Filio’s story did not start with a business plan.

Filio’s story did not start with a business plan. It started with a research breakthrough at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

As PhD researchers in Computer Science, Civil and Geotechnical Engineering, we (Max Roozbahani, David Frost and Fikret Atalay) spent years analyzing the built environment. We were trained to look for precision and proof. Yet whenever we stepped out of the lab and onto a job site, we saw a massive disconnect. We saw highly skilled engineers, inspectors, and contractors doing critical work, but they were forced to document it with tools that were fundamentally broken.

We watched professionals capturing the reality of their projects with nothing more than a standard phone camera. The moment those photos left the site, they lost their value. A photo of a structural issue or a completed milestone is useless if you cannot prove exactly where it was taken or what direction you were facing.

We realized the industry did not just have a photo organization problem. It had a data integrity problem.
The Problem We Were Trying to Solve
We saw teams drowning in "Camera Roll Chaos". Critical project evidence was trapped in text threads, scattered across personal devices, or buried in folders without context.

This lack of organization created a liability. In construction, engineering, and insurance, a photo is not just a memory. It is a legal record. It is proof. We asked ourselves why the most important record of the job site was being treated so casually.

We wanted to build a solution that respected the complexity of the field. We needed a tool that was as easy to use as snapping a selfie but rigorous enough to stand up in a courtroom or an engineering audit.

How Our Approach Evolved
We approached building Filio with the same rigor we applied to our doctoral research. We used Evidence-Based Entrepreneurship. We did not simply guess what features might be cool. We treated the problem like a scientific thesis.

The Hypothesis: If we could automate the context—capturing GPS, bearing, time, and weather instantly—we could turn a simple photo into an indisputable data asset.

The Research: We went to the field. We observed that field crews needed more than just a photo gallery. They needed to see their work on maps and blueprints.

The Solution: We evolved Filio from a simple capture tool into a Visual Asset Management Platform. We integrated AI to handle the busy work, like voice-to-text translation and automatic labeling, so teams could focus on building rather than typing.

The Filio Difference: Deep Research vs. "Rough Ideas"
This is where Filio stands apart from the rest of the market.

There are many photo apps available today. Many were built quickly based on a simple idea: that sharing photos should be easier. These tools are often great for showing off a finished job, but they were not designed for data.

Filio was created by PhD engineers to solve a harder problem.

While others built features for social sharing or marketing, we focused on GIS integration, defensible metadata, and plan sheet accuracy. We built Filio for the teams that cannot afford to be wrong.

Filio is the result of high-level academic research applied to the real world. It represents the difference between a rough concept and a solution engineered at one of the top research universities on the planet. We built this platform for the engineers, inspectors, and serious contractors who know that proof is everything.