qentin helps facility managers find assets, check safety features and explore “digital twins“ using natural language.
Finding all the fire extinguishers, checking for damage or locating a piece of equipment by its asset tag in a large building could become considerably easier with qentin, an AI agent that lets facility managers search laser-scanned “digital twins” using natural language.
Currently in early access, the software is developed by Austrian startup qapture, which has spent the past six years laser scanning buildings across Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Its projects include 38 Ikea sites covering more than 2 million square metres.
Once a building has been scanned and georeferenced, qentin uses AI to automatically detect, label and locate objects. It can also read labels and asset tags directly from the scans using text recognition.
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Facility managers can then ask questions in German or English through a chat interface and receive answers displayed directly in the 3D viewer. Each answer is pinned to a location in the digital twin, allowing users to check the relevant object and correct its classification in the model if necessary.
“Today, knowledge about a building sits in Excel lists, old drawings, PDF reports and in the heads of a few people. With qentin it sits in the building itself, and you can simply ask,” says Daniel Höller, CEO and co-founder of qapture. “For six years we have structured building data so that an AI can work with it. qentin is the moment that pays off.”
Austrian energy utility Energie AG Oberösterreich is already using qentin in live operations. According to qapture, its most frequently used function is searching for asset tags: users enter a tag and the 3D model shows the corresponding asset’s location.
Qapture has captured 137 Energie AG sites as digital twins, covering 730,000 square metres of existing buildings and 43 hydropower plants. The scans contain 6,300 automatically detected labels.
Other applications include checking escape routes and fire protection measures, comparing facilities across multiple sites and helping external contractors locate specific assets.
On the same data, qapture also offers a facility management dashboard showing floor areas to DIN 277 (the German standard for floor area calculation), asset inventory and compliance status.
