We have one of those companies that can let people across the
world make sure that they get home safely to their families
every day of the week and that's got to be something that's game
changing to get out of bed for every morning.
Utility and construction crews perform essential work, and
working out in the field brings certain operational challenges
that require a rigorous, thorough commitment to safety
and efficiency. That's where FYLD comes in.
This disruptive startup grew out of Koru, an independent venture
foundry from Ontario Teachers' Pension plan.
Koru was created by Ontario Teachers' to surface value in all
of Teachers' investments, working exclusively with our portfolio
companies to test, create and build scalable new digital
businesses.
And FYLD was one of Korus's first innovations.
We sat down with Shelly Copsey, CEO and cofounder of FYLD, to
discuss how FYLD went from innovation to application and
how its partnership with Ontario Teachers' and Koru helped them
rapidly expand and establish themselves in the utility
sector. All right, let's let's do this. What?
What does FYLD do? How does it work? So FYLD is very much
aimed at the field worker who's working typically in a dangerous
environment. You know when you walk out the front door in the
morning and you get a bit of a smell of gas, right? And you go
call someone and say there's gas out the front and a man arrives,
woman arrives in a truck filled at its most basic, helps those
people get the job done. We've bridged that gap, and we bring
transparency to remote managers as to what's happening in the
field. We help them get ahead of the curve.
And provide coaching moments to the people in the field to let
them do their job safely and productively and get the day's
operation safely delivered. From a safety perspective, we see
incidents drop by 20% upon deployments. From a productivity
perspective, work outputs go up at least 8%. Every field worker
has field basically in their pocket and on their phone. Yeah,
and in your pockets are a really good way of describing it,
Victor. I think right from the beginning we built this system
to be simple. All that they've got to do is take a bit of a
video.
And talk about the site, it's incredibly easy for people to
use you as a startup CEO. When you heard that a pension plan is
backing FYLD, what what was on your mind? I was very curious. I
really like the vision of Teachers' that even as a pension
plan data and digital right from like the minute space that field
started in is a massive opportunity and industry
vertical that they need to get into. I liked that long term
vision.
I've heard from the beginning, don't let cap at all stop you
having ambition to do something. We don't necessarily need to be
traditional in terms of seed Series A, series B. And I think
for us, that lets us some to think really quite creatively
about how we're going to grow the business because they were
there at the validation stage. They understand our business
deeply and it's given us really strong continuity in terms of
having a stable board that's been with us across the the 2
1/2 years that we've existed and just from my perspective as a
CEO having a board.
But I know well and who knows our product well is a really big
advantage. I find with teachers, they don't actually ask for for
too much of my time in managing stakeholders. They're more
focused than I I'm managing the business and growing our
revenues. What would you say is different working with core when
you think about sort of the innovation, validation and
ultimately incubation of of field?
Real differentiator of teachers and compared to what else I've
seen in the market, when I think about teachers, it's financial
investment to drive pension returns that they actually
specifically set up Cora and went about bringing in experts
at building ventures. There's everything from you know product
people to engineers to business analysts to really look at the
market and make sure that there's both opportunity that
we're also building like really cutting edge solutions. And I
think that that's an absolute differentiator of Koru. It is a
combination of Koru and Teachers' and it's.
Access to market, it's never going to give us a free ticket
to a new customer, but what it does do is give us a warm
introduction to somebody that is table stakes will know that
we're worth talking to. We're very lucky to have the major UK
gas network, SGN as one of our shareholders and founders. SGN
worked with its major investor Ontario Teachers' Pension plan to
really look at what was the future of field force
operations. How would you run them in a data let age. Within
three months they had 750 of their workers on board. That was
a phenomenally fast period of growth.
For us to to support if FYLD had started in a garage, you
know the likelihood of of a company like SGN that's got 6
million customers is running critical national
infrastructure. It's not going to open its doors and let us
start up in to work with 750 field workers. From my
perspective, SGN got a different level of confidence in working
with FYLD because we had Koru and teachers sitting behind her
and it made that collaboration really strong. That's actually a
good point which I'd like to understand a little bit more.
OTPP is a significant.
Build up both in field as well as SGN at its core. What I've
seen with Teachers' is that they've treated SGN and FYLD as
being two very separate organizations which are valued.
They've seen the the mutual benefit of us partnering
together, but I've seen that in a really respectful way. I have
people from Teachers' that will talk to me about some of the
benefits and areas in SGN and where they see we could add more
value and they can give me some good coaching and guidance about
what that might look like for SGN. But it's a very natural
relationship.
Which Teachers' kind of lets organically take shape with a
bit of coaching on both sides, but it never feels imposed and
that to me is a really good way of working. FYLD went from Koru
innovation to market ready application with a continuous
focus on the end user, ensuring that it was solving real
problems for field workers from day one.
That, you know, there shouldn't be any budget on health and
safety. Shelley spoke on site with Karl Simons, executive
director and chief futurist of FYLD, about how field has
continued to grow through hands-on implementation and data
collection. We've gone from gas into water into electricity,
into highways and construction, and you see that everybody who
seemed to be speaking to wants FYLD because of the solution
that's being offered, there's nothing like it.
Right. Yeah, very few organisations partnered in the
way that I see FYLD does and connect with our customers from
the very beginning where we have development conversations, we
run solutions workshops, we run hackathons. You know, these
things all contribute. And then hackathon in the utility sector
is unheard of. But we're bringing that into our customers
now and saying how can we help you, what can we do that solves
your current challenges? What you get is then it becomes very
real for the designers and engineers. Oh wow, we're not
just making this up. So do you think FYLD is more of a
sort of incremental improvement or is it disruptive? I view it
as highly disruptive, although the nice thing for our customers
is that it's not disruptive to their operations to get the
gains. That's like a really great spot to be in as a company
like FYLD. We have not come across any company in the market
that is reimagining how you run remote field force operations
that's using the rich data like we are that's letting customers
create a true operational digital twin of what takes place
in the field.
And how much have you deployed FYLD across different verticals
in the UK we've got a strong presence. I reckon about 80% of
the country's utilities would have a a member of their
workforce using FYLD on their assets. We're also in the US
with Ferrovial, many people know that as a massive owner of
infrastructure and a construction company. Deployed
through Texas on quite a number of highway bills that are going on.
We're also down in Mexico and Chile now into highway
maintenance.
And also in utilities. So we're really seeing that play out
in quite a number of territories and verticals. We're into the
thousands and thousands of users on board now. It's been a very
quick journey for us. So what's next for FYLD? What's your
vision? You look, if I'm absolutely blatant about it, the
team at field want to dominate the software market for the
execution of field force operations. The UK market's been
incredible. We now want to, you know, double down and make sure
that all of those early customers are getting out.
Brand promise, right, 10 times ROI for everybody within six
months of deployment is absolutely massive for us and
we're achieving it and we want to help them go further. That's
excellent. So your view has changed on Teachers' or I would
say the positives that I thought would be there. They've played
out well for us. You know, I've got access to to people within
Teachers' who have been in the infrastructure market for 30
years. I can go and talk to them and get their perspectives. A
lot of the the corporate social responsibility.
Aspects that Teachers' would talk about in market, I see that
plays out and it really aligns to some of FYLDs core values.
Our product delivers sustainability and it delivers
you know health and safety outcomes. I've actually found
there's an awful lot of alignment between what the two
of us are trying to achieve and that's a great spot to be with
your investor from Koru innovation to international
application across multiple verticals in under five years
FYLDs data LED safety revolution in the utility sector
is one of the many ways Ontario Teachers' pension plan
is investing to make a mark? Ontario Teachers' Pension plan
investing to make a mark.