Overview
In partnership with CentralNest, we are transforming how UK removal companies survey, quote and win jobs. We worked with the CentralNest founders from an early stage to architect a cloud environment capable of running computer vision workloads at scale reliably, securely, and cost-efficiently. Through our AWS Solution Provider Program, we continue to manage and evolve that environment as the company grows.
This blog tells the story of what CentralNest does, the problem they are solving, and how we built the cloud foundation underneath their product.
About CentralNest
CentralNest was built by founders who experienced numerous moving day surprises as consumers. They watched surveyors disagree by tens of cubic feet on the same job. They also saw quotes won and lost on margins thinner than the error rate of the estimate itself. This is why it was decided that the answer was not another booking platform or another CRM, it was getting the inventory right in the first place.
Not with theoretical AI or another chatbot, but with computer vision that watches a video of a customer's home and tells the removal company exactly what is in every room.
The challenge: quoting by guesswork
Anyone who has moved house in the UK knows the drill. You request quotes from three removals companies, and three different numbers come back. Sometimes hundreds of pounds apart or more.
It is tempting to assume someone is trying to overcharge you. The truth is more mundane, and harder to fix. Estimating the volume of someone's belongings by eye is imprecise by nature. A surveyor walks through a house, mentally converts wardrobes and sofas and boxes of books into cubic feet, and writes a number down. Another surveyor does the same exercise the next day and arrives somewhere different. Neither of them is wrong. The method is the problem.
That imprecision costs the industry. Underestimate and the mover lose money or has to send a second van. Overestimate and the customer go elsewhere. Either way, the quote was a guess dressed up as a number.
The solution at a glance
The product is simple from the customer's side. They film a walkthrough of their home on a phone. Living room, kitchen, bedrooms, the loft, the garage. A few minutes of casual video.
Behind the scenes, CentralNest’s computer vision model watches that footage and generates an itemised inventory. Sofas, beds, wardrobes, boxes, white goods. Each item is identified, sized, and converted into a volume estimate. The removals company sees a complete list with cubic feet, box counts, and any items flagged for special handling.
The mover reviews it, adjusts anything they want to adjust, and sends a quote. Accurately. In minutes. With no home visit required.
For the customer, that means a faster, more consistent quote. For the removals company, it means winning more jobs, sending the right-sized van, and freeing up surveyor time. For an industry that has been quoting the same way for fifty years, this is a meaningful shift.
Our role and the AWS foundation underneath:
Computer vision at this fidelity is not a plug-and-play exercise. The model must handle bad lighting, cluttered rooms, weird camera angles, and the full variety of British homes. It must run reliably on every video that comes in, and the results have to land in the mover's hands quickly enough to feel real-time. This is a serious infrastructure problem, the model is only useful if the platform underneath it can ingest video, run inference, store inventories, and serve the results without falling over on the day a hundred customers all film their houses at once.
This is where Cloud Combinator comes in. CentralNest was built on AWS, and we worked with the founders from an early stage to architect the environment around it. This meant choosing the right services for video ingestion and processing, designing the inference pipeline so it scales with demand without burning budget on idle capacity, and putting the observability in place to spot problems before customers do. The goal throughout was simple: give the founders a platform they could grow on without having to think about it.
The Solutions Provider Program:
Through our AWS Solution Provider Program, CentralNest gets more than a well-architected environment. They get optimised pricing on their AWS spend, consolidated billing that simplifies the finance side, and direct access to our cloud engineering team whenever something needs attention.
For an early-stage company, that combination matters. Cloud costs are predictable as the product scales. Billing is one line instead of dozens, and there is a team of engineers on call who already know the architecture inside out.
An ongoing partnership, not a one-off build:
What matters most in this partnership is the future. We continue to manage, optimise, and evolve Central Nest’s environment as the company grows. New regions, new model versions, new traffic patterns, new cost optimisations which are all handled.
That is deliberate. The founders of CentralNest should be focused on their customers, their product, and the removals companies they are reshaping the industry for. Not on Kubernetes upgrades, IAM policies, or whether the right reserved instances are in place. That is our job.
What this partnership represents:
Cloud Combinator works with ambitious tech companies who need the cloud foundation underneath their product to work. Sometimes that is a migration from another provider, or it is cost optimisation on an environment that has grown faster than the architecture supporting it. In this case, this partnership is where we are with the founders from early on, building the platform alongside the product.
CentralNest is a good example of what becomes possible when the infrastructure is handled. A small team with deep industry knowledge, an ambitious AI product, and a clear shot at modernising a £1.4bn industry that has been waiting for someone to fix it.
If you are a UK removals company curious about what AI-powered surveying could do for your quoting process, have a look at what CentralNest is building. www.centralnest.co.uk
If you are a startup or scale-up that needs to migrate to AWS, optimise your cloud spend, or get the right infrastructure under your product, please get in touch today.
