Håkan Holmgren is CEO of CheckProof, a rapidly growing and highly successful Swedish-based SaaS (Software as a Service) company born from quarrying industry experience and made for industry professionals to boost their operational efficiency, safety and quality. Aggregates Business editor Guy Woodford caught up with him to get CheckProof’s full story and learn about the firm’s exciting growth plans.
Håkan Holmgren’s face lights up as he talks about working at Rimbo Jord, his father Nisse’s quarrying business in Rimbo, north of Stockholm. “I started at the age of 12 or 13, helping after school to repair wheeled loaders, excavators, and screening equipment. Dad founded the company in the 1960s. It had around 45 employees and two quarries full of crushers, washing plants, trucks and all the other regular machines. I did everything – working evenings, running crushers, running washing plants.
“I eventually became the business’s CEO, and in 2009, we got a big new permit spanning over 105 more hectares of our Ledinge quarry. This allowed us to process a much higher volume of aggregate material. In 2011, Jehander [now Heidelberg Materials Ballast Sweden], a subsidiary of Heidelberg Materials, acquired our company.”
Shortly after acquiring Rimbo Jord, Holmgren joined Heidelberg Materials Northern Europe’s Production Performance Team as a process development and project manager. “The team went around lots of Heidelberg Materials Northern Europe quarries and other sites, reviewing how they operated, including their approach to maintenance, health and safety, quality and environment.” During Holmgren’s time at Heidelberg, he got to do site visits in the UK and Belgium.
“From working within and eventually running a family quarrying company, I knew all the issues around product [European] CE marking, quality control, and people not doing the maintenance they should. After starting work at Heidelberg Materials Northern Europe, I soon realised they faced the same challenges. Too many routine tasks were done on pen and paper and not carried out efficiently.”
Being part of the Production Performance Team gave Holmgren access to priceless quarrying process information, partly through the business’s Aggregates Academy and Aggregates handbook. He trained his Swedish colleagues at Heidelberg Materials Ballast Sweden on compact Swedish versions of the Aggregates Academy. “It [Heidelberg Materials Northern Europe] was an awesome place to work with great colleagues.”
In April 2014, one of Holmgren’s childhood friends, Jonas Pålgård, married into his wife’s family’s ship-loading company, where he worked in IT support. Jonas’s dad was also a quarry foreman at Rimbo Jord, so the wider Holmgren and Pålgård families were also close. “Jonas did much of his work on paper, such as safety checks and fuel consumption logging. It never worked well. Jonas thought having an app that acted as a checklist and advisor for his work would be a good idea. We then started discussing the idea, and that’s pretty much how CheckProof started. Jonas had also previously worked as an art director, and we sat down over several evenings and weekends and began designing an app.
“After finalising some work projects, I resigned from Heidelberg Materials Northern Europe at the end of 2014. In 2015, Jonas and I started designing the first CheckProof [software] codes, and we released the first version of CheckProof in May of that year. We started working quite closely with Heidelberg Materials Ballast Sweden and Pålgård & Söner Kran.”
CheckProof provides a mobile-first platform that simplifies maintenance management and HSEQ (health, safety, environment and quality) processes. Combining intuitive technology with actionable insights, CheckProof helps companies in the construction materials sector and heavy industries to follow routines, mitigate risks, minimise costs, and enhance safety procedures.
“Around 2017, we realised that we needed to scale the CheckProof offer so there weren’t just two or three people working on it,” explains Holmgren. “We then searched for capital to enable us to run the business at scale. We secured investment, started to take on more customers, and developed the app to make it available in different languages. We now have around 350 customers in 38 countries. This includes major building materials companies, like Cemex and Heidelberg Materials, which use the system in multiple countries, and SMEs [small and medium enterprises], including contract crushing companies with 15 to 20 employees. We have built a system that should solve all the operation pain points around maintenance, health and safety, environmental protection, etc., on one platform.
“We currently have over 40 employees based in our head office in Sweden, Germany and the UK. We are also recruiting in France, redeploying two employees to North America, and hiring six more people to work in that market. The US is huge. Texas alone is bigger than Sweden!” Holmgren says CheckProof’s recruitment drive and business scale-up are largely funded by a summer 2024 investment from Viking Venture, a leading Nordic B2B software investor renowned for its backing of fast-growing scale-up companies in the Nordics. “Granitor [Growth Management], another of our key investors, has a base in Indonesia, and we are building a CheckProof development team there. It means that later this year, we will pass 50 employees.”
The aggregates industry, characterised by heavy machinery, complex operations, high safety risks, and navigating sustainability challenges, can significantly benefit from digital tools. As Holmgren stresses, paper-based processes are time-consuming and prone to errors, often leading to costly inefficiencies, resource strain, and overlooked risks.
Digitalisation and solutions like CheckProof address these challenges by streamlining data collection, automating insights, and enabling game-changing predictive maintenance to enhance operational efficiency and ensure equipment reliability and workplace safety.
At CheckProof, telematics and integrations are central to enhancing operational efficiency in the aggregate industry. The platform connects to telematics systems across various machines and vehicles, regardless of brand. This integration enables seamless access to vital data such as fuel consumption, geographic location, idle time, error codes, and CO₂ emissions.
CheckProof can then merge this machine data with frontline employee reports. This holistic approach allows businesses to proactively address deviations, monitor performance trends, and ensure compliance with maintenance routines—all from a single platform. Additionally, CheckProof offers integrations with OEM industry leaders and third-party providers offering vibration and temperature sensors and belt-weigher software. This helps users harness real-time insights and automate maintenance workflows, bringing the concept of a truly connected plant to life. This innovative approach transforms raw telematics data into actionable insights, driving operational improvements and creating smarter, more connected plants and sites.
Anju Khanna Saggi, CheckProof’s content specialist, is on Aggregates Business’s Teams call with Holmgren. She explains that the company uses a direct sales approach with salespeople recruited from the quarrying industry, giving them an instant connection with potential customers and a better understanding of their needs. “Check Proof has a very open leadership style, and that same spirit of openness is seen in how the company works with customers to get things done.”
Holmgren agrees with Saggi’s comments, emphasising that CheckProof’s success is rooted in collaboration. By working closely with clients, the company refines its platform based on real-world challenges and opportunities. This collaborative ethos fosters long-term partnerships, drives innovation, and ensures the platform remains indispensable to its users.
“When you start with CheckProof, you buy the software. You get assigned a customer success manager to help you work the system at the required scale. It’s taking things step by step, and there are system add-ons you can pay to have, depending on the scale at which you want CheckProof to work.
“When you look at the work of a quarry manager, for example, they are on-site with responsibility for everything: plant operation and maintenance, walkaround inspections, site health and safety, implementing environmental best practices, and lots more. I remember being on a quarry site after a big crusher failed. A €50 air filter hadn’t been changed, so dust had entered the crusher’s oil tank, leading to a €55,000 repair bill and lost production time. The site team said, ‘Oh, we missed that.’ Those things can happen continuously in the industry.”
Holmgren says that CheckProof can assist with quarry employees’ regular working routines, alerting them to machine technical issues and any checks and maintenance they need to do at specific timed intervals. “It creates, in effect, a ‘My Task’ list – showing everything that needs to be done on-site that day. The success of CheckProof is based on how much you utilise it. We have multiple quarrying customer success stories. We have seen a 33% reduction in yearly maintenance cost per tonne with the full use of CheckProof. In other instances, we have seen daily output increase up to 75% on a site when they utilise CheckProof to drive behaviour change to improve operations. We are continuously working to develop the software to create even more value for our customers. “
Focusing on CheckProof’s 2025 priorities, Holmgren says: “We are focused on expanding our sales team in North America. We are looking at opening an office in Texas as we already have customers in the State. We will also attend the bauma [Munich, Germany] and AGG-1 [St Louis, Missouri, USA] exhibitions and several other events in the U.S. We will showcase CheckProof and highlight some new features of the software.”
Quarrying has long been a conservative industry, with many of its experienced professionals resistant to change. How tough have Holmgren and his CheckProof colleagues found it to persuade quarry operators to invest in the SaaS solution? “It’s about showing the value of CheckProof, which includes demonstrating how easy it is to communicate with colleagues through the platform app, log an issue with a case number, comment on how it is being progressed, tagging particular colleagues, and then solving it. You don’t need a WhatsApp group.
“It’s about how you encourage the change to a digital approach. We had one client, an older man in his sixties, who told us he was fine with pen and paper and didn’t need any digital system. Six months later, he was standing on a stage at an internal company meeting telling his colleagues how the CheckProof app could give him this and that and that he loved it.”
Commenting on the sustainability gains quarry operators can enjoy from using CheckProof, Holmgren says, “If you can make your equipment fleet last longer by using our software, that’s good for your sustainability. The fleet optimisation you can get from using CheckProof, such as reduced machine idle time, is also a big sustainability gain. With our system, you can put all the telematics from your machine fleet into it and can see an instant leaderboard in the app showing which machine has the highest or lowest idle time. When we did a pilot study, we saw a 25% reduction in fleet idling. If you have a big machine fleet, the reduced idle hours easily equates to replacing one less machine per year.”
In 2024, CheckProof was selected as a key vendor at the AggNexus Digital Innovation Conference at the University of Texas, Austin campus (9-10 September), highlighting its position as a leader in digital transformation for the aggregates sector. On the second day of the debuting event, Holmgren participated in a panel discussion on Challenges and Opportunities in Digitalisation for the Industry. During the hour-long session, David Boardman, developer of Stockpile Reports, an image-based stockpile inventory management system powered by a scalable, cloud-based platform, described data as “truly the new oil,” adding that capital expenditures for harvesting data will grow by an “order of magnitude”.
“AggNexus was inspiring. Seeing all the different digital solutions for the quarrying industry was great,” says Holmgren. “There is huge potential to stage this event in other world regions, such as Europe.”
Did Holmgren ever have any doubts that the CheckProof solution would not be a hit in the global quarrying marketplace? “Once you start something, there is no turning back. You have to succeed, and you need that mentality. We are clear on how to solve a problem in the [quarrying and wider construction materials] industry, and we want to keep going and make real changes for both the frontline workers and management. What drives me is receiving or hearing positive customer feedback. I remember early in the business when a colleague discovered a comment by our customer, Cemex UK, in a LinkedIn post, describing CheckProof as a ‘game-changer’. It was incredibly rewarding.”
