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By Caitlin Granfield
Detect helps utility companies identify equipment defects before a major power failure or accident happens. The Miami-based startup does this through its proprietary AI-powered technology, which enables utilities to respond quickly, lowering their risks, driving down their costs, and potentially saving lives.
Recently, Detect’s AI agents inspected over 120,000 images from 2,600 transmission towers and in real time identified a severe defect invisible to the human eye, Matthew Sattler, CEO and co-founder of Detect, told a roomful of investors as a presenter at the Florida Venture Capital Conference in Miami in early March. Acting on that insight saved the utility $1 million and avoided a week of outages.
The defect was a single bolt that was hanging on by corrosion, and it was just one of 1,600 defects that Detect’s technology discovered that day, Sattler says. “And that is the power that we provide with our technology – the ability to act before something happens,” which is becoming increasingly critical with an aging electrical grid, more extreme weather, and rising demand.
Sattler, a New Jersey native who moved to downtown Miami from London four years ago, previously worked for 12 years building a data business across five different countries for the corporate and investment bank, HSBC. “I learned pretty much the hard way of what it means to try to innovate within very large organizations, and as you can imagine, it’s quite difficult,” he says.
In 2021, he left his job at HSBC and joined his mentor with the goal of actualizing their shared passion: to innovate traditional businesses and traditional sectors with artificial intelligence and other types of cutting-edge technology. Sattler became one of the partners of Pilot Wave Holdings that buys traditional businesses and makes them more valuable with technology. In 2021, Pilot Wave acquired a powerline construction company in Nova Scotia. That experience led to the idea for Detect Technologies.
“These are blue collar guys that are hanging from helicopters building the large transmission towers or fixing the distribution poles across our community – building the grid. There was a major sense of urgency to innovate these current manual processes,” he says, of how the idea of Detect came to be. “The backbone of our society, how we power everything that we do, is currently done with people flying from helicopters with binoculars, taking notes on what the issues are or walking the lines and seeing what the issues are.”
Sattler says that nowadays, utilities are starting to use drones to assess their equipment but that too much data and too much information creates an overload problem.
Detect’s AI organizes, categorizes and summarizes all of the information from the drones and other sources of information such as iPhones and cameras mounted on trucks. It pinpoints the equipment that is failing so that companies can move forward with a repair plan. “In minutes, companies can see a major defect right in our platform,” says Sattler.
Sattler says that Detect’s proprietary AI architecture includes generative intelligence, such as adversarial networks and computer vision models like Vision Transformers (ViTs).
“The key innovation isn’t just in selecting specific models, but in how they interact, leveraging each other to form a cohesive and intelligent system that drives critical decision-making for infrastructure monitoring,” he says.
Last year, six clients booked with Detect, including multi-year contracts with hundreds of thousands in ARR (annual recurring revenue), Sattler says. This year, Detect signed a five-year multi-million-dollar contract with a utility company to inspect their entire network. Detect was self-funded up until recently, and completed a seed round where they took in $1.5 million of venture capital, he says.
Detect, founded in 2024, has a presence both in Canada and in the US. Ten people make up Sattler’s current staff and he’s looking to hire five to ten more employees by the end of the year.
This year, he’s looking to hire AI engineers, front-end developers and a social media and marketing professional. He says that 80% of his current team is made up of AI engineers and other competencies within technology. “I’m building out our tech presence here in Miami and hiring talent here, starting this year,” he says.
Above, the DetectOS platform. Pictured at the top of this post: Detect CEO Matthew Sattler and CTO Justin Lee exhibiting at an industry conference. Below, Sattler engages in an on-stage presentation and discussion with Danielle Mousseau of FPL at the Florida Venture Capital Conference March 4.
Nancy Dahlberg contributed to this report.
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