Notice of Capital and Business Alliance with ON GRIT Holdings

WingArc1st announces that it has entered into a capital and business alliance agreement with ON GRIT Holdings Inc. WingArc1st will acquire 41,025 shares of ON GRIT's stock (ratio to the total number of shares issued: 19.3%) on 28 February.

Background

Currently, much of the social infrastructure, such as bridges, concrete structures, and road appurtenances that were built after Japan's period of rapid economic growth, are more than 50 years old. Since these structures are expected to age at an accelerated rate over the next 20 years, there is a need to strategically maintain and renew infrastructure that is aging all at once. In addition, the construction industry is facing severe shortages of labor as well as the "year 2024 problem" (the enforcement of overtime work limit regulations under the Workplace Reform Law). These factors have made digitalization and labor saving an urgent issue in the area of inspection work for the maintenance and management of structures.

In this environment, our medium-term management policy announced in January 2022 calls for the expansion of industry and business solutions that promote DX. The alliance with ON GRIT holdings is aimed at developing cloud services in construction and civil engineering.

ON GRIT is a start-up company with a business vision of solving social issues in the structural inspection industry by encouraging the participation of vulnerable people in employment through its operational know-how and technology. The company has developed robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems related to structural inspection work, and has received high acclaim, including selection as one of the 30 Promising Technologies ^*1 by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.

In the future, WingArc's solutions for promoting the use of data, such as MotionBoard, a BI dashboard, and Dr.Sum, a data utilization platform, will be used to link data from structural inspections using On-Grit's robots. The accumulated data will be used to understand current conditions and to provide industry-specific services useful for maintenance. We expect that the development of this service will bring about DX in the construction and civil engineering industries, as well as support the government's revision of analog regulations^*2 for inspection work.

 

■Company overview

Company name	ON-GRIT ENGINEERING,.Inc.
Established	March 2018
CEO	Haruna Morikawa
Capital stock	235,993,750 yen (including capital reserve)
Number of employees	35 (As of January 2023)
Business	Inspection and detailed survey of bridges and other structures ordered by the national, prefectural, and municipal governments CAD production and compilation of results reports Photographing, data processing, CAD drawing, and contracted development using 3D scanners ordered by the private sector

*1 Reference: Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism: Announcement of the results of public solicitation for technology concerning new road lighting: https://www.mlit.go.jp/report/press/kanbo08_hh_000812.html (Japanese)

*2 A bill by the Temporary Digital Government Study Group to repeal approximately 10,000 provisions of analog regulations that prevent the use of digital technology. The analog regulations are expected to be repealed by June 2024.