For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed HUVR’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (Bob Baughman). HUVR enables the aggregation, analysis, and automation of visual and quantitative inspection data from any device, sensor, robot, or field technician. For more information on HUVR, please visit www.huvrdata.com.

Background: Before co-founding HUVR, Bob Baughman spent 30 years working in the technology sector at both large (e.g., AMD & Intel) and early-stage companies. When deciding what his next venture would be, Bob knew that cloud-based analytics was where he wanted to focus, and at the time, drones were a novel and interesting digital inspection tool. In 2014, Bob co-founded HUVR to provide digital inspection services utilizing drones and a cloud-based platform that ingests the resulting vast amount of unstructured data into actionable reports and analytics to energy and industrial companies.

In 2016 after performing over 3,500 inspections, one of HUVR’s clients (a renewable energy company) invited HUVR’s management team to their offices where their CEO said, “you are doing great, but what I really want is to license ‘this’ (pointing to his computer screen that had HUVR’s portal running where he was looking at an inspection report).” This is when HUVR decided to pivot to a pure SaaS strategy around digital inspection data and ramp down its inspection services contracts (last inspection was performed in 2017).

Value Proposition: HUVR’s digital inspection data management platform provides its customers the following unique features and benefits:

Digital Inspection Tool Agnostic: HUVR can ingest, label, store, and analyze the massive amount of data from virtually any digital inspection tool, including drones, remotely operated vehicles, robotics, wearables, tablets, and smartphones.
Single, Comprehensive Database: Rather than stored in multiple places, data from all digital inspection tools are securely aggregated into one data lake where both HUVR’s clients and their subcontractors have easy access.
Mobile Digital Checklists: HUVR’s mobile digital checklists are simple for technicians to use and integrate with new data types that will seamlessly ingest data from any digital inspection tool.
Reports & Analytics: HUVR provides its customers flexible, clear, and actionable reports that can be customized to each function in an organization. Further, HUVR’s platform provides powerful and sophisticated analytics that offer valuable insights and time savings.
Integrations to Existing Databases: HUVR has native APIs with numerous existing legacy systems, such as SAP, Oracle, IBM Maximo, which enable ease of IT deployment and maintenance.

Closing Thoughts: As industrial inspections continue to be digitalized, more efficient inspection data management platforms like HUVR will be critical. We look forward to following the company, as it continues to grow from its footprint of over 250 asset types across over 400 locations in the oil & gas, renewable energy, and industrial sectors.

Company Spotlights

June 2023