By Riley Kaminer
Albert Bou Fadel has worn many hats in his career – very often, hard hats. After growing up in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, Fadel eventually found his way to Miami and the Bahamas through his work in the glass and glazing space, serving high-profile high-rises and resorts.
“When I moved to North America, I realized how difficult and expensive it is to manage labor,” Fadel told Refresh Miami, underscoring the compounding headaches of wage gaps, language barriers, and non-traditional work environments.
“What was very shocking was how this human capital was almost always tracked using pen and paper.” This was not simply an efficiency issue. Rather, for many clients, the lack of insight into who is active at a building site at any given time was also a compliance and legal issue.
So around 2016, Fadel started to devise a solution. Figuring that there must be some relevant tech available, Fadel began to scour the market for the latest and greatest in RFID badges, fingerprint readers, eye scanners, wearables, and more.
“During the sales pitches, they all sounded phenomenal,” said Fadel. “But as soon as they were deployed on a job site, they failed.” The problems with these technologies were varied: they were too easy for workers to circumvent, they had too much friction to actually be used by workers, or they were not designed to withstand the extreme environments common in building sites.
Eventually, Fadel realized that he would have to build his own solution, SmartBarrel. He would come to realize why the solution already did not exist: product development took two and half years – five times longer than he expected.
The startup has developed a biometric time-tracking device for the construction industry. Workers simply scan a fob or input their phone number to check in or out of a site. Each time this happens, SmartBarrel’s system takes the worker’s picture.
From there, its AI-powered models can verify that the person checking in or out is the same one attached to the phone number or fob. Crucially, this is not facial ‘recognition,’ which would carry a range of potential privacy issues. Rather, ‘verification’ simply checks the image taken against other images using computer vision.
Already SmartBarrel is deployed in a wide range of contexts, including by specialty trade contractors, subcontractors, and construction companies such as Suffolk. SmartBarrel follows a SaaS business model, charging companies a per worker fee.
Miami has always played a major role in SmartBarrel’s growth. “When I first started raising capital in 2018/2019, being based in Miami was a major red flag for investors. ‘The odds are exponentially against you,’ they thought.” But the pandemic-induced rise of #MiamiTech has proven these investors wrong. Fadel also notes that Miami makes sense for SmartBarrel since our construction industry is year-round, unlike other tech hubs.
Fadel and his team of 24, more than half of whom are based in South Florida, are excited to continue making SmartBarrel’s ambitious roadmap come to life.
“We built our product from the bottom up – not with the C-suite – so we’re 100% field-friendly,” said Fadel. “That gives us an insane competitive advantage to adoption.” And this adoption, Fadel hopes, will propel the company into other verticals like payroll, costing, and safety. “Ultimately, we’re going to become a full-fledged HR platform for construction.”
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- Industry-backed Suffolk Technologies is unlocking VC dollars to usher in the next era of construction tech
- Buy, rent, sell, manage: Miami’s proptech ecosystem may be as hot as our real estate market
- DigiBuild secures $4M seed round for blockchain-based construction management platform
- Pro Platforms raises $4.7M to build the digital tools to bring the construction industry into the 21st century
