The Tay Road Bridge, a concrete span crossing the Firth of Tay, is a proving ground for sensor-based infrastructure monitoring. For the last year, a Seyond LiDAR unit has been counting cars, logging speeds, and watching for stopped vehicles. The company behind the deployment is Digiflec, a Scottish outfit betting that the path to smarter infrastructure runs through a hardware distributor's playbook.
Steven Gillan founded Digiflec in 2020, operating with the lean posture of a regional specialist. It has secured official distributor status for LiDAR from manufacturers like Ouster and Seyond, and partnered with TIER IV for high-dynamic-range cameras [Digiflec]. The core product is the bundle: sell the hardware, then layer on proprietary software for traffic analysis, digital twin creation, and asset management. For customers like Forestry and Land Scotland, this means mobile mapping units to survey forest roads [Seyond].
A bet on public sector pragmatism
Digiflec targets public sector bodies and land managers in the UK who have specific, tangible problems and a budget that prefers operational expenditure over massive capital projects. Winning a pre-commercial agreement via the Scottish government's CivTech 6 program gave Digiflec its first real customer: a project with Forestry and Land Scotland and Stirling Council to develop a digital twin of road networks [InvestFife].
The team and its traction
Public records show a small, focused team. Beyond founder Steven Gillan, LinkedIn profiles point to a handful of technical roles, including a perception engineer [LinkedIn (Krishnanjana Reddy Gangireddy)].
Deployment and recognition
- The Tay Bridge deployment: An ongoing collaboration using Seyond's Falcon K LiDAR for traffic and incident monitoring [Seyond].
- The CivTech win: The pre-commercial agreement for digital forest road twins [CivTech Demo Day].
- Program recognition: Being named among Techscaler's "Ones to Watch" for 2025 [Techscaler].
The distributor's dilemma
Digiflec's rebuttal to the low-margin distribution model is its integrated software layer, the Connected Intelligent Infrastructure Management (CiiM) platform. The question is whether that software can become the primary engine of value and margin before a larger player decides the UK's bridges and forests are worth a direct look. Digiflec's long-term bet is on becoming the default operating system for Scotland's physical infrastructure.