Spending his days as a software engineer keeping the systems ticking along at edtech platform Showbie, Muhammad Yawar Malik had little idea that a conversation in a pub in 2024 would eventually lead him to build his own AI start-up, Lexilio.
At the time, Malik’s job was essentially to spot problems before they became bigger ones. But down the pub, a friend working in construction asked him a question that got him thinking. Why wasn’t there something similar to monitor the mountain of contracts, notices and deadlines sitting behind major construction projects?
Out of curiosity, he started digging and soon discovered it was a costly problem for the construction industry.
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Construction contracts can require companies to formally flag delays, changes or extra costs within strict deadlines. Miss those notices and it can lead to expensive disputes, or mean contractors lose the right to claim extra time or money.
Malik began looking at the growing number of AI platforms being developed to review contracts, but found much of the attention was focused on the legal sector through the likes of Harvey, the fast-growing legal AI platform.
“Nobody was building for construction specifically,” he explains. “It’s not that the models are bad, but the models are trained for legal departments, not for quantity surveyors or commercial managers.”
So, while on paternity leave last year, he decided to try building a solution himself.
“I started reaching out to people on LinkedIn, asking if they wanted to be advisors. I can build things really fast and it helped that I was on paternity leave too.”
He knew how to build the technology behind it, but building a business around it was a completely different challenge.
Originally from Pakistan, Malik had spent much of his life living in Lithuania before moving to the UK 14 years ago. He later lived in London before moving his family to Liverpool in 2019.
But for much of the next five years, he kept his head down working remotely from his home office, with little idea about the world of start-ups or what support was on offer locally.
Getting serious about launching Lexilio, a construction commercial intelligence platform, changed that.
“When I launched this company, I realised I needed to go out, work from a shared space and see what was happening in Liverpool,” he says.
“I knew this kind of business couldn’t just be run from my room. You’ve got to be out and meet people.”
He started searching for local events and headed along to a pitch practice session at Barclays Eagle Labs in May. There he met Mo Aldalou, programme director at Baltic Ventures, who encouraged him to apply for its Launchpad programme for early-stage businesses.
“I met Mo and applied to Baltic Ventures as I didn’t know how it all worked. They really liked my idea and gave me a chance. Now I’m one of 10 start-ups on the programme.”
It was another chance conversation, but one that helped take Lexilio from something Malik was building alone at home to being able to navigate the practicalities and commercial side of running a start-up.
The company was formally registered in April and the AI-powered platform went properly live towards the end of June. Within its first few weeks, Malik says Lexilio had secured 13 paying users, with a string of enterprise demos booked with businesses across the UK, Canada, US and Middle East.
For a first-time founder who was building the platform solo just months ago, even he seems slightly taken aback by how quickly things have moved.
“It just started from a basic conversation and now it’s kind of a reality. I can’t believe it,” he admits.
“It’s a little bit scary.”
The problem hiding in the paperwork
So what does Lexilio actually do? In simple terms, the platform uses AI to sift through the contracts and documents behind construction projects, identifying important obligations and deadlines that might otherwise have to be tracked manually.
Rather than analysing a single contract, Lexilio is designed to take an entire suite of project documents and pull together what needs to happen and when.
Users can assign actions to colleagues, track whether they have been completed and monitor notices as deadlines approach.
“Up until now, there has been no monitoring. And when it comes to construction contracts, they have some of the biggest open disputes,” he explains.
But his bigger ambition for the technology is already taking shape through an AI agent solution he calls “autopilot”.
Currently being tested with private beta users, Malik claims Lexilio’s own benchmarks suggest the technology can now automate around 70% of the work it is targeting.
But as AI takes on more of the work buried in construction contracts, should those working in the industry start worrying about their jobs? He is adamant that his solution isn’t designed to replace them.
“There will always be a human touch required, 100%,” he insists.
“When I speak to quantity surveyors, they have to look at the drawings, planning, numbers and calculations as well as contract reviews. Sometimes contract reviews can take 40% of their time and, if it’s a major project, that’s a lot of work.”
He says the aim is to slash the time construction professionals spend manually reading and cross-referencing documents.
“With Lexilio, instead of reading hundreds of files and matching them across documents, within two minutes it will give you everything,” he says.
For him, it’s less about taking people out of construction and more about reducing the hours they spend trawling through paperwork.
From engineer to founder
Getting out of the house and into Liverpool’s start-up ecosystem has also forced Malik to think differently about what it takes to turn an idea into a business.
“I think it’s totally changed the way I was thinking,” he says.
He points to guidance on everything from pricing and positioning to understanding the type of customer Lexilio is trying to attract. There has also been a lesson in not getting quite so technical during demos.
Malik says the Baltic Ventures programme has helped him strip back the jargon and explain Lexilio more simply to the construction professionals he is trying to reach.
But he now faces the kind of challenge plenty of founders would probably be pretty chuffed to have, keeping up with the interest.
He admits the business is already struggling to stay on top of emails and demo requests and plans to hire more than 20 people by the end of the year as Lexilio grows.
“My first priority is to hire a lot of people, just so we can cope with the speed,” he explains.
He also plans to establish an office in Liverpool and is exploring taking on interns through the University of Liverpool, while future hires could be based in North America and Gulf markets including the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Then there are the investors. Malik says Lexilio is already attracting interest from US venture capital firms, although he isn’t in a rush to accept outside investment just yet.
“We just have to see,” he says. “I would prefer to work with someone who knows construction technology really well rather than just taking a pay cheque and discovering you don’t align with each other.”
For a business that only properly launched this summer, there is plenty still to prove. But Malik certainly isn’t short on ambition for where it could eventually end up.
He points to Harvey, the AI platform that has rapidly established itself in the legal sector.
“What Harvey is doing in legal AI is what we’d like to become for the construction sector,” he says.
