Unexpected construction issues, infrastructure failures, and wasted maintenance investments can cost millions to fix on individual projects. BKwai aims to revolutionise the construction and asset management industries through its cloud-based machine learning platform. This can intelligently forecast possible structural, ground, and environmental issues and defects within major construction projects and existing developments before they occur. Their data technology makes sense of the huge amount of engineering, survey, space, environmental, and historical data that normally overwhelms organisations. The system can identify trends and anomalies within the data to predict and forecast disruptive, dangerous, and costly future events.
Dr Sakthy Selvakumaran is the founder and CEO of the company and has responsibility for all functions across the business. As an early-stage company, this means she has many operational roles, including sales, board director, and investor relationships and fundraising.
Sakthy recognises that understanding and developing her own leadership style will support BKwai through a period of rapid change and disruption. She recognises that the Shott Scale Up Accelerator’s mentoring can help her “identify blind spots, offer strategic advice, and share real-world insights that would help me refine my own leadership skills.”
She would also like to understand different approaches to leading organisational change in a challenging economic environment. As she acknowledges “I did not realise exactly how many challenges I would face until I became pregnant and discussed my plans for the business!” The Shott Scale Up Accelerator’s coaching and networking will help her “support the company, both in being agile and adapting but also in moving from a small team where I am largely the driving force and key decision-maker, to scaling a broader team.”
BKwai as a business is coming into an interesting and commercially (in terms of scalability) important period, and Sakthy wants to build a scalable and sustainable business, which “requires building the right team and advisory board.”
BKwai's progress to date has primarily been to develop engineering technology, deploy pilots, and develop first contracts to build confidence of product–market fit. They will be aiming to raise a Series A round for the purpose of scaling commercially and investigating expansion to territories outside of the UK – primarily the US.
