Calibre raises $3.3M to build AI infrastructure for trust
Today we’re announcing Calibre’s $3.3M pre-seed, led by Vicus Ventures and CIV, with participation from I2BF, 9 Yards Capital, Jigeum, and angels including Nikesh Arora and many others. We are proud to be joined by these investors who have previously backed the likes of Databricks, Coinbase, Anduril, ServiceTitan and The Nuclear Company.
In a short time, we’ve been fortunate to partner with industry leaders, including publicly listed TIC companies and accreditation bodies. We’re also seeing strong momentum with AuditorOS, our auditor-facing product, already delivering meaningful value to an early set of users.
The next chapter is about going deeper with our enterprise partners and getting Calibre into the hands of many more auditors.
The hidden $200B industry
Behind every product you trust and every service you rely on is a human auditor who has signed off. From aircraft components to banking systems and food supply chains, nothing reaches the market without someone first certifying it’s safe, compliant, and fit for purpose.
These certifications — ISO standards, regulatory approvals, safety marks — are the invisible precondition for virtually all global commerce. You can’t sell to a government, a major retailer, or a regulated market without them.
This is facilitated by the testing, inspection and certification (TIC) industry: a $200B+ market, working in the background of everyday life.
The problem
Getting certified today takes 3–6 months. Every month a business spends waiting for certification is a month it can’t sell its products and services — and holds up entire supply chains.
We sat deskside with auditors and inspectors to understand why. They do some of the most consequential work on earth, but it turns out, they spend very little of their time making the judgement calls they were trained for. Most of it goes to analysing thousands of pages of documents and writing reports: slow, manual work on a low-tech stack that doesn’t utilise their expertise.
And the bottleneck isn’t improving. Training to become an auditor takes years, retirements are accelerating, and fewer people are entering than leaving — stretching the auditors who remain even further.
What we’re building
Solving this requires more than a productivity tool bolted onto a broken process.
The same bottleneck appears across testing, inspection, and certification: expert work buried under document review, report writing, and manual cross-referencing.
Fixing it means delivering the next-generation AI infrastructure that the TIC industry can run on — and that’s exactly what Calibre is building.
For enterprise TIC bodies, Calibre deploys bespoke AI agents built directly into their existing systems and engineered to enterprise security standards. Each deployment is purpose-built for the standards, workflows, and judgement patterns of that organisation.
Today, we’re also announcing AuditorOS: our first AI product built specifically for independent auditors. It handles documentation review, report writing, and standards cross-referencing — so auditors and inspectors can spend their time on the expert judgement that only they can make. Already in use with early customers, it launches publicly in June.
Why now
Two forces are converging that make this the exact right moment.
AI is being embedded into every product category: self-driving cars with AI navigation, financial systems with automated decision-making, manufacturing lines with autonomous equipment. Each one needs to be certified before it ships. Demand for verification is about to grow by an order of magnitude, against a workforce that’s already stretched.
At the same time, the generation of experts who hold this work in their heads is retiring. Decades of edge cases, judgement calls, and pattern recognition walk out the door with them. The only way to preserve that knowledge is to build systems that learn from how experts work, while they’re still working.
Why us
The founders, Gautham and Steve, met at university and have been building together for seven years. At Palantir, they spent three years embedded inside customer operations across 20+ regulated industries — learning where enterprise AI creates real value and where it fails. Gautham became a direct report to CTO Shyam Sankar, running over 100+ AI bootcamp using Palantir’s AIP platform. Steve led some of Palantir’s largest European engagements, building agentic systems that replaced entire manual workflows at scale.
“TIC is a fragmented, highly specialised industry where generic AI doesn’t work. You need founders who’ve actually deployed AI inside regulated environments, and Gautham and Steve are among the very few who have, at serious scale. We’re lucky to be backing them.”
— Manraj Singh Sandhu, Vicus Ventures
Come build it with us
We’re hiring engineers who want to build AI for regulated environments that touch the physical world. If that’s you: recruiting@calibre.ac.
If you’re an auditor, AuditorOS launches in June — join the waitlist.