Ben, Oyvind and Rami start Checkfirst to bring AI to inspection and certification work. Everywhere they look, audit programmes worth millions are being planned in spreadsheets, email and phone calls.
2024
Funded and launched
$1.5M pre-seed led by Olisipo Way and Hiero, with Notion Capital, operators.network and Angel Investment Network. ScheduleAI launches in July, shaped by certification bodies including AENOR through the AI Innovator Programme.
2025
Proven in production
Control Union auto-allocates 90% of a year of audits in two minutes. A global assurance provider's integrated audits are scheduled in 11 minutes.
2026
Scaling with the industry
AENOR schedules 49,000 audit-hours in 12 minutes. A North American food-safety certification body schedules all of its 10,000 audits a year automatically. DQS and UKAS are live. Checkfirst partners with Intact and Xait.
Checkfirst in the press
02 · What we believe
Three rules we build and sell by.
1
Planners decide.
ScheduleAI searches, ranks and explains. People confirm. Every decision is logged and reversible.
2
Only verified numbers.
We publish results measured in a customer's own production data, and start every engagement with a demo on yours.
3
Plain dealing.
Fixed-fee scoping, clear licensing, support by SLA. What the product doesn't do, we say.
Checkfirst and ScheduleAI
Checkfirst is the company. ScheduleAI is our product, built for certification, inspection and accreditation bodies.
Why it's hard to copy
Rule models built with certification bodies across standards, schemes and countries. Integrations into the platforms, ERPs and calendars TIC runs on. AI agents added on top of an allocation engine that accreditation and certification bodies already run in production. And former leaders of UKAS, Bureau Veritas, TÜV SÜD, SGS and UL Solutions advising the team, in a personal capacity.
Where this goes
Scheduling is where TIC operations start, so it's where we started. The same engine and agents can take on the work around each audit: preparing it, keeping clients informed and turning results into the next plan. Our aim is to become the operating layer for how testing, inspection and certification work is delivered.
03 · The team
The people you'll work with.
From the first call to go-live, these are the faces on the other side of the table.
Benjamin Lambert
Co-founder & CEO
Sets strategy and leads relationships with certification bodies, partners and investors. Helped scale Nexmo (Vonage) and Agora.
Oyvind Henriksen
Co-founder & Chief Product Officer
Owns the product: the allocation engine, rescheduling and the planner experience. Former CEO of Poq.
Rami Elsawy
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Leads engineering and the API-first platform behind ScheduleAI. Has hired and managed 400+ engineers.
Aman Hemchand
Head of AI Transformation
Leads customer discovery, custom demos and the agent programme. If you book a demo, Aman runs it on your data.
Orestis Tzanetis
Head of Partnerships
Leads the partner and referral programmes, and scopes integration phases and commercial terms with customers.
Spencer Grabel
Customer Success
Leads data reviews, onboarding and adoption for customers in North America and Europe.
Anastasia Kusnadi
Customer Implementation Manager
Turns customer requirements into phased, testable delivery plans and takes each rollout through UAT and training to go-live. Previously Principal Technical Program Manager at tiket.com.
Georgia Borthwick
Customer Implementation Manager
Runs implementations day to day, from data setup to planner training. Brings eight years of enterprise systems consulting and business analysis from New Zealand and Australia.
Franz Vitulli
Product Manager
Leads product for enterprise adoption in testing, inspection and certification. Previously product at Oxford University Press, where he ran the Oxford Dictionaries API, and at The Bot Platform, acquired by Flip.
Sam Leworthy
Product Designer
Designs the planner experience in ScheduleAI and has been at Checkfirst since 2022. Previously co-founded Tendrr and worked in business development at Poq.
Nathan Anibaba
Commercial Lead
Works with certification and inspection bodies to find where planning time, travel and subcontracting are costing them, and builds the business case with them.
The AI team
The people who make the engine think.
Matching, optimisation and agents are built by specialists who work on AI every day, with planners' rules and accreditation logic at the centre.
Sherif AbushadiAI Solution Architect
25 years building software and teaching 15,000+ people to do the same: Head of Education at the NEAR Foundation, lead instructor at Dev Bootcamp, adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins. Now designs ScheduleAI's agents and matching logic.
Co-founder and CTO of Poq, the app-commerce platform behind retailers such as Missguided, which raised over $20M and twice made the Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50. Later CTO at Healthera and Rosecut. Now brings AI security and governance depth to ScheduleAI.
Track recordPoqHealtheraRosecut
Sami AbidAI Solution Architect
Integration and automation architect: an authorised Zapier solution partner, Workato integration developer for Beekeeper, and solutions architect at The Bot Platform, acquired by Flip. Connects ScheduleAI to ERPs, CRMs and calendars.
Behind them, engineering, product, data and delivery across London, Lisbon, Madrid, Athens, Cairo and Mumbai.
Rania Hassan
OFOmar Fouad
AMAbdelrahman Mehanny
MKMuhammed Khalid
DKDimitar Kazakov
MZMaged Zaki
Khaled
Assem Mansour
04 · Advisors
We're kept honest by people who ran it from the inside.
Non-executive advisors who ran it from the inside: a former UKAS Operations Director and former leaders from Bureau Veritas, TÜV SÜD, SGS and UL Solutions. They advise, in a personal capacity, on product priorities and on how TIC organisations buy.
Jeff Ruddle
Non-Executive AdvisorEx-UKAS · Operations Director
Nineteen years at UKAS, the UK's national accreditation body, as Operations Director and later Strategic Development Director. Now secretariat of the AIQI Consortium, the international quality-infrastructure platform for trustworthy AI.
Track recordUKASAIQI Consortium
Jean Michel Marnoto
Non-Executive AdvisorEx-Bureau Veritas · VP B2B
Former Vice President B2B at Bureau Veritas. Advises on enterprise TIC buyers, the Middle East and global expansion.
Track recordBureau Veritas
Dubai
David Goodfellow
Non-Executive AdvisorEx-Bureau Veritas · Ex-TÜV SÜD
Former UK Certification Director at Bureau Veritas and, before that, Divisional Director for UK Business Assurance at TÜV SÜD. Advises on certification operations, commercial growth and TIC M&A.
Track recordBureau VeritasTÜV SÜD
Glasgow
Jeff Nauseda
Non-Executive AdvisorEx-SGS · Director, Commercial Strategy, North America
Led commercial strategy for SGS's North American food testing business, after years growing its key accounts. More than 22 years in food safety and compliance, including bioMérieux.
Track recordSGSbioMérieux
Denver
Harry Woolfall
Non-Executive AdvisorDirector, Metric Search
Executive search across business services, industrials and testing & certification, and a long-time voice for AI in TIC.
Track recordMetric Search
London
Rodolfo Flores Martinez
Non-Executive AdvisorEx-UL Solutions · Regional Director LatAm
Former Regional Director Latin America at UL Solutions, after 25 years with the company. Advises on the certification and inspection market in Mexico and Latin America.
Track recordUL Solutions
Mexico City
05 · Partners and integrations
We plug into the tools you already run.
ScheduleAI is the scheduling layer, not another suite. It connects to the platforms certification bodies already trust, and to the tools they have built themselves.
ScheduleAI
IntactXaitGoogleMicrosoftYour existing toolsAdapt
Integration partner
Intact
The software platform for certification bodies, scheme owners and accreditation bodies, covering the whole workflow from client application and audit planning to findings, certificate issuance and invoicing. Headquartered in Austria and trusted for over 25 years. ScheduleAI connects to Intact so scheduling and the certificate lifecycle stay in one record.
A Norwegian software company whose co-authoring, document automation and quoting tools are used by 70,000+ people at 300+ clients, strongest in energy and renewables. Partnership signed September 2026 to bring ScheduleAI to inspection and integrity scheduling for Xait's energy clients.
Co-founded the AI Innovator Programme for TIC in 2024, bringing certification bodies into early product design.
Integration
Microsoft
Outlook calendar sync, so every allocation lands in auditors' own calendars and planners keep working in the tools they use every day.
Integration · coming soon
Google
Google Calendar sync is in progress, so teams on Google Workspace get the same: allocations straight into auditors' calendars.
Integration
Your existing tools
Built your own tools, or running a legacy system? ScheduleAI connects through a REST API and webhooks, or runs engine-only behind your own interface. Nothing needs replacing.
