Technology

Start me up: Hoppa

Justin Stanton

Editor, DC+

2 June 2025

Had it up to here with unstructured information? Done with wasting time searching for documents? Perhaps Hoppa can come to your aid.

Ahead of appearing at Digital Construction Week in the Start-Up Village, Hoppa co-founder Sam Rees tells DC+ about his startup.

DC+: You’ve got two minutes: what problem does your technology solve and how does it do it?

Sam Rees: Bad or missing data costs the UK construction industry up to £22.9bn each year – and for teams on the ground this shows up daily in ill-informed decisions and hours wasted hunting for information that should be at their fingertips.

We regularly speak to asset owners who spend nine months or more tracing basic facts about their estates, and delivery teams who miss critical details buried five folders deep in a zip file no one even realised was there. No one is to blame, but everyone pays the price.

Better data is essential to improving safety, delivering on time and on budget, and meeting the urgent demands of decarbonisation. But achieving that quality relies on strict governance, and traditionally, that’s meant people following rigid rules – easy in theory, fiendishly hard to sustain at scale. In a naturally fragmented industry, as information moves from one stage to the next between teams and platforms, context is lost, lineage breaks down and logic quickly unravels.

This is where Hoppa comes in. We use AI to comb through unstructured file stores, cataloguing their contents to restore lineage and trust. Information management that would previously have taken months – if it happened at all – is completed in days.

Our vision is simple: information structuring and governance should be a job for machines. It should happen automatically, in the background, without adding to anyone’s workload. When that becomes the norm, we’ll have overcome one of the biggest barriers to true industry-wide interoperability.

In keeping with this, our focus today is always on reducing cognitive load for our customers – not adding to it. Hoppa isn’t another app your teams need to learn, or another silo where data gets stranded. We plug into your existing CDE and return enriched, structured information right where you need it, codified to your data standard and ready to use.

OK, you’ve got my attention: who’s tested or already using your tech and what are the results?

We’ve tested our tech with customers in highways, nuclear decommissioning, schools, utilities, real estate, ports, public sector… to name but a few. It’s been a whirlwind nine months since launch!

We were fortunate enough to have a customer willing to benchmark our service against their traditional in-house data cataloguing capability. While I can’t reveal too much until the report is published, we achieved in the region of a 30x time saving. Quality was higher too, as this kind of repetitive work is highly prone to human error, and we could take on extra scope, like running specific queries across every file, that would have been cost-prohibitive with person-power alone.

One thing we’re noticing is the diversity in our customer base, not just by sector, but in how they want to build Hoppa into their stack. One customer is an established technology vendor who has licensed our capability to streamline data interoperability across their product suite. Another, a professional services firm, is leveraging our workflow engine (which supports ISO 19650 and other industry standards out of the box) to bring resiliency and capacity to their established information management services.

Offering our capability as both a plug-and-play licensable technology and as a hands-on service is opening a lot of doors for us. It means customers can configure Hoppa themselves, lean on our team, or mix and match as they need.

What’s your senior management team’s background?

Tom Goldsmith and I both cut our teeth as design engineers at AtkinsRéalis, working on major projects here in the UK and overseas. Hands-on expertise in sectors ranging from advanced manufacturing to nuclear new-build and rail has been a huge contributor to what we’ve both gone on to do in our careers since.

About six years ago, I moved from real-world engineering into software, helping establish AtkinsRéalis’ flagship Digital Future programme, advising on digital strategy and leading in-house software development initiatives as director of product. Tom joined the programme to grow our data analytics and predictive scheduling capabilities, before taking on overall responsibility for platform integration across AtkinsRéalis’ design management software suite. Tom’s most recent role was product owner at XYZ Reality, bringing augmented reality to the construction site.

Building Hoppa together as mates who also know each other’s professional skillsets has helped us establish quickly and deliver efficiently – while also having fun too!