ROXID

The company

ROXID is a research-led start-up founded by Roxana Montazerian, working to transform the way cultural heritage sites are managed and conserved. The company was born out of a research project in heritage conservation where Roxana identified a major challenge: large amounts of time and money were being lost to duplicated work and inefficient collaboration. 

ROXID’s mission is to enable better decision-making across the sector by providing organisations with access to reliable, structured data on conservation activity—ultimately helping preserve heritage sites more sustainably and cost-effectively. 

To support this vision, ROXID is developing an intelligent platform that collects, analyses and presents conservation project data in a user-friendly way. The platform is designed to be accessible to professionals from across the heritage field, from archaeologists and engineers to historians and project managers. 

A cost-conscious, local solution

A central requirement for ROXID was to ensure the solution worked entirely within their existing infrastructure—without relying on paid APIs, third-party platforms or cloud-based tools. NICD designed the system so it could run on ROXID’s local machines using open-source tools, avoiding any additional overhead or subscriptions. 

Roxana Montazerian highlighted the importance of these cost saving measures:

"The NICD team engaged in extensive discussions to determine the most efficient and cost-effective approach to delivering the project. They were committed to leveraging our existing equipment, which allowed us to avoid outsourcing and keep expenses down — a crucial consideration for us as a start-up."

By using a platform that enables large language models to run locally and selecting a suitable large language model given RAM restrictions, NICD ensured that ROXID could maintain and expand the solution without incurring extra costs.

Dr Chris Wedge, key NICD data scientist working on this project, added:

"This was an exciting opportunity to collaborate with ROXID on their heritage sites information project. As the client required an open-source solution the project provided an opportunity to explore the use of smaller local language models, rather than interacting with the API of larger GPT models as in previous projects. 

While we met with Roxana weekly to provide project updates a particular highlight for me was the final day of the project, learning more about ROXID’s products and scoping a follow-on project as part of a Project Success Workshop, and getting the code up and running on the client’s own machine during the code handover session.”

How we worked together

The project was highly collaborative, with regular meetings allowing both teams to share updates, solve challenges and iterate on the design. ROXID played an active role in guiding development priorities and testing outputs. 

To ensure long-term sustainability, the project also included: 

• A two-hour upskilling session for ROXID on topics like GitHub, version control and good coding practices 
• A code handover session, where the solution was successfully tested on ROXID’s own machines 
• A Project Success Workshop, where the team reviewed outcomes and scoped future areas for development 
  
  

“The collaboration with NICD was really productive. I was able to watch the team explore different ideas, debate technical decisions, and explain why they made certain choices. That transparency helped me build confidence in the solution and also taught me a lot about LLMs and data science more generally.”

Roxana Montazerian, Founder, ROXID

The impact

The project successfully delivered a fully functional pipeline that met ROXID’s original goals. The new pipeline allows them to automate data collection and extraction, reducing the need for manual effort and improving the consistency of their datasets. 

Benefits include: 

• A scalable, local solution to replace time-consuming manual processes 
• Cleaner and more reliable data for use in heritage project planning 
• Timeline visualisations to help interpret conservation activity across sites 
• A platform for future expansion and automation 
• A cost-efficient build using in-house equipment and open-source tools 

The project has also increased ROXID’s internal capacity, with Roxana and her team gaining hands-on experience with LLMs, open-source AI tooling, and collaborative development workflows. 

“Working with NICD helped us understand what kind of technical skills we’ll need in the team going forward. We now have a solid base to continue development and build new features on top of this pipeline.”

Roxana Montazerian, Founder, ROXID