Trend-setters: Celebrating 5 years of Trendspek

Back in 2019, former commercial pilots Derek Feebrey, Fiona Church and Mitch Deam had an idea.

Having ran a successful enterprise commercial drone business for a few years, working directly with asset owners to aerial capture their buildings, they noticed that the infrastructure industry was experiencing a shift.

Aerial drone surveys were growing in popularity as a turnkey solution to safely inspect large-scale assets, such as shipping ports, mines and container cranes. With minimal safety risk, the drone solution was not only keeping personnel safe by avoiding heavy machinery and rope abseiling, but also delivering major efficiency gains across projects with minimal shutdown periods.

As interest in drone surveys grew, it started to become a question of: once you had those tens of thousands of drone photos of a building facade, what could you actually do with them?

After a global search, they found a solution didn’t exist yet.

So they decided to build it themselves.

With the expertise of key hires Josh Sinclair (Head of Product) and Haoran Un (Head of Development), Trendspek was born.

Trendspek today: Award-winning platform in 20+ countries

Today, Trendspek’s Precision Asset Intelligence is an industry-leading asset management software that transforms vast volumes of photogrammetry data into beautiful, engineering-grade 3D models of built assets.

With millimetre detail, advanced measurement tools and interactive reporting, Trendspek’s software not only recreates built assets in powerful, high-fidelity 3D, but also minimises the safety risks of on-site inspections and opens up predictive maintenance pathways.

Trendspek is used globally across more than 20 countries, championed by leading organisations such as National Grid, Applus+, Infracorr, Sterling, PGIM, Aggregate, Placemaking NSW and leading universities including University of Sydney and University of Melbourne. Within one virtual workspace, we’re facilitating a truly globalised workforce of engineers via remote collaboration.

In recent years we’ve expanded our team to over 30 employees, opened our new Sydney headquarters in Stone and Chalk, and won our first major award — Australia’s Most Innovative Proptech Scaleup in 2024. 

With further key hires in our pipeline, we are proud to be supporting the economy with the NSW technology precinct, and beyond. 

Key recent highlights:

• We spread our wings to the Middle East to enable a comprehensive digital condition assessment of the 25km King Fahd Causeway — which connects Saudi Arabia and Bahrain — in partnership with Applus+, Egis and VCL Engineering.

• We supported the landmark reopening of White Bay Power Station, providing Placemaking NSW's project team with millimetre-detail 3D models so they could access hard-to-reach areas and streamline extensive remediation works.

• We completed a comprehensive 3D portfolio across University of Sydney, enabling a pioneering new approach to real asset management for higher education assets.

• We developed an AI-powered crack detection tool in collaboration with MLOps platform Datature, which successfully expedites condition assessments across large concrete structures. 

As we continue to scale, we remain first and foremost a people-first company, and this also extends to our clients. We’re incredibly proud to partner with innovative leaders across multiple industries who share our vision: to do things differently and challenge the status quo, for the better.

Derek Feebrey, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Trendspek:

“I have seen Trendspek evolve piece-by-piece, day-by-day. We have built a team that has never settled.  Whether it’s the platform, or how we work with clients, our security posture, the way we collaborate internally — there is no part of the business that hasn’t wanted to do better that we did yesterday."

A journey through our milestones

Trendspek goes global with Series A

In 2022, Trendspek successfully completed its Series A raise of $6.3 million AUD, led by strategic investment from real asset technology house Taronga Ventures and Australia’s largest insurer IAG.

Jonathan Hannam, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Taronga Ventures:

"Trendspek is changing how asset owners approach risk assessment and asset management, and we are pleased to support the team to make Precision Asset Intelligence a core component across global assets.”

Partnerships with global networks 

We're proudly partnered with the UK Business and Trade's Global Entrepreneur Programme (GEP), a program that helps international entrepreneurs expand by establishing their global headquarters in the UK.

Through this partnership, we've embarked on two UK founders trips to take part in Investment NSW's Tech Week Trade Delegation, meet with key partners, and attend industry trade events such as GEO Business Show.

We also joined forces with ARIAM Hub to collaborate on a three-year program of research into infrastructure modelling for visually challenging aspects, such as glass facades, windows, water, and other reflective materials.

Professor Ian Manchester, Director of ARIAM Hub:

“Together, we are tackling the critical research problems that need to be solved, to deliver new knowledge and new technology that optimises decision making and delivers real-world impact."

We partnered with RealAssetX to develop AI property solutions, an innovation lab launched by PGIM Real Estate and real asset technology investor Taronga Ventures.

With the potential to automatically identify and track building defects over time, our innovative approach will provide asset owners with a plan on what requires remediation, when and how much it will cost, according to a customised risk vs. cost matrix.

Naqash Tahir, Executive Director, CIO Office at PGIM Real Estate:

“RealAssetX is delighted to partner with Trendspek to develop innovative AI technology, which aims to enhance a property’s lifecycle through advanced defect detection and predictive failure, thus optimising operations and improving investment performance."

We've also had the opportunity to take part in key industry events, delivering thought leadership at TEFMA Smarter Data, InsurTech Australia and RPAS in Australian Skies, where we were nominated as finalists for Innovation Technology Champion.

Our co-founder Fiona is also a board member of Apropela, a not-for-profit organisation supporting female entrepreneurs.

Trendspek's new Sydney home in Stone and Chalk

In 2022 we established our new Sydney headquarters at Stone and Chalk, a leading innovation tech hub led by Investment NSW in the 477 on Pitt building by ISPT.

Joining Stone and Chalk’s technology network has allowed us to partner with like-minded scale-up businesses, while receiving valuable, ongoing support and connections through it’s in-house team.

The hub is also pet-friendly, which means our Chief Happiness Officer Charlotte can join us in the office!

Linh Le, Scaleup Success and Community Manager at Stone & Chalk:

“Not only are Trendspek doing some amazing things in market and solving real life problems in physical property asset, they are one of the most friendliest teams in residence here with us at our Scaleup Hub in the Tech Central Sydney precinct.”

Trendspek wins at PropTech Awards 2024

We were delighted to be announced as the winner for Most Innovative Proptech Scaleup (Asset and Facilities Management) at the 2024 PropTech Awards, selected by a panel of more than 40 industry judges. 

Redefining compliance standards with Triple ISO, SOC2 1 + 2

We identified early on the need for a high level of cybersecurity, and were the first of our class to achieve ISO 27701 in 2023 for Privacy Information, a testament to our ongoing commitment to the highest levels of compliance.

Mitch Deam, Co-Founder and Chief Compliance Officer at Trendspek:

“We were amongst the first to achieve  ISO 27001 and ISO 9001. We continue to lead the field by achieving ISO 27701, SOC2 Type 1 and Type 2, and GDPR compliance."

Building world-class features for better asset management

In 2023 we launched Trendspek 2.0: our biggest ever platform upgrade with a host of powerful new features and improvements, such as:

Since then, we’ve released even more powerful new features, including Annotate on Source Images and Panoramas.

Josh Sinclair, Head of Product at Trendspek:

"Trendspek is all about finding better ways to manage critical assets. We've learned that less is often more. It's better to build big, meaningful features that genuinely add value for our users than to focus on many smaller ones."

Diversifying our software for unique use cases

We've developed our software to cater challenging use cases, such as inspecting under wharves, using integrated reality capture.

With hundreds of metres of the wharf structure to look at, and a race against time to conduct the inspection, it can be difficult for surveyors to correctly record and report the location of defects.

By using Trendspek, surveyors complete comprehensive condition assessments without needing to physically go underneath a wharf.

We've also developed our software with two powerful algorithms to help identify concrete corrosion and cracks, which is especially useful in the case of RAAC concrete.

Trendspek's Roof Deflection Tool allows you to quickly identify sagging and deviated sections of a structure, accurate up to the millimetre. These defects can be readily exported into interactive reports to share with engineers to immediately plan remediation work.

Inspecting underneath a wharf using Trendspek 3D model:

Championing female leadership and diversity

Across the Australian technology industry, women make up only an average 31% of employees.

Trendspek proudly stands well beyond that statistic, with our leadership team comprised of 50% women and our co-founder Fiona Church at the forefront.

Having begun her career as a commercial airline pilot (in an industry where just 5% of pilots are women), Fiona has long been breaking barriers. Her leadership inspires not only within Trendspek, but also into broader networks through her close collaboration with initiatives like Apropela to foster career growth for women in the tech industry.

We continue to celebrate female leadership across our team, 3D modelling the women of Trendspek for International Women's Day.

Our Head of Delivery, Alana Flack, was recently named as a finalist in the Australian Aviation Awards 2024 for two award categories: Female Aviation Leader of the Year — Small Business and Aviation Rising Star — Small Business. 

Our UK expansion and what comes next 🎉

It's been a wonderful journey so far, scaling Trendspek from an idea in our Rosebery office to an industry-shaping software solution.

Many companies will say they're like "a family", but in our case, we really are, with many of our founding members still at the helm of departments driving great innovation. 

We're incredibly proud that Trendspek is today solving inspection, maintenance and reporting challenges for leading organisations across the world, revolutionising their asset management.

Of course, we wouldn't be here without our brilliant team and partners. We extend our thanks to our clients who continue to support us.

Next in Trendspek's pipeline:

• Strategic new hires to grow our team capability in AUS and PH
• Grow our Preferred Capture Provider Network to deliver best-in-class capture for clients.
• Deliver new features, including Customisable PDF Reports, our new Uploader, and Layers.

From all of us, thank you and watch this space!

If you'd like to learn more about Trendspek, get in touch with our team: