Flash Inspector started with one conversation over dinner in Los Angeles in the summer of 2023. Fire protection engineer Simon Goodhead was catching up with a CAL FIRE / California State Fire Inspector he’d known for years. She told him about a roughly million–square–foot inspection that took weeks in the field and then another week or two just to write up the report with all the code references.

What stuck with Simon was simple: someone of her caliber was off the street for weeks so she could type. The community was better protected when she was out inspecting, not stuck at a desk. He’d heard versions of that same story enough times that, by the next morning, the idea for Flash Inspector was on paper: a wearable camera and phone app that capture an inspection walkthrough and narration, then use AI to turn that into a structured, code-referenced draft report.

Simon’s background is deep in fire. He has a Fire Science degree, is a fire protection engineer by training, and has spent decades in fire safety, investigation, and engineering. He understands how inspections really happen, how departments think about risk, and how thin most prevention teams are stretched. On the business side he’s comfortable with finance, strategy, and leadership, but he’s blunt about his limits: once the conversation turns to tech stacks and production environments, he knows he needs help.

So his first call was to a longtime friend: co-founder David Mustard.

David comes out of the enterprise software world. For nearly two decades at Manhattan Associates, he’s led large, complex software implementations from design through custom development, testing, issue resolution, and support. He has an Industrial and Systems Engineering degree from The Ohio State University, early experience in engineering education and supplier analysis, and a career built on process improvement, integration, and cross-functional leadership. In the founders’ own words, Simon is the true entrepreneur; David is the conservative, risk-management-minded partner who keeps the technology grounded and the roll-out realistic.

Together, they started Flash Inspector in 2023 with a clear first question: “Is this even technically feasible?” They spent the first several months in full-blown research, working with an AI development firm to see if inspection video could be re-watched, key moments pulled out, and then analyzed reliably against fire and building codes. By mid-January 2024, they had a working proof of concept, while Simon personally cycled through 15–20 different cameras to figure out what would actually work for inspectors in the field.

They built the company the way a lot of real-world teams do: bootstrapped and in the margins. Early contributors were people from their own networks with the right integrity and skill sets who had some capacity because they were between roles or underemployed. Most worked nights and weekends; only a couple of people drew paychecks. 

To see if inspectors actually wanted what they were building, Simon and teammate Russell took a simple camera to the Community Risk Reduction Vision 2020 conference. They walked the floor asking fire inspectors, marshals, and chiefs: “If you wore this, said ‘this is wrong’ while you walked, and it produced a report—would that help you?” Person after person said it would change their entire approach to inspections, and many immediately asked whether it could also help with investigations.

From there, departments helped shape the product. Cobb County, Decatur, and Sandy Springs in Georgia participated in early alpha and beta testing. The team gathered feedback at conferences from Phoenix to the IAFC Technology Symposium, then went back and fixed what didn’t work. By spring 2025, Sandy Springs had completed a full beta, using Flash Inspector for construction and annual inspections and helping round out what the system needed to support real-world workloads.

Underneath the technical story is a very human one. Simon talks openly about the “entrepreneur’s roller coaster” of building a company with a team of about 15 people largely working in their spare time—swinging between unshakable belief that Flash Inspector can transform inspections, and the fear that comes with that level of responsibility and risk. David emphasizes the impact on the inspectors themselves: if they can spend most of their week in the field doing the work they signed up for, and a fraction of the time on reports, job satisfaction and retention go up along with inspection volume.

Their long-term ambition is straightforward and bold. The U.S. sees roughly 4,000 fire fatalities a year; Simon and David want Flash Inspector’s data and time savings to help departments push that number down by as much as half, by letting inspection and CRR teams focus on the highest-risk properties instead of spreading limited resources thin.

Flash Inspector is a founder-led, boots-on-the-ground effort built by people who know fire, know software, and care deeply about the inspectors and marshals doing the work. The goal is simple: Inspect more. Reduce risk. And give prevention teams the time and tools to protect their communities the way they’ve always wanted to.