200 workers die every year on building facades. Robotics can end that.

The call that changes everything

In 2025, Théo Jouanno was hanging 60 meters above the ground on a building facade in France. Two ropes. A harness. Years of IRATA certification and training. Then one of the ropes failed.

He caught himself. He finished the job. He went home that night. But the phone call to his brother Enguerand was not about the job. It was about the fact that the job almost killed him.

Théo had been a professional rope access technician for years. He knew the protocols, respected the equipment, trusted the system. But that day made something clear: no amount of training eliminates the fundamental risk of suspending a human body hundreds of meters above concrete.

That phone call is why VitroBOT exists.

A number the industry does not talk about

More than 200 workers die every year performing facade maintenance worldwide. Falls from height remain the leading cause of death in construction across Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. And that number, 200, is almost certainly low. Many countries do not track rope access fatalities as a separate category. In parts of Asia and Africa, reporting is inconsistent or nonexistent.

Behind every number is someone like Théo. Trained, certified, careful. Someone who did everything right and still came within seconds of not coming home.

The injuries that do not make the headlines are just as telling. Chronic joint damage. Suspension trauma. Heat exhaustion at altitude. Rope access workers operate in conditions that no amount of safety protocol can fully control: wind, rain, equipment degradation, human fatigue. IRATA certification is rigorous and valuable. But it manages risk. It does not remove it.

The question we started asking was simple. If the job itself is the danger, why are we still sending people to do it?

Why the ropes are still there

The honest answer is that rope access works. It is flexible, relatively cheap, and requires almost no permanent infrastructure beyond the anchor points that already exist on most tall buildings. An estimated 95% of buildings over 30 meters already have the double-rope systems and davit arms that rope access teams use daily.

That infrastructure took decades to install. It represents billions of dollars in embedded capital across the global building stock. No building owner is going to rip it out. No insurer is going to mandate a replacement technology that does not exist yet.

So the industry has settled into a pattern. Workers go up. Some come down injured. A few do not come down at all. Insurance premiums absorb the cost. Regulations tighten incrementally. And the fundamental equation stays the same: a human being, two ropes, and gravity.

Until recently, there was no alternative that could match rope access on cost, speed, and flexibility. That is what we set out to change.

Thirty days on glass

Less than six months ago, Enguerand, Théo, and Jean-Philippe Winckler packed a suitcase and flew to San Francisco to join Founders Inc. Jean-Philippe brought the engineering dimension that turned a personal conviction into a technical roadmap.

We had 30 days, roughly $1,000 in parts, and a thesis: if the ropes and anchor points already exist on every tall building, a robot should be able to use them too.

By the end of that month, we had a working prototype on real glass. Not a render. Not a simulation. A physical machine, climbing a real facade, capturing visual data. It was loud, ugly, and held together with zip ties in places. But it worked.

That prototype proved something that mattered more than any pitch deck. The problem was not a hardware moonshot. The infrastructure was already there, waiting for a machine instead of a person.

What the robot sees

Today, VitroBOT's system scans building facades autonomously. The robot descends on the same ropes a human technician would use, capturing high-resolution imagery of every surface it passes.

Our vision AI identifies 13 types of facade defects: cracks, spalling, exposed rebar, corrosion, efflorescence, mold, peeling paint, water damage, staining, weathering, glass damage, window deterioration, and tile damage. The system produces a priced inspection report, typically within a single day. No scaffolding. No human at height. No phone calls about rope failures.

This matters now more than ever. The EU's revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is creating new inspection and renovation obligations across Europe. The Renovation Wave strategy targets 35 million buildings by 2030. Building owners will need facade assessments at a scale and frequency that rope access teams simply cannot sustain.

The shift that is already happening

We do not pretend VitroBOT will solve this alone. The movement away from putting humans in unnecessary danger at height is broader than any single company. Drone inspection, automated cleaning systems, and sensor-embedded facades are all part of a shift that the construction industry is slowly, sometimes reluctantly, making.

What we do believe is that the 200 deaths per year are not inevitable. They are the cost of an industry that has not yet adopted the tools to do things differently. The ropes are already there. The regulatory pressure is building. The technology exists.

Théo still knows how to tie every knot in the IRATA manual. He just does not think anyone should have to.