Construction corporations take care of loads of documents – so many who it may well be difficult to process and manage all of them. According to a recent Opinion pollA 3rd of construction professionals found accessing documents a challenge to completing a project, while 1 / 4 said inaccurate project documents contributed to a construction delay.
Sarah Buchner knows this. The trained carpenter founded a startup, Trunk toolswhich provides automation tools for organizing unstructured construction documentation.
“I grew up in poverty in a small village in Austria and began working as a carpenter after I was 12,” Buchner told TechCrunch. “After a few years in carpentry, I moved to general contractor and worked my way up from construction manager to project manager and group leader. During my PhD, I noticed that I could have a much bigger impact on my field by developing groundbreaking construction technologies, and that inspired me to maneuver halfway world wide to Silicon Valley to get my MBA at Stanford.”
Trunk Tools' platform can ingest files akin to PDFs, spreadsheets, drawings, blueprints, and tables and answer questions on them in a chatbot-like interface (e.g., “What variety of electrical outlets are within the art studio?”). Trunk Tools can even “link” planned construction activities to supporting documentation to discover potential project issues and gain insights.
“Traditional construction software like Procore is about documenting workflows and storing data in a predefined system,” said Buchner. “In contrast, we’re introducing a paradigm shift where Q&A and AI enable construction teams to interact with information in natural language.”
Buchner says the $500 million condo in a New York high-rise involved 3.6 million pages of paperwork. Given the time it takes to sort through such massive files, it's not surprising that construction employees hate paperwork.
A Opinion poll by Dodge Data and Viewpoint, a provider of accounting software for the development industry, found that only 28% of contractors were comfortable with paper processes, while only 47% said they were comfortable with spreadsheets. 79% of survey respondents expressed willingness to adopt construction management tools.
“If you were to print out the three.6 million pages and stack them, they might be thrice as high because the constructing itself,” said Buchner. “It would take a human 50 years to read them – Trunk Tools only needs seconds to structure them and supply insights.”
Occupy In a construction software market that might reach $7.5 billion by 2032, Trunk Tools competes with vendors akin to Briq (which uses AI to automate financial processes in construction), Join (a “decision platform” for construction) and PlanRadar (which digitizes construction and real estate documents).
However, Trunk Tools appears to be doing well, with a “double-digit” variety of construction customers and hundreds of users. Buchner says the corporate is targeting a revenue-to-burn ratio of 4x.
To achieve this goal, Trunk Tools this month closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Redpoint, bringing the corporate's total raised to $30 million. The latest money will probably be invested in expanding Trunk Tools' 30-person team in New York, in addition to developing latest services just like the recently launched Trunk service. Incentive program for construction employeessays Buchner.
“To date, construction technology has focused totally on digitization – what we used to do on paper has been transferred to computers,” said Buchner. “Time slips and rework can completely destroy the razor-thin margins of construction projects, and Trunk Tools can mitigate each.”
