ScopeMatch
A pan-European directory of ISO 17025 accredited testing laboratories. 13,700+ labs across 6 countries with AI-powered search.
Background & Overview
If you’re a quality engineer and you need to find a testing lab accredited to run a specific test on your product, you have a problem. There’s no single place to look. Every European country maintains its own accreditation database — Germany has DAkkS, the UK has UKAS, France has COFRAC, the Netherlands has RvA, Italy has ACCREDIA, Spain has ENAC. Six countries, six databases, six interfaces, six languages. The same test method has different reference numbers in each country. Finding the right lab means checking them all, one at a time.
I built ScopeMatch to fix that.
The Problem
Quality engineers and procurement teams spend hours navigating 36 separate national accreditation body databases to find labs accredited for specific tests. No unified search exists. No cross-border comparison is possible. The data is public but practically inaccessible.
The real challenge is taxonomy, not technology.
The interesting problem here isn’t building a search engine. It’s normalization. The same tensile test might be referenced as “EN ISO 6892-1” in Germany, “BS EN ISO 6892-1” in the UK, and “NF EN ISO 6892-1” in France. Multiply that across thousands of test methods and six languages, and you have a classification problem that’s genuinely hard to solve at scale.
I built data pipelines that scrape each national accreditation body, extract lab profiles and scope documents (including PDFs), and normalize everything into a unified taxonomy. AI-powered classification maps test method variants across borders, so a search for one finds them all. The result: 13,700+ labs with over 122,000 capability variants, all searchable from one interface.
My Process
From market research through architecture, scraping, data modeling, taxonomy design, AI classification, and web development — this is a solo build. Python, Flask, PostgreSQL, and a lot of patience with PDF parsing. The competitive moat is the taxonomy layer: tedious, unsexy work that becomes a genuine barrier to replication.
Strategy as product.
ScopeMatch isn’t a side project — it’s a business. The directory is the foundation for a marketplace: premium lab listings, lead generation, RFQ matching, and analytics. The product strategy was designed in phases, starting with data aggregation (the hard part that creates the moat) and building toward monetization once the directory reached critical mass.
The decision to start with six countries wasn’t arbitrary. Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain represent the largest accreditation ecosystems in Europe. Together they cover the majority of testing demand on the continent.
The Outcome
ScopeMatch is live at scopematch.eu with 13,700+ labs across 6 countries, 97.5% geocoded, generating 10,000+ indexable pages. The platform serves quality engineers, procurement teams, and lab managers looking for accredited testing partners across European borders.
Like what you see?
Don’t hesitate to reach out so we can chat about working on a project together.