Leaving EasyInspect
After five years, I sold my share and left EasyInspect. The technology worked. The timing did not. Everyone wanted drone inspection, but nobody's existing workflows could absorb it yet. My vision for the product had diverged from where it was heading.
I sold my share in EasyInspect and left the company after five years.
What worked
The technology worked. Inspection Cloud could take thousands of drone images, reconstruct them into 3D models, detect damage using computer vision, and generate reports that saved inspection teams weeks of manual work. Innovation Fund Denmark gave us a Grand Solutions grant. David Helgason from Unity advised us on 3D visualization.
We had real customers and real deployments. Vejdirektoratet used us for autonomous drone inspections of major Danish bridges including Vejlefjordbroen, Kronprinsesse Marys Bro, and Ny Lillebæltsbro. SBB, Sund & Bælt, Cowi, and Rambøll were all in the pipeline. The Drone Harmony partnership gave us end-to-end capability from autonomous flight planning to cloud analysis.
At UAV shows in London and Las Vegas, people got it. They'd watch the demo and want to know pricing.
What didn't work
The timing was wrong. Everyone wanted drone inspection. Nobody could integrate it into their existing workflows yet.
Large infrastructure operators have inspection processes that have been the same for decades. A team goes on-site, climbs the structure or uses a cherry picker, writes notes on paper forms, takes photos with a camera, and compiles a report in Word or PowerPoint. The regulatory framework, the insurance requirements, the reporting standards - all assume a human physically inspected the structure.
Drone inspection is better in almost every way: safer, faster, more detailed, cheaper per inspection. But "better" doesn't mean "ready to adopt." The organizations that needed our product weren't ready to change their processes, retrain their inspectors, update their compliance frameworks, and rebuild their reporting pipelines. Not yet.
We were two to three years too early. The technology was there. The market wasn't.
On top of the market timing, my vision for the product had diverged from where the company was heading. When what you want to build and what the product becomes are just different things, staying doesn't serve anyone. Selling my share and moving on was the right call.
What I take with me
Five years of building computer vision, 3D reconstruction, and cloud infrastructure at scale. The Laravel backend, the image processing pipelines, the real-time collaboration features. The domain knowledge of how infrastructure inspection actually works: not the idealized version, but the messy reality of regulatory compliance, legacy workflows, and organizational inertia.
And a lesson about timing and alignment. Building the right thing at the wrong time feels the same as building the wrong thing. And when your vision doesn't match where the product is going, there's no point staying.