Calibre raises $3.3M pre-seed to bring AI to the $200B certification industry
May 18, 2026
Calibre, a London-based startup building AI for the testing, inspection and certification industry, has raised $3.3 million (£2.46 million) in a pre-seed round co-led by Vicus Ventures and CIV, with participation from I2BF, 9 Yards Capital, Jigeum and angels including former Google and SoftBank executive Nikesh Arora.
The testing, inspection and certification industry — known as TIC — is a roughly $200 billion market that sits behind almost every regulated product in global commerce. Aircraft components, banking systems and food supply chains all require sign-off from a human auditor before reaching the market, and the certifications they produce are the precondition for selling to governments, major retailers and regulated markets. Yet getting certified typically takes three to six months, holding up businesses and supply chains.
Calibre's pitch is that the bottleneck is auditor time. Most auditors spend the bulk of their hours reviewing thousands of pages of documents and writing reports rather than making the judgement calls they were trained for. The company deploys bespoke AI agents inside publicly listed TIC bodies and accreditation bodies, built to enterprise security standards. Alongside the funding it is also launching AuditorOS, an AI product for independent auditors that handles documentation review, report writing and standards cross-referencing. AuditorOS is already in use with early customers and launches publicly in June.
The company was founded by Gautham Senthilnathan and Steve Thomas, who met at university and have been building together for seven years. Both spent three years at Palantir before starting Calibre: Senthilnathan became a direct report to chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, running more than 100 AI bootcamps on Palantir's AIP platform, while Thomas led some of the company's largest European engagements, building agentic systems across more than 20 regulated industries.
The lead investors have previously backed Databricks, Coinbase, Anduril, ServiceTitan and The Nuclear Company. Calibre plans to use the funding to grow its existing enterprise contracts with publicly listed TIC companies and accreditation bodies, and to put the product in the hands of more independent auditors. "TIC is a fragmented, highly specialised industry where generic AI doesn't work," said Manraj Singh Sandhu of Vicus Ventures in a statement. "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."
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