The city of Lebanon, New Hampshire, plans to adopt Florida artificial intelligence tech into its government permitting process.
Lebanon partnered with Gainesville-founded AutoReview.AI, a for-profit startup partly owned by the University of Florida. Researchers at the college developed the technology, but Tampa entrepreneur Rob Christy and UF academic Dr. Nawari Nawari commercialized it in the past two years.
AutoReview.AI's platform inspects government permit applications to automate the review process. Delays and inefficiency bog down the permitting operations, and the startup seeks to fix that across industries and governments. The new partnership represents what it's trying to accomplish, AutoReview.AI CEO Christy said.
The New Hampshire city decided to work with AutoReview.AI to be "forward-thinking" and improve government services, according to a release.
"By integrating AI into our operations, we are positioning our city as a model for technological advancement in municipal governance," Lebanon City Manager Shaun Mulholland said in a prepared statement.
Christy has owned Sun Coast Permits in Tampa for more than 20 years. That's where he first identified the potential to create this sort of technology. But his connection to Nawari in 2020 was coincidental.
Nawari has more than 25 years of architectural modeling and research experience. He teaches graduate and undergraduate architectural structures, sustainability and resilience, and building modeling courses at the University of Florida. Nawari sent Christy a survey in 2020 while gathering data about permitting, and Christy reached out of curiosity.
"He was looking for information and reached out to me as an industry professional," Christy said. "... I was in that same mindset, thinking about how can we automate this? I had seen automation in the legal world, AI being used in the legal world to read documents, which led me to believe we could do the same with building codes. So when he reached out, it just was a stroke of luck and everything, and the stars were aligned."
Since then, the company has contracted with Hernando County, Pasco County, the city of Altamonte Springs, the city of Gainesville and surveying company Carter and Clark. It has also raised $5 million from angel investors and strategic partners, Christy said.
The company is headquartered in Tampa and has offices in Gainesville. UF recognized the technology behind the company as one of the top inventions of 2022.
