❓ Problem

Tradespeople do their best work with both hands busy, then lose hours writing up what those hands just did. A Powered Now survey found UK tradespeople lose an average of 7 hours a week to paperwork, up to 48 days a year, which it reckons costs HVAC professionals over £17,000 annually. In the US, a Field Promax report found only around 5.7 hours of a technician’s day is billable, with the rest swallowed by paperwork, training and van maintenance.

Then there’s the on-the-job friction. Every photo of a rating plate, every “can you have a look at this?” call to the office, means gloves off, tools down and a phone held at arm’s length inside a boiler cupboard. The knowledge to fix the tricky jobs sits with a shrinking pool of veterans. Around half of the UK’s 130,000 Gas Safe engineers are over 55, meaning roughly 65,000 could retire within a decade.

The kicker? Most tradespeople already wear something on their face all day. Safety glasses are mandatory PPE, yet they’re treated as a cheap disposable that does exactly one job. Tradies clearly care about what they wear: a Specsavers study found three in five Australian tradies swap safety glasses for regular sunnies on site. The most underused bit of kit on the job is sitting right on the bridge of their nose.

✅ Solution

Smart safety glasses that capture the job as it happens, then do the paperwork for you.

• Certified frames with a camera, mic and open-ear audio. Built to safety standards, light enough to wear for a full shift, with prescription inserts. The tech should be invisible until you need it.
• Voice-first capture. “Capture the serial number.” “Note we replaced the condensate pump.” “Photo of the flue.” The glasses grab the image, transcribe the note and tag it to the job automatically.
• An AI job report, drafted before you’re back in the van. The software stitches photos, voice notes and parts into a customer-ready service report, ready for the tech to review, tweak and send. Before-and-after photos included, no evening typing session required.
• Live “see what I see” calls. Stuck on an unfamiliar system? Call a senior engineer who sees the job from your point of view and talks you through it. One expert can support a whole team of juniors without leaving the office.

The wedge is deliberately boring: documentation for HVAC service teams. The expansion is where it gets exciting, from remote expert support to AI diagnostics, training libraries built from real POV footage, and every other trade with a van and a safety spec.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• The US had about 440,900 HVAC technicians in 2025, with a median wage of $61,010 and employment projected to grow 8% over the next decade.
• The UK adds roughly 130,000 Gas Safe engineers, before you count plumbers, electricians and the wider field service workforce.
• The global field service management market is worth around $5.1bn and is expected to hit $9.17bn by 2030.
• Proof the trades pay for software: ServiceTitan, the dominant platform for US home services, did $961m in revenue last fiscal year, up 24%.

TAM, SAM, SOM (our estimates)

• TAM: US HVAC techs plus UK gas engineers is roughly 570,000 workers. At ~$600 a year in software per seat, that’s a ~$340m annual software opportunity in heating alone, before hardware and before expanding into plumbing, electrical and commercial maintenance.
• SAM: around half of UK gas engineers are sole traders, and they’re not the first buyer. Focus on technicians at multi-tech businesses with a service manager and an office, roughly 300,000 seats, or ~$180m in annual software spend.