Asia's Biggest Construction Jobsite Monitoring AI Firm viAct Aims To Foray in Europe by 2022

viAct's Inception in ConTech

Construction industry is one of the oldest industries in the world with shelter being one of the main essentialities of humankind. However, it is noteworthy that in last 25 years, the increase in productivity in this sector has marked as low as 0%. On the contrary, project delays have risen as high as 98% due to various fatal accidents occurring as a result of non-compliances and negligence by the workforce. The reported raise of injury costs associated with construction workforce up to 1 million USD per fatal injury justifies the hazardous nature of this business. Thus, with the mission of saving lives and ultimately enhancing the productivity of the construction business; Gary Ng (Founder) & Hugo Cheuk (Co-Founder) started viAct in 2016, combining their engineering and technical knowledge after identifying that construction businesses were ready for technology use. However, on exploring the then existing market, they found that AI models were expensive and time-consuming to upgrade. So they started R&D in AI focusing on building tailor-made AI modules for scenario-based, real time, on-site as well as remote monitoring of construction safety and productivity in minutes. From then the team started to expand initially in Hong Kong being the headquarters, viAct has now become one of its own kinds by providing œScenario-based Vision Intelligence solutions exclusively for construction industry all across Asia & Europe by successfully deploying around 30 sites with an ambition to double by 2021. viAct's smart AI modules has been successfully providing extremely granular insights on safety prepositions, productivity forethoughts and environmental compliances in jobsites by not only tracking objects but by transforming vision to practical actions. 

Backed by Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund, Artesian Ventures and ParticleX with 2 million USD of seed funding, viAct continues to bring real time processing control in the construction sites by utilizing the cognitive ability of AI. viAct has currently expanded its reach from ConTech to PropTech with an extended aim to monitor a construction project from œthe first brick to the last breath. Through simple but sophisticated, unique algorithms based, plug & play pre-built AI modules; viAct has made deployment extremely intuitive in any construction sites by any individual even without dexterity in AI. Moreover, viAct's smart cloud adds more adequation to the AI powered construction sites by ensuring well calculated planning for faster progress and alleviated productivity. By giving remote access to every associated stakeholder, viAct also makes the construction process a transparent flow in terms information regarding non-compliances which otherwise become the antecedent for both safety and productivity compromises in long run. Therefore, by creating a holistic construction monitoring ecosystem, viAct is bringing a revolution in that sector of market which is popular for fatal accidents, opaque workflow and environmental non-compliances to even enhance the ESG ranking of construction business. viAct with its œsuper cognitive AI modules makes a construction site 10X more œsmarter in gleaning various safety, productivity and environmental compliances related issues in real time, thereby making the oldest profession of mankind a safer business. 

An extraordinary Leadership with a phenomenal International Team

viAct was founded Mr. Gary Ng. Gary being a graduate in building engineering have worked in the construction ecosystem for years. However, after ample working experience in the construction ecosystem being the managing director of 3D leading EFI Optitex fashion technology and senior management of the NASDAQ business listed in Stratasys technology; Gary has been awarded as the worldwide number one in president club as a regional country manager at Stratasys with the highest commercial growth of Y2Y at 85% in 2015. However, understanding the loopholes in the industry and to bridge the divide; Gary emerged as an AIpreneur being the CEO of viAct along with the co-founder & COO of viAct, Mr. Hugo Cheuk. Hugo being a building engineer with a Masters degree in Business Administration along with 10+ years of experience in marketing strategy and brand development is a serial entrepreneur and community builder. Before starting his AI journey at viAct, Hugo was the head of business development at Shiseido HK in charge of channel strategies and corporate partnership, owned a profitable engineering company. With his extensive knowhow about the market and operations; he has worked hands in hands with Gary to bring viAct to an international market. 

Starting with two visionary leaders in 2016 and growing till 30 enthusiastic employees in 2021, viAct has expanded its team from all across the world. Interestingly, the expansion of the viAct's team was not interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. viAct has taken this as a chance of a lifetime and created œthe first remote culture to expand its team at worldwide by promoting a proactive remote working culture. This has also enabled viAct to employ the best staff no matter where they are. Currently, it has 30 employees, including people working in Asia, Africa & South America. This therefore brings international perspective in viAct's work culture. 

Exponential Growth Post COVID-19

Last 1 year has been quite crucial as viAct has achieved many milestones. In terms of technology advancements, the following has been achieved:

• viAct has become the first Asian AI company to integrate with Autodesk BIM 360 which is world's leading construction cloud thereby boosting its operations further

• viAct published its first research paper viz. Artificial Intelligence powered Dump Truck Smart Management System: Case Study by viAct in ResearchGate and International Journal of Advances in Engineering and Management (IJAEM) 

• viAct has developed 30+ modules specified modules for construction sectors extending its operational radius from construction safety and productivity to environmental compliances

Furthermore, in terms of financial milestones, viAct's AI monitoring solution has covered 50 construction projects with contract sum over USD 10B across Asia.

In terms of awards and reorganization, last one year has been quite thrilling for viAct. The achievements are as follows:

• The company has been awarded amongst the Top 50 ConTech startups in 2020 by Cemex Ventures for delivering new, innovative and attractive solutions to the construction industry.

• viAct has received the award for being the Top 100 Global ConTech Startups 2019 by BuiltWorld for its exceptional work in revolutionizing construction industries with the power of AI in a scenario-based approach to mitigate the issue of job-site related accidents and productivity compromises.

• viAct has been selected as the consulting partner of Huawei Cloud and the top 5 companies joined the Huawei Spark Program.  

In January 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia; viAct was the first Asian company to implement a face-to-face solution for construction sites. This was recognized in the mainstream and the Chinaccelerator executive director Oscar Ramos said: œCOVID has accelerated digital transformation, and traditional industries such as construction are undergoing a rapid transition process that is critical to survival. The viAct team has not only created a profit-driven product in the industry but has also been able to gain the trust of their customers and speed up acceptance.

Thus, with multiple operational advancements as well as last 1 year has been noteworthy in terms of both growths, productivity 

Why is viAct unique?

Being one of the leading ConTech startups in Asia, it enjoys various competitive advantages. To start with in terms of technology, viAct has trained its modules in far smarter way than various other peers working in the same genera. In this notion, it is worth mentioning that instead of œAI computer vision viAct has pushed itself forward in a way that it provides construction surveillance through œscenario-based vision intelligence. Moreover, adding to the advantages viAct's smart monitoring system is not only an inspector rather a virtual assistant for mangers of construction sites. This is due to the fact that when other peers have developed AI algorithms to just detect non-compliances in construction safety and productivity, viAct has added a smarter touch to its surveillance system by training it to acquire insights vision technology and transform it into practical actions through audio-visual alerts. 

Secondly, viAct has another unique feather to its crown. Unlike other peers in the ConTech ecosystem; viAct has developed a very simple, intuitive, ready-to-use deployment model. For using viAct there is no AI expertise needed, any on construction site with any CCTV camera with a minimum resolution of 2MP can simply use the RTSP link for connect to viAct's smart cloud system to automate monitoring of the jobsite. Moreover, with viAct's 1st mobile AI monitoring solution for construction site viz. viMOV is potent enough to even provide surveillance of critical and non-static construction sites like tunnel, roadways etc. even in absence of power supply and internet. Moreover, the 30+ dedicated modules of viAct which can be deployed for various scenarios like Dump truck management, high rise work management, construction and demolition waste management; applicable indigenously to construction sites makes it the best-fit solution for holistic construction site monitoring.

Furthermore, it is worth nothing that most of the peers in the U.S. are involved in post-processing monitoring; however, viAct has built its AIoT devices for real time processing which necessitates construction industry being prone to fatal accidents and drastic delays in project timelines due to ample non-compliances associated with the workforce which is almost impossible to be controlled with manual monitoring.

An exquisite business model

viAct's business model takes a problem-focused approach to create a subscription-based business model using cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS). It is based on clients from construction industry paying a regularly recurring amount for the use the wide range of AI modules from viAct's module house and cloud dashboard. The modules are made taking in consideration numerous scenarios in construction sites. The module house thus gives ease to the client for selection of over 30 pre-built AI modules-based safety, productivity, environmental protection and inspection in construction sites. Also, viAct offers client with œEnterprise Mode which leverages them for unlimited usage of AI modules, rental of edge devices and options for new R&D solutions to be co-developed.

The Road Map Ahead

For the upcoming 3 years, viAct is focusing to expand its reach of business from Hong Kong to other Asian countries with primary targeted destination of Singapore. The foresight is to establish offices for local employees working in sales & marketing as well as technical departments also for the purpose of partnership alliance. Belonging to a technology-oriented ecosystem, viAct is planning to persistently invest in R&D to reinforce technical stack and deep dive into various elemental issues existing in the construction site using AI powered cognitive technologies. This will help in broadening the application research on the state-of-the-art AI, machine learning and deep learning algorithms. 

Apart from this, viAct is targeting the next round of fundraising which is expected to be carried out by the first quarter of 2022. This will mushroom the brand to achieve the aforementioned plans and help in making it a fast-growing AI Company specialized in construction and engineering. viAct therefore has a mission to become the Asia's leading AI company with the aim to penetrate it's AI monitoring services from hundreds to thousands construction projects in order to make construction industries a safer and productive place to work inside.

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