platformOS joins the Top 50 in the QBE AcceliCITY Resilience Challenge, bringing proven inspection workflows to help cities boost safety and speed.
We're excited to share that platformOS has been selected to the Top 50 in the prestigious QBE AcceliCITY Resilience Challenge! This achievement is a testament to the transformative power of our 3rd Party Building Inspection solution, “Tertius”, and its impact on urban resilience and safety.
The QBE AcceliCITY Resilience Challenge, now in its eighth year, is a powerful partnership between Leading Cities and QBE Insurance. This year, the program saw 822 applications from 71 countries, with platformOS first selected into the Top 100, and now the Top 50. The AcceliCITY competition serves as an accelerator, a certification pathway, and an educational program that connects innovators with cities globally, opening doors to government partners and accelerating solutions that strengthen community resilience.
Our recognized 3rd Party Inspection Marketplace solution, Tertius, developed for the Department of Buildings in Washington D.C., seamlessly connects building developers with certified third-party inspectors, thereby streamlining permitting processes and significantly boosting accountability and safety in construction. Ernest Chrappah, Director of the agency at the time, described Tertius as "...an Airbnb for inspections," where significant latent inspector capacity has been unearthed, such that contractors can easily find, book, and schedule available certified inspectors for their specific permit need, in just minutes.
Tertius directly addresses the critical challenge of lengthy turnaround times for construction inspections, a major bottleneck that can cause significant delays and costs for developers. In D.C., Tertius has been "transformative for permitting and approval processes," drastically reducing inspection turnaround times
from 3-4 weeks to just 3-4 days.
This massive productivity gain enables developers, general contractors and property owners to progress and finalize construction faster, boosting cash flow for construction firms and ultimately reducing financial stress and potential project failures.
Beyond efficiency, Tertius introduces several key features that enhance transparency and quality:
Integrated geolocation check-in and check-out ensures inspectors are actually onsite, preventing remote sign-offs that were previously a concern.
System-enforced randomization of inspector allocation mitigates the risk of collusion between developers and individual inspectors, ensuring adherence to regulations.
The platform provides real-time monitoring of outstanding permit requirements and exception flags, substantially reducing poor or rogue construction practices that lead to building failures.
It centralizes communication, billing, and payment options, integrating all data and reports into one streamlined system. This level of transparency and accountability was previously lacking.
Our participation in the Proptech Track of AcceliCITY highlights Tertius's direct relevance to the commercial property insurance sector. By significantly improving construction oversight and quality, Tertius acts as a loss mitigation solution that identifies and minimizes potential hazards more quickly. It directly reduces the likelihood of major or catastrophic building failures, which in turn mitigates the risk of insurance claims for types such as Builders Risk (Course of Construction) Insurance, General Liability Insurance, and Errors & Omissions/Professional Liability Insurance.
The D.C. government itself is projected to generate a new revenue stream of an estimated $2.4 million annually through a transaction fee on the platform, demonstrating a sustainable business model. Furthermore, the platform includes user ratings for inspectors, enhancing accountability and quality within the inspection ecosystem. We believe this comprehensive oversight leads to a system where validated developers, consistently delivering ethical and safe construction, to secure reduced insurance premiums.
Tertius's impact extends to broader sustainability and resilience challenges:
Resilience: By enabling faster, more efficient, and effective inspections with recorded, accessible data, Tertius promotes fuller transparency and accountability, leading to the safer construction of buildings that are built to last. This reduces failures across the built environment, preventing massive financial loss and tragic loss of life. We also see a significant use case for war-torn regions or areas destroyed by natural disasters, where rapid, transparent, and accountable reconstruction is critical.
Sustainability: The substantial productivity gains in the construction sector, like reducing inspection turnarounds from weeks to days, directly boost the supply of both commercial and residential buildings. This goes a long way in tackling pervasive housing shortages in towns and cities, ultimately contributing to more affordable residential properties.
Tertius runs on platformOS, a flexible Platform as a Service (PaaS) delivered in a hybrid SaaS model, the platformOS Government Solution. With modular, API-first architecture, agencies can modernize slow, inflexible legacy workflows without disrupting daily operations by adding easy-to-use overlays and integrating with existing permitting, licensing, and ERP systems. In contrast to SaaS and ‘monolithic’ solutions, agencies retain FULL ownership of their application code and data, allowing teams to ship improvements continuously instead of waiting for vendor release cycles. This upgrade-in-place approach reduces the need for future rip-and-replace projects and helps minimize the long-term total cost of ownership.
This foundational flexibility means that the scalable and extensible code base can be affordably applied to ANY inspection type – from fire safety and environmental health to social welfare – and has already enabled further digital transformations for the Department of Buildings, such as their Certificate of Occupance and Wallcheck solutions.
platformOS aligns with key trends in the tech space, particularly the shift towards modular, composable digital innovation, as recognized by leading research firms such as Gartner, Forrester, Deloitte, and McKinsey.
We're grateful for this recognition and excited to continue our journey with AcceliCITY, scaling our impact and enabling safer, more resilient, and more sustainable built environments for cities worldwide.
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