01
The Challenge
On major infrastructure projects, the right to claim extra time or money is rarely lost because nobody saw the problem. It is lost because the problem was treated as a site issue, not a contractual one, until the deadline for giving notice had passed. The evidence is almost always already in the record: an instruction from the client's engineer, or an email between site and the project manager that the contracts team was never copied on. Practitioners told Kuper's founder the same thing independently, and put the cost anywhere between a discounted settlement and a claim lost outright.
The founder brought deep domain expertise, a clear thesis and a fixed budget. Kuper had to be an early-warning system over ordinary project records, not a tool that decides who is right. It also had to be credible with the large enterprises and Gulf infrastructure clients it would eventually sell to, which meant Microsoft-based infrastructure, enterprise sign-in and a clear answer on where data lives.
02
How We Worked
We started by narrowing the product to one loop worth proving end to end: upload a contract, forward project email to it, review clause-linked alerts on a dashboard. An uploaded contract is read by AI and turned into a reviewable rulebook of the notice requirements, deadlines, variation rules and programme obligations it contains, each linked to the clause it came from. Every project gets its own inbound email address, so a forwarding rule is all a team has to set up. Each message gets a fast first pass that filters out noise, logging why, then a thorough check against the rulebook.
Two principles shaped the build. The economics are asymmetric: a false alert costs thirty seconds to dismiss and a missed notice can cost six figures, so the system is tuned to raise rather than stay silent. And AI output is treated as a claim to check, not an answer to trust. Every alert quotes the contract and the message behind it, and every quote is checked automatically against the source. Where a check fails, the alert is kept and clearly labelled rather than quietly trusted.
We worked shoulder to shoulder with Kuper's own contracts practitioner, and their review reshaped the product twice. Their clause-by-clause audit of the pilot contract showed the early version paraphrasing where it should have quoted, so we rebuilt it to quote the contract word for word. A test site instruction that came back as 22 separate flags became one alert per real-world event, with every clause it touches attached as evidence, so one decision closes them all.
The whole environment is defined as code and runs without a single shared password or key.
03
The Outcome
Five weeks later, Kuper was live in their own Azure environment, reading real contracts and screening real project emails on day one. Within the week, users from Kuper's first pilot customer were signing in and forwarding correspondence.
Kuper now has an MVP to build towards a bigger ambition: a product that reads the project record where it already lives, from shared mailboxes and document platforms to meeting minutes and the programme, and connects Monday's email, Wednesday's query and Friday's minutes into one developing contractual event. It spots the drift while the notice clock is still running, tells the site team what evidence to capture while it still can, and puts a draft notice in the contract manager's inbox for approval.