A year into his own home remodel in Palmetto Bay, Martin Hebert still hadn’t broken ground. The delay wasn’t design-related. It was permitting.
In South Florida, that kind of timeline doesn’t shock anyone who has tried to build, renovate, or install solar panels. Plans get submitted. Weeks pass. Meanwhile, crews wait, homeowners wait, and costs rise.
That frustration is what drew Hebert to Inspected, a Miami-based startup where he is head of growth. The company aims to bring speed and predictability to one of the most opaque parts of construction: municipal permitting and inspections.
Hebert spent more than 15 years at Alarm.com, helping grow it from a 15-person startup to a public company with over 1,500 employees. Later, at RapidSOS, he helped scale a platform that connected smart device data directly to 911 centers. But permitting, he said, felt like a massive problem hiding in plain sight.
“You can’t get projects done for construction and trades pretty much anywhere in a timely manner because municipalities really have this very opaque permitting and inspection process that nobody understands how to navigate,” he said.
Inspected serves companies required to pull permits and pass inspections: homebuilders, remodelers, roofers, solar installers, and skilled trades like HVAC and plumbing. Through its software platform and licensed inspectors, the company acts as a private provider, legally authorized under Florida law to perform plan reviews and inspections.
Instead of waiting days or weeks for a municipal inspector to show up on-site, contractors can schedule a virtual inspection through the platform. A technician connects by phone, walks through the work in real time, and receives a pass or fail on the spot.
“If there are any corrections needed, we can reschedule and do a reinspection that same day,” Hebert said. “Instead of having to wait.”
The shift to virtual inspections didn’t happen overnight. According to CEO Ian Cohen, it required years of legislative updates. “The most impactful improvement in the statutes is the ability to perform inspections virtually,” Cohen said. “This has provided significant opportunity for projects to get completed faster while also providing a digital record of actual inspections.”
Over the last five years, Cohen said, lawmakers have recognized that permit management needs to improve “to address issues around timing, affordability and efficiency.” The post-COVID building surge exposed how many departments struggled to keep up.
Inspected originally launched around 2020 with a different plan: to sell a SaaS platform directly to building departments. But the sales cycles were long and dominated by more established vendors. By 2022, the company pivoted, launching its platform to serve contractors directly as a private provider.
At its core, the software is designed for simplicity. Contractors upload plans, track permit status, and schedule inspections in one place. The platform integrates municipality-specific documentation requirements, reducing the chance that an application gets kicked back for missing paperwork.
“We take that complexity and distill it into something that’s just a quick click,” Hebert said.
Still, legislation remains central to Inspected’s strategy. Cohen is working with Florida lawmakers to clarify parts of the law that, he said, are sometimes misinterpreted by certain municipalities.
“The modifications to the statutes are related to process efficiency improvements and removing ambiguity,” Cohen said, adding that the goal is to prevent building officials from creating rules that obstruct private providers from operating as intended under state law.
The business has grown quickly. Inspected has around 60 employees, about 40 in South Florida. Before bringing on outside capital, the company achieved 100% growth for three consecutive years while remaining profitable, Cohen said.
For Hebert, building Inspected in South Florida feels aligned with the region’s identity. “We’re helping enable the built environment to improve faster, more efficiently, and at better scale,” he said. “We’re not software selling to software.”
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I am a Miami-based technology researcher and writer with a passion for sharing stories about the South Florida tech ecosystem. I particularly enjoy learning about GovTech startups, cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence, and innovators that leverage technology to transform society for the better. Always open for pitches via Twitter @rileywk or www.RileyKaminer.com.
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