Next in our meet the founder’s series, we are introducing the co-founders behind Stitchbloc – Sabastine Nwachukwu and Abraham Olaobaju. These founders are using AI to help make homes safer and healthier and in this blog, they explain how they are bringing their technological experience to this real-world problem.

Tell us about your start-up – what problem are you solving and why does it matter? 

Stitchbloc exists to close the gap between spotting damp and ensuring action is taken. Too many rented homes across the UK still have visible damp and mould. In Scotland, around one in ten dwellings have damp or condensation, and it is more common in rented homes than in owner-occupied properties. 

On the tenant side, Stitchbloc analyses a photo of the affected area. The AI highlights visible patterns that may be consistent with damp or mould, returns a preliminary assessment (early signs, action recommended, or urgent attention) and drafts a clear maintenance email the tenant can review and send to their landlord. The aim is to create a better first report indicating what is visible, where it is, and when an inspection is needed so the landlord has enough information to act.   

On the landlord side, those reports land in a digital portfolio. Serious issues are flagged first, so housing providers can see what needs an engineer urgently and deploy their teams accordingly. 

That matters more as Scotland’s Awaab’s Law takes effect on 6 October 2026, with fixed deadlines to investigate damp and mould and to take action. Clearer reports in, faster triage out, so both sides can move sooner. 

Tell us more about the team at Stitchbloc and your background? 

Stitchbloc was founded by Sabastine Nwachukwu and Abraham Olaobaju, who have known each other since they were undergraduates together at Babcock University, studying software engineering. They later both came to Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Sabastine for an MSc in Data Science, Abraham for a Master’s in Software Engineering. 

Sabastine is CEO and founder. He is a full-stack Software Engineer and AI engineer with more than five years of experience building production systems, including payments and other trust-critical data.  

Abraham is CTO and co-founder. He is a senior software engineer who builds and scales full-stack systems used in production. At Flutterwave he built SDKs and workflows for merchant payment processing. 

Together they bring production engineering and applied AI, with a shared focus on housing compliance as a regulated, real-world problem. 

What inspired you to start this company? Was there a personal story behind it? 

The spark was simple: a damp patch is easy to photograph but knowing what to do next is not. 

Both founders have spent years building systems where evidence and a clean paper trail are the product. Living and studying in Edinburgh, they kept seeing the same failure in rented housing. Tenants take photos. Landlords ask for more information. Weeks pass. Nobody has a shared, dated record of what was visible and when it was reported. The missing piece was the loop around the photo and how to create an assessment a non-expert can understand, a maintenance email that is fit for purpose, and an audit trail a housing officer can actually use. Stitchbloc was built to stitch those pieces together. 

What are your goals during the accelerator programme? 

The Stitchbloc platform already takes a tenant from photo to evidenced email, and gives landlords a portfolio view, risk radar and exportable compliance pack. During the accelerator, the goals are to integrate Ordnance Survey and Registers of Scotland data into that risk model. In turn predicted damp risk can be scored from building age, EPC and location and to test it on Scottish housing stock. 

The focus is to run pilots with housing associations, local authorities and letting agents ahead of 6 October 2026, and convert those pilots into the first paying customers. There is also the ambition to grow the team in Scotland and use the programme’s mentorship and data access to take the product from a working MVP to a tool housing providers can run in production. 

What has been your proudest moment so far as founders? 

Two moments stand out. First, deploying the application successfully. Going from an idea to a live product, photo analysis, a preliminary assessment, a maintenance email the tenant can send, and a landlord view of reports as they come in and seeing how this all holds up in production, not just as a demo. 

Second, getting tenants using it. Watching the first real photos come through, the model analysing those photos and converting that report into an email for the tenants to use That was the point at which it stopped being a prototype and started being a tool people use when they have a damp patch on the wall and need a clear next step. 

How can people support you? 

Stitchbloc is looking for housing associations, local authorities, letting agents and private landlords in Scotland to pilot the platform before Awaab’s Law takes effect in October.  

Feedback from housing officers, compliance teams and tenant support organisations is especially useful. Anyone who shares the vision of making homes healthier for everyone in Scotland and in the UK can get in touch at hi@stitchbloc.com. 

Website: www.stitchbloc.com 

Stitchbloc LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/stitchbloc 

Sabastine LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nwachukwu-sabastine 

Abraham LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/abraham-olaobaju