS suites (Intelex, Cority) and Procore own the budget lines and the systems of record in their respective territories and can bundle “good enough” capture. FYLD’s genuine edges: video-first capture generates evidence and training data checklists cannot; utility-grade references (SGN, Ferrovial, 12 UK networks) that took five years of regulated-industry credibility to earn; and Simons-grade access to safety leadership. None of those edges is self-defending in US heavy construction, where it arrives as the challenger.

History and evolution

2019: BCG DV and Ontario Teachers’ launch Koru. Jul 2020: FYLD launches from the SGN transformation program, mid-pandemic, when remote site visibility was suddenly urgent. 2021: Utility Week Awards finalist with SGN; 31,000 VRAs recorded; Nov Series A. 2022-23: expansion beyond SGN to UK water and energy networks and contractor alliances (Morrison Water Services commended at the Water Industry Awards); early Australia/North America moves. Apr 2024: £12M OTPP-led round — notably modest for a four-year-old “category definer,” and labelled Series B by some outlets, suggesting the real Series B took two more years to earn. Oct 2024: NatWest debt. 2025: US customer wins, executive rebuild (new CPTO and CRO — the original product leadership did not scale to this phase), Gartner and Deloitte recognitions, and the Predictive Safety Interventions award with SGN. Feb 2026: $41M Series B, Houston dateline, 82% growth claim. Jun-Jul 2026: app relaunch with reworked workflows — and fresh one-star registration complaints on Google Play.

What people say

The case for. Employees rate FYLD 4.6/5 on Glassdoor across 28 reviews, with 87% recommending it (mid-2026) — strong for a scale-up mid-pivot to the US. Customer-side praise comes through results rather than review sites: SGN’s 20% reduction in safety events and £2.9M benefits (2021), the up-to-48% serious-injury reduction claim across customers (company, Feb 2026), repeat industry awards with SGN and Morrison Water Services (2021-2025), and Gartner’s nod as a Hype Cycle sample vendor (2025). Early field reviews on Google Play from 2020 praise simplicity for recording site events. Buyers echo the four-week deployment claim as the differentiator against legacy EHS suites.

The complaints. The field app — the product 30,000-worker deployments live or die on — holds a 2.8-star rating across 75 Google Play reviews (10K+ downloads, checked Jul 2026). Recurring themes: registration and sign-up code failures (a July 2026 reviewer never got working codes after the relaunch), buggy nagging (a 2021 reviewer repeatedly prompted for fatigue risk assessments hours into a shift), and permissioning gaps pushed down from employers. The listing itself discloses location sharing, which lands differently for a worker than for a safety director; research on field-worker monitoring consistently finds a majority of workers distrust GPS-carrying employer apps, and FYLD’s model — your own video, graded by AI, visible to your manager — is precisely the kind of tool that surveys say crews experience as surveillance, even though no FYLD-specific organized pushback has been reported publicly. There is no meaningful G2 or Capterra footprint (mid-2026), so buyer-side dissatisfaction is invisible rather than absent. And every headline metric — 82% growth, 48% injury reduction, $28.8M ARR — is company-sourced or third-party-estimated, not audited.

Outlook: the open question

FYLD works if — and only if — frontline capture rates stay high after the mandate energy fades. The bull case would be confirmed by: US logos like Kiewit and Quanta expanding from pilots to full contractor bases through 2026-27; VRA volumes per worker holding or rising in year-two and year-three deployments; the app rating converging toward the Glassdoor rating as the 2026 rebuild lands; and the 40%-US-revenue target hit on schedule. If those hold, FYLD becomes the system of record for point-of-work risk in infrastructure — a dataset of millions of narrated hazard videos nobody else has, defensible against both checklists and external-data models, and the obvious consolidator (or acquisition) in a category EIP is visibly assembling. The bear case is falsified adoption: crews film perfunctory VRAs or stop filming, model quality plateaus because the training data is compliance theater, US contractors — non-union or union, but either way less regulated than UK gas networks — decline to mandate video, and SafetyCulture ships a good-enough narrated-inspection feature at a third of the price while Urbint gives US utilities risk prediction with zero crew friction. The 2.8 stars versus 82% growth is not a contradiction; it is the company’s entire risk profile expressed as two numbers. Watch which one moves first.

How a challenger would attack it

Build for the crew FYLD never designed for. The founding story contains no field worker, and it shows: a 2.8-star Google Play rating against 4.6 Glassdoor stars is a company loved by everyone except its users. A challenger would make the worker the product’s beneficiary, not its data source — a field app whose registration works, that never nags a crew hours into a shift, that shares productivity data with the worker before the manager, and that treats location sharing as opt-in with visible boundaries. Win the crews and the capture-rate problem that caps FYLD’s model quality becomes the challenger’s moat. The second vector is passive capture: FYLD’s loop requires reluctant humans to film honestly, job after job; body-worn or vehicle-mounted cameras with automatic hazard detection deliver the same compliance artifact with zero behavioral demand — the Urbint philosophy applied at the point of work. Third, attack the US beachhead before it hardens: FYLD’s five years of credibility is UK-regulated-utility credibility, and its Kiewit and Quanta relationships are new pilots, not installed bases; a US-native competitor that speaks heavy-civil rather than gas-network compliance, priced against SafetyCulture’s $30-seat anchor rather than enterprise negotiation, forces FYLD to defend its premium with an analytics layer whose training data depends on the very adoption the app reviews call into question.

Same playbook, new buyer

Video-narrated point-of-work risk assessment is a mechanism, not a utilities product, and the most promising transplants are verticals FYLD’s roadmap ignores. Insurance is the sharpest: workers’ comp and contractor-liability carriers would pay for — or subsidize — VRA capture across their insured base, because narrated site video before every job is underwriting and claims-defense gold; the buyer shifts from the operator’s COO to the carrier, and the worker’s incentive flips from surveillance to premium reduction. Second: telecom and renewables field forces — tower climbs, solar and wind O&M — share the dispersed-two-person-crew profile of SGN’s gas teams but sit outside FYLD’s utility-network sales motion entirely. Third: down-market self-serve for mid-size subcontractors, where SafetyCulture’s checklist model is the only option and no enterprise sales team will ever call. FYLD can’t chase these easily: its Series B thesis, its Houston expansion budget, and its 40%-US-revenue target lock it onto large utility and heavy-civil accounts, its enterprise deployment model has no self-serve motion, and an insurance-distribution play would require rebuilding its data-governance story around a third party its operator customers may not want watching.

Sources and further reading

• FYLD Raises $41 Million Series B — GlobeNewswire / FYLD, Feb 18, 2026
• AI field operations startup FYLD raises $41M — SiliconANGLE, Feb 17, 2026
• London’s female-founded FYLD raises $41M — Tech Funding News, Feb 2026
• FYLD raises £10 million in Series A funding — UKTech News, Nov 30, 2021
• FYLD secures £12 million investment led by Ontario Teachers’ — UKTech News, Apr 17, 2024
• FYLD Secures $10 Million in Financing from NatWest — PR Newswire, Oct 30, 2024
• New platform set to revolutionise safety and productivity of field teams — PR Newswire (launch release), Jul 2020
• A Proven Model for Corporate Venturing (Koru/FYLD) — BCG, 2022
• SGN’s new app improving productivity for workers in the FYLD — Tech Monitor
• FYLD on Google Play (ratings and reviews) — Google Play, accessed Jul 2026
• Connected Worker Platform Market — Verified Market Research, 2025
• Shelley Copsey: $48 Million Raised to Transform Field Work Execution — Frontlines.io podcast, 2025