Inorsa Launches Nora Intelligence for Critical Infrastructure

Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong TV. My next guest is Shawn Shahini. Shawn is the CEO and founder of a company called Inorsa.

I'm looking forward to hearing all about it. But let's first welcome Shawn to Techstrong TV and then find out maybe a little bit about Shawn. Shawn, how are you, man?

Welcome. I'm good. How are you doing?

Good. Shawn, we're going to talk about the company, but you are the CEO founder, and people always want to know who they're listening to, who they're watching. Tell us a little bit about the road that led you to founding Inorsa.

Yeah, happy to. So I'm an immigrant. I came to US to get a PhD, and then I fell in love with capitalism, basically all the opportunities here.

So I decided to, instead of getting a PhD, start my own company. But it was a whole journey. I worked as a structural engineer in oil and gas, then utilities, then telecom.

And I was obsessed with this opportunity that you can have in America to build anything you want. But also, I gained a lot of expertise as a structural engineer in terms of designing, building critical infrastructure. So anything from oil and gas platforms to telecom towers to fiber infrastructure.

So I had a lot of learnings there. I started a couple of different companies along the way. But, this critical infrastructure problem was where there was a lot of my skill set and background expertise, and I think it is something that we spend more money on than any other industry in America, and it's really important.

So, that kind of led me to starting Inorsa. Love it. So first of all, when did you found Inorsa?

So I started the company in 2020- Okay ... like a week before COVID shut down. Mm-hmm.

But the first kind of two, two and a half years, it was just a engineering consulting firm, and after that, it became a software company. So I raised a round of venture capital. I hired the engineering team, and basically everything took off.

Wow, what a great story. Only in America, right? Yeah.

So let's go back to when you made that kind of pivot from an engineering firm to a software company. What drove that? So I always, even at my first job about 15 years ago as a structural engineer, this problem was very obvious to me, just nobody understood it.

Because nobody understands what it takes to design like an oil and gas refinery or a telecom tower. It's very specific to a structural engineer. So I always wanted to start a software company to automate the work.

It was very obvious to me that it's a lot of repetitive work, and these are massive projects. But the thought process was, if I start as a consulting firm, I can basically learn everything that I was missing on the business side and then transform it into a software company. So, it was kind of a natural progression after getting enough customers, learning enough about the business.

It just naturally happened. I got connected to some very successful, exciting people in tech, and they basically supported me to transform the company into a software company. Love it.

Now, of course, 2020-- Well, 2022, maybe AI starts coming on the horizon. It was kind of 2023 where you started seeing ChatGPT and all of this stuff. Was AI sort of on your planning at that point, or that's something you had to incorporate in?

The original thought process was, it always starts from the customer problem. AI is just a tool in the toolbox. And from a technical standpoint, AI had a lot of limitations, and we were working with those limitations.

This is when the company was early on. So the first iteration of the product wasn't as AI heavy as now, but the obsession was the customer's problem. So the customer problem has been the same.

It's been just different variations of the same platform, same solutions, that are now way more efficient than before, to solve the same basic problem, which is automating the entire infrastructure workflow. Got it. And so, I imagine as AI has become more and more front and center- Mm-hmm ...

it's become more and more important in terms of how you use it to solve customer problems. Exactly, but I think, again, it comes down to the problem is they're falling in love with the problem, not the tools. But even when we started the company, we were an AI company.

It was just the tools or the technology wasn't as sophisticated as now. So now I think the speed of development has accelerated a lot. You have a lot more potential competition on the horizon, and you can do a lot more exciting stuff at scale, which was not as easy before.

So, and on the other side, I think because the market-- So when you start a company, you have to convince people that AI is not smoke and mirrors. But now there's a lot of push on our customer side that everybody wants to adopt AI in their workflows. And that has, on the business side, has made a huge push in terms of how many tools we can develop, how extensive the platform can be, how technical you have to be so competition doesn't catch up to you.

So it just has a lot more than before. Excellent. I want to turn now, if we can, Shawn, to this Nora Intelligence, because this is something new you guys just launched over at Inorsa.

What exactly is Nora Intelligence? So Nora Intelligence is our AI coworker platform that helps our customers not only have access to all the information within their infrastructure, and this could be complicated for us, not just the PDFs, everything from their jurisdictional requirements to basically the CAD data, structural capacity, to all the way to automating their end-to-end workflow. So, for example, we automate everything that an architecture engineering firm does for our customers, and the customers could be architecture engineering firms, too.

So, Nora's Intelligence is that the goal with Nora is to accelerate the end-to-end operations of our customers, at scale. Because all of these infrastructure projects are also projects at scale. You don't build one tower, you build a thousand towers, or you operate 10,000 towers at the same time.

The data center is not just one piece of structure. It's like hundreds and hundreds of pieces of infrastructure that you have to operate at scale. Got it.

When we say it's an advanced AI platform, is there a model running there, or is it sort of a RAG, it creates a RAG that runs on top of an underlying model? What exactly are we talking about? In our case, it's a mix of different approaches and different layers of products.

So, there is always a foundational model underneath. But, what Inorsa does that's a lot different than most of other generic AI tools is, one, besides all the context, all the permitting requirements, all the jurisdictional customer requirements, and construction, basically specifics, we take kind of all the clean data we create for our customers on their assets all the way to the end of deliverables. So we can generate complicated CAD models and CAD designs that are normally done by humans.

And these are not something you can buy off the shelf, or you can find anywhere in terms of- And to generate AI tools. Or we can generate structural models that a structural engineering firm has to do to basically design a tower or a structure. Or we generate financials.

Our customers can review their legal documents on our platform. But those are, I think, low-hanging fruits. The really complicated stuff is how far we can take the clean data we create on an infrastructure asset in terms of the end deliverable for the user, so the engineers can review it and file it.

So Sean, is Nora Intelligence something that runs on top of the Inorsa software platform, or is Nora itself the platform? Basically what Nora does is it orchestrates all of these AI agents and capabilities that the Inorsa platform has and brings them to the surface for the customers and users. So Nora is the new interface that makes it a lot easier for customers to automate their work at scale and help basically the day-to-day users all the way to the C-suite to get visibility and access, but also take advantage of all of these automation capabilities that the Inorsa platform had before.

Got it. All right. If you don't mind, we've got a few minutes left.

Can you walk people through how to engage with Inorsa? How to be able to check out Nora? So obviously, you can find us on our website online.

Which is? com. Okay.

And our team is very accessible, both on LinkedIn or on any online website, social media. We're also heavily focused on infrastructure, so if you're in telecom, you're in data centers, oil and gas, these are the three markets that Inorsa is tackling right now. And on the other side, especially if there's anybody that is interested in finding new opportunities, we are hiring and scaling really fast, so I would love to hear from them too.

I love it. Sean, first of all, congratulations. Starting your own company is hard enough.

Making the move from providing, let's say, professional engineering services to a software company is harder still. Riding this AI wave and incorporating that into your original plan, this is what it's all about, right? That's what being an entrepreneur is, running with the market and providing the solutions customers want.

So that's fantastic. Thank you. It's a very exciting time.

I don't think it is possible without the heroic effort of the employees. And on the other side, the customers that buy into the vision, especially the early customers- Sure ... and bring something to life.

So thanks for taking the time. com, and we'll keep what's doing with Nora, and we'll hopefully check in with you soon and see how things are going. Looking forward to it.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Sean Shahini, CEO and founder of Inorsa here on Techstrong TV.

We're going to take a break. We'll be back in a minute.