Filip Sobotka believes the coming six months will be critical for his company FTD Highrise Inspection, as he secures a partner with the proper drone and gauges the best way to grow in Toronto’s condo market.

Working on his own for most of the past eight years, Sobotka has built up FTD into a company whose automated systems can inspect the exterior of a building to detect potential leaks or other problems. With sales rising, he is now in the process of securing a partnership with a drone operator that can conduct the inspections allowing Sobotka to focus on sales and product development. He will soon have to decide whether to seek financing, and it so what type and how much her should try to raise.

“Scalability’s not going to be a problem because we’re morphing into a software company,” said Sobotka in an interview. “The big thing for me now is to find the right partner … and build the software in such a way that it can handle so much data.”

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Sobotka began FTD when he had a summer job with his father’s caulking company and noticed the difficulty engineers have inspecting the exterior of mid- and high-rise buildings. They essentially are lowered from the roof for a visual inspection, and then they extrapolate on what they can observe in their field of vision to draw conclusions on the state of the building.

Sobotka had a revelation one day when he saw and engineer tape a smartphone to a broomstick so he could reach around a corner and get a photo. He knew there was an opportunity for an automated solution.

His first iteration was a robotic device that would scale the exterior of a building, photographing every inch of it so all every problem could be detected and followed up on. Then drones became prevalent in many industries, so FTD now uses drones to inspect the whole building.

“It doesn’t matter where the problem is, we’ll find it,” he said. “You won’t have any surprises in terms of cracks turning into leaks.”

Having scanned 30 buildings in total, the company recently hit $40,000 in monthly revenue for the first time. Sobotka has found customers among condo boards, engineering firms and developers in the Greater Toronto Area. He’s winning repeat customers as some condo boards are now asking him to plan to do a follow-on scan in three years. And he’s also gaining traction with developers because FTD can scan a whole building and find any problems before the tradespeople have left the site.

FTD Highrise operates out of the Waterloo Accelerator Centre, and Sobotka was one of the presenters at the centre’s recent Client Showcase. Now he is focusing on finding the proper partner to carry out the scans, assess the market and decide on a funding strategy.

The opportunity is huge, he said, because the owners and developers of buildings want the peace of mind to know that there will be regular, complete scans of their structures to prevent problems.

“We’re becoming the standard of care for buildings in a way,” said Sobotka. “In five years, there’s no way you aren’t scanning all the buildings all the time.”