TEC HN O LO G Y
A marriage of love - and logistics Lindsay and Zach Rattner spoke to FIDI Focus Editor Dominic Weaver about how their partnership brought together moving and technology – helping inspire the formation of virtual survey business Yembo “Zach and I married and he got the inside scoop about a busy season at a moving company”
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hile much innovation begins in the boardroom or company brainstorming sessions, virtual moving survey platform Yembo has its roots in a relationship. Lindsay and Zach Rattner were dating out of college and, having completed an internship with the State Transportation department, where she worked with several FIDI-accredited movers, Lindsay took a job with Hilldrup in 2011. The company sent her on the FIDI Academy’s EiM training and to the FIDI Conference in Boston the following year. ‘This really opened my eyes to how interesting and vibrant the moving industry is,’ says Lindsay. ‘I got to meet people from all over the world.’ Zach, meanwhile, was working on mobile phone technology for Qualcomm in California, and Lindsay eventually agreed with her employers that she could join him there and continue working for the company remotely. ‘Zach and I married, and Zach got the real inside scoop about what it’s like to do a busy season at a moving company,’ she says. ‘We lived in a pretty small apartment, and my phone would start ringing with client calls at 5 or 6am, so he got a really good introduction and understanding of the industry.’ In 2015, Zach was headhunted for an innovation role and was sent to an industry AI conference where
he heard a talk by Ilya Sutskever, one of the founders of OpenAI. ‘I remember coming home from the conference and my head was spinning,’ he says. ‘I walked in the door and Lindsay told me about some problem at work – something like a 20ft container had been sent instead of a 40ft one because the shipper didn’t mention they had a basement or similar. ‘I felt we were living in two worlds; one where computers had become better than humans at identifying objects and images and doing these crazily advanced tasks and the other where you have these cream of the crop firms having these issues – not for the lack of trying, it was just really logistically complicated.’ A few weeks later when the couple were buying their first house, they were helped by an estate agent who was also running a small local mover business. ‘Lindsay was talking to him about his work, and it blew my mind,’ says Zach. ‘He had the same problems as a large mover: back-office logistics, the need for accurate inventories, being labour intensive, and getting the right carton counts. The more I learned, the more I realised this process is pivotal to a successful move on the survey side and that computers could help with the workflows.’ Zach resigned from his job six months later, along with his co-founder Siddharth Mohan, to set up Yembo. They developed their first video-collection platform, giving it to a local mover for free to test the technology and customers’ willingness to use it in return for the data that helped train the AI. It was a success, with the company reporting carrying out around two and a half times as many surveys in a typical day. ‘This was well beyond what we were expecting,’ says Zach. There then followed a five-year period of perfecting the AI – getting it to recognise unusually shaped items – to ensure it could cope with the uniqueness of every property, and focusing on its use to speed up the inventory process to save time and increase capacity, rather than replacing salespeople. ‘It’s a great accelerator, cutting the drudgery out of tasks like working out how many cartons are needed to pack your basement,’ says Zach. ‘Building a rapport with the customer is still uniquely human and we want to enable more of that’. The pandemic, meanwhile, turbocharged the acceptance of digital surveys and the company’s growth continued. Yembo now has users worldwide and hit the 1,000+ daily inspections mark in mid 2025. To celebrate the milestone, Zach and Lindsay returned to the FIDI Conference this year. Lindsay – who now works in another industry – calls this ‘a full-circle moment’. ‘I attended my first FIDI Conference at the age of 23,’ she says. ‘It was great to see Jesse (van Sas, FIDI Secretary General) again, who was my Academy trainer, too.’ Zach, of course, was able to meet existing and new Yembo customers at the event, reflect on how far the business has come in under a decade, and the part that the coming together of moving and technological knowhow has played in the company’s success. ‘If I hadn’t been coming home and seeing Lindsay working in moving and getting that insight into what works and what doesn’t, I really think we wouldn’t have a Yembo,’ he says. ‘But it’s not a side hustle any more, it’s grown far beyond anything we could have expected.’