Roofers don't take your word for it

A roofer has a tape measure, a ladder and twenty years of knowing what a roof costs. He is not going to accept a number that arrived from an algorithm because a software company told him to.

So Spotable flew drones.

"Roofers would check our results with drones or manual measurements. Until they saw we were more accurate," co-founder Julie Dumoulin says.

The company doing the convincing

Spotable was founded at the end of 2024 and had 25 people by the time of the interview, all working out of Ghent. Dumoulin runs it with two co-founders, Pieter-Jan as CTO and Sebastiaan as CEO. The product takes a building address and returns a 3D model and an automated renovation quote for roofing and facade companies, using custom algorithms to produce material calculations and cost estimates within minutes.

A long list for a young company

The expansion map Voka reports is wide. Across Europe: the Benelux, the DACH region, the UK, France and Spain. In the United States, the early focus sits in the Southeast, around Florida, Texas and Atlanta.

The next Unicorn

Dumoulin is 28. She grew up on a pig farm in Kortemark, one of triplets, with two brothers. She studied Commercial Sciences, did a management year at Vlerick Business School, and had already built a data analysis business and a packaging analysis company, and taken a CEO role at an Antwerp company, before any of this.

Asked where the work ethic comes from, she goes back to the farm.

"I always found it striking when friends asked what I was doing that weekend. For us it was always simple: helping out on the farm."

On what Spotable is aiming at, she does not soften it.

"We always say: we don't have a dream, we have an ambition. Building the next unicorn."

The quotes in this article have been translated from Dutch.

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