Latest news with #TrunkTools
NBC News
6 days ago
- Business
- NBC News
Startup Trunk Tools is using AI to reduce construction errors and waste
Homebuilding has long been one of the slowest industries to modernize, and commercial construction isn't far behind. Its scale is enormous, and yet it remains one of the least digitized industries in the world. That lack of innovation in commercial technology contributes to outdated documentation and errors in tasks that then have to be redone as well as administrative drag. It's a huge drain on time, budgets and materials and can lead to costly delays and unnecessary environmental waste. All told, it contributes to nearly $1 trillion in lost productivity each year, according to an August 2024 report from McKinsey Global Institute. Historically, construction companies spent an average of less than 1% of revenues on IT, less than a third of what is common in automotive and aerospace, according to the report. Sarah Buchner learned all this the hard way. The daughter of a carpenter in Austria, she came to the U.S. to learn construction and worked her way up to foreman, superintendent and eventually contractor. 'At the peak, I was running a $400 million high-rise, 600 guys working for me in the job. And on that specific construction side, I had a fatality, which in construction happens, unfortunately, a lot,' she said. 'But I was, I think, very young, and couldn't fully process what was happening.' So Buchner decided to build a health and safety app, switching careers from construction to construction software and construction tech. A decade later, with the proliferation of AI, she launched Trunk Tools, a generative AI platform trained on real construction workflows. It automates some of the more tedious tasks and also pinpoints project risks and simplifies documents. 'We take all of the unstructured documentation on a construction site, and we use different AI and machine learning tools to restructure it,' Buchner explained, noting that an average high-rise project in New York City, costing about half a billion dollars, would require about 3.5 million pages of documentation. 'Those pages change every single day, because the planning isn't finished by the time you start construction,' said Buchner. So contractors often get conflicting orders and can't search the documents to clarify. For example, take the installation of an emergency exit door. One data set says it needs electricity, but the electrical drawings don't have an outlet there. Discrepancies in the data, Buchner says, not only waste money but contribute to carbon emissions due to work inefficiencies. Trunk Tools' technology can process millions of unstructured documents, from blueprints to drawings to schedules and specs, and then return them in a clearer format that workers can better follow. The startup is partnering with Microsoft to integrate the technology into the company's suite of options. Trunk Tools just announced a $40 million Series B funding round led by global software investor Insight Partners with participation from Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, StepStone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Prudence. This investment brings its total funding to $70 million.
CNBC
7 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
Startup Trunk Tools is using AI to reduce construction errors and waste
Homebuilding has long been one of the slowest industries to modernize, and commercial construction isn't far behind. Its scale is enormous, and yet it remains one of the least digitized industries in the world. That lack of innovation in commercial technology contributes to outdated documentation and errors in tasks that then have to be redone as well as administrative drag. It's a huge drain on time, budgets and materials and can lead to costly delays and unnecessary environmental waste. All told, it contributes to nearly $1 trillion in lost productivity each year, according to an August 2024 report from McKinsey Global Institute. Historically, construction companies spent an average of less than 1% of revenues on IT, less than a third of what is common in automotive and aerospace, according to the report. Sarah Buchner learned all this the hard way. The daughter of a carpenter in Austria, she came to the U.S. to learn construction and worked her way up to foreman, superintendent and eventually contractor. CNBC's Property Play with Diana Olick covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, delivered weekly to your inbox. Subscribe here to get access today. "At the peak, I was running a $400 million high-rise, 600 guys working for me in the job. And on that specific construction side, I had a fatality, which in construction happens, unfortunately, a lot," she said. "But I was, I think, very young, and couldn't fully process what was happening." So Buchner decided to build a health and safety app, switching careers from construction to construction software and construction tech. A decade later, with the proliferation of AI, she launched Trunk Tools, a generative AI platform trained on real construction workflows. It automates some of the more tedious tasks and also pinpoints project risks and simplifies documents. "We take all of the unstructured documentation on a construction site, and we use different AI and machine learning tools to restructure it," Buchner explained, noting that an average high-rise project in New York City, costing about half a billion dollars, would require about 3.5 million pages of documentation. "Those pages change every single day, because the planning isn't finished by the time you start construction," said Buchner. So contractors often get conflicting orders and can't search the documents to clarify. For example, take the installation of an emergency exit door. One data set says it needs electricity, but the electrical drawings don't have an outlet there. Discrepancies in the data, Buchner says, not only waste money but contribute to carbon emissions due to work inefficiencies. Trunk Tools' technology can process millions of unstructured documents, from blueprints to drawings to schedules and specs, and then return them in a clearer format that workers can better follow. The startup is partnering with Microsoft to integrate the technology into the company's suite of options. Trunk Tools just announced a $40 million Series B funding round led by global software investor Insight Partners with participation from Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, StepStone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Prudence. This investment brings its total funding to $70 million.
Business Insider
24-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
This startup says it's made ChatGPT for construction sites. Read the pitch deck it used to raise $40 million.
A New York startup that has built an AI agent for handling admin tasks in the construction industry has raised $40 million in funding. Trunk Tools takes unstructured construction industry data — such as documents, drawings, blueprints, and schedules — and turns it into structured datasets to feed into its AI. Construction workers can then ask the AI a question in layperson's language, such as, "Does this door require electricity?" and the AI provides an answer, along with the source material. "So it's a ChatGPT for your job site," Trunk Tools' CEO, Sarah Buchner, told Business Insider. In the last 18 months, Trunk Tools has rolled out AI agents that can autonomously handle entire workflows, such as scheduling and project tracking. Buchner told BI that the startup has built custom large language models because general-purpose AI struggles with construction data. "We trained multiple models completely from scratch from construction drawings, construction objects, room boundaries, and so on," Buchner said. The company mostly sells its software as a subscription service, but some of its newer AI agents are charged per business outcome. Its customers include Suffolk Construction, Gilbane, and DPR Construction. The 60-person company operates in the US and Canada. Buchner started her career as a carpenter with her dad at age 12 in a small village in Austria. She worked her way up in the construction industry to a group leader, then built a construction safety app and completed a Ph.D. in civil engineering and data science. Buchner compared Trunk Tools' placement of its AI specialists into its customers' organizations to manage behavioral change and adoption from the inside to what "Palantir does with forward-deployed engineering." Insight Partners led the startup's $40 million Series B round, which included participation from Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Stepstone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, and Prudence. It brings Trunk Tools' total funding to $70 million, which includes a $20 million Series A round in 2024. Buchner told BI that the startup plans to allocate about half of its fresh capital to product development and the other half to its go-to-market strategy. Here's an exclusive look at the pitch deck Trunk Tools used to raise its $40 million Series B. Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools Trunk Tools
Business Insider
24-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
This startup says it's made ChatGPT for construction sites. Read the pitch deck it used to raise $40 million.
Trunk Tools has closed a $40 million funding round for its construction industry AI agents. The agents can handle admin tasks like scheduling and project tracking. BI got an exclusive look at the 19-page pitch deck the New York startup used to raise its Series B. Trunk Tools takes unstructured construction industry data — such as documents, drawings, blueprints, and schedules — and turns it into structured datasets to feed into its AI. Construction workers can then ask the AI a question in layperson's language, such as, "Does this door require electricity?" and the AI provides an answer, along with the source material. "So it's a ChatGPT for your job site," Trunk Tools' CEO, Sarah Buchner, told Business Insider. In the last 18 months, Trunk Tools has rolled out AI agents that can autonomously handle entire workflows, such as scheduling and project tracking. Buchner told BI that the startup has built custom large language models because general-purpose AI struggles with construction data. "We trained multiple models completely from scratch from construction drawings, construction objects, room boundaries, and so on," Buchner said. The company mostly sells its software as a subscription service, but some of its newer AI agents are charged per business outcome. Its customers include Suffolk Construction, Gilbane, and DPR Construction. The 60-person company operates in the US and Canada. Buchner started her career as a carpenter with her dad at age 12 in a small village in Austria. She worked her way up in the construction industry to a group leader, then built a construction safety app and completed a Ph.D. in civil engineering and data science. Buchner compared Trunk Tools' placement of its AI specialists into its customers' organizations to manage behavioral change and adoption from the inside to what "Palantir does with forward-deployed engineering." Insight Partners led the startup's $40 million Series B round, which included participation from Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Stepstone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, and Prudence. It brings Trunk Tools' total funding to $70 million, which includes a $20 million Series A round in 2024. Buchner told BI that the startup plans to allocate about half of its fresh capital to product development and the other half to its go-to-market strategy. Trunk Tools pitch deck slides Trunk Tools Series B funding pitch deck slide Trunk Tools Series B funding pitch deck slide Trunk Tools Series B funding pitch deck slide Trunk Tools Series B funding pitch deck slide
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Builders eye later-stage startups in funding ventures
This story was originally published on Construction Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Construction Dive newsletter. When it comes to venture investing in construction, contractors have operated like they do in the field. Instead of looking at shiny new toys, they're deploying established methods to help turn a profit. This approach has emerged via two key trends: Builders are ramping up their own venture funding arms, and they're looking for startups that are commercial-ready, rather than starting out. Take DPR Construction. Its Redwood City, California, headquarters is located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Its inhouse investment arm, WND Ventures, has been active since 2015, according to its LinkedIn, and has put money toward established startups such as reality capture platform DroneDeploy, AI-based document tracking tool Trunk Tools and automated layout robot creator Dusty Robotics, according to the company's portfolio. Another contractor on the hunt for tech companies with a proven track record is Suffolk Technologies, the venture capital offshoot of Boston-based Suffolk. The firm runs its BOOST incubator program annually, tapping promising startups to deploy existing solutions on jobs while offering not only investments, but coaching from the inside out. To date, the cohort has featured 36 different startups, according to its website. Suffolk Technologies initially invests $100,000 on a post-money SAFE, or a Simple Agreement for Future Equity, which allows an investor to put money into a company and solidify the percentage it will own when that cash is converted to shares. Graduates of this program include San Francisco-based Canvas, which creates robots that help with the drywall process. The company, which focuses on drywall finishing, completed a $24 million Series B in April 2021, in which Suffolk Construction participated. Since then, Canvas has partnered with drywall manufacturer USG and construction equipment manufacturer Hilti in 2023 and released a new robot in 2024. Then there is San Francisco-based Webcor, which is a new player on the block — the builder unveiled Webcor Ventures, its investment offshoot, on Nov. 15. It acquired a 10% stake in the Oakland, California-based modular construction firm R2 Building as its inaugural investment. And even Turner Construction, the New York City-based building giant, has gotten into the game, launching Turner Ventures on March 17. Anatomy of funding Funding rounds for startups can be thought of as a company's maturity indicator. A company raising a pre-seed funding round, for example, can be seen as in its infancy and is reflected as such in its investors — friends, family, supporters and the founders themselves. Additionally, some companies never extend beyond Seed funding into later rounds, like Series A. Percentage of built environment deals that were Series B funding rounds or later by year. This embedded content is not available in your region. By contrast, a company raising a later stage round, such as Series A or B, is more established and can attract the presence of other, larger investors. These more mature rounds also tend to attract more money. One example is Buildots, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, which delivers an AI-powered project tracking solution. Buildots completed a $45 million Series D funding round in May, which brought its total capital raised to $166 million. Indeed, even Series A rounds must demonstrate not just a great idea, but also a strong strategy to generate profit. This differs from Seed funding, where a company raises cash to finance its first steps, such as establishing a final product and its target demographic. Taken together, this means Series A funding also comes later in a firm's lifecycle. Corporate investments in Series A and later funding rounds take up larger share of investment volume This embedded content is not available in your region. 'I think startups are beginning to realize that there are no disruptions in this space,' said Dan Laboe, founding principal of Nymbl Ventures. 'It's more of a slow transformation into the future.' Over the last five years, these firms have matured during the COVID-19 pandemic, international conflicts and now, tariff-induced economic uncertainty. Observers say that over the next five years, new opportunities are available for firms — and contractors in particular — that put in the grunt work to identify solutions that are viable in the field today. Gonzalo Galindo, the head of Cemex Ventures, the contech-focused venture capital arm of Monterrey, Mexico-based building materials firm Cemex, said that firms that make it to the Series B stage have had to overcome obstacles already. 'It's a normal course of business, because many of the people in Series B have been, for a year to a year and a half, trying to raise money,' Galindo said. 'Those which are actually still alive are showing that they are resilient, that they know how to manage business, how to manage the funding, and certainly will be more prone to get money these days.' Builders seeking solutions Along the way, these tech survivors have established a toehold in construction by tailoring solutions to the industry's endemic challenges — labor shortages, environmental unpredictability and cash bottlenecks — that threaten to derail projects, either on the jobsite or before they even start. In the current environment, artificial intelligence reigns supreme as the most hyped technology. Additionally, robots, software platforms and physical equipment also play an important role on jobsites. For example, Providence, Rhode Island-based Gilbane Building Co. used New York City-based Trunk Tools, which tracked around 21,000 discrete documents on the $456 million renovation of Milwaukee's Baird Center to save money. Another — Zachry Construction, based in San Antonio — used Menlo Park, California-based Alice Technologies to speed up its estimating process, which helped the builder save 28 days on a $149 million highway project's timeline. Follow the money The broader venture capital landscape is flush with cash — global venture funding reached $321 billion in 2024, doubling over the last decade, according to Crunchbase. However, contech makes up a more diminutive portion of the total — the sector managed to pull $3.1 billion in 2024 following a sharp downturn in 2023, according to analysis by Cemex Ventures. Nevertheless, construction, with its thin profit margins and a reputation for doing things the way they've always been done, has become a favorite target for startups looking to disrupt it, due to its well-known technology adoption gap. While that gap narrowed during the pandemic, critics say construction still lags far behind other industries in productivity gains due to integrating new technologies. With that in mind, experts say that though the sector is small, it is mighty, and ripe with opportunity for those who seek it. 'I think 2025 is going to be a transitional year for really understanding where the technology investments need to be made,' Nymbl's Laboe said. Bigger kids on the block This is where more mature startups can prove attractive to builders. Laboe said that the later-stage startups represented a quid pro quo relationship with builders, who can capitalize on the immediate rewards of a commercially ready product while boosting a startup's growth trajectory. It's also a reassuring sign for other builders if they can see a contractor investing in a product, Laboe said. 'These are long-standing industries and industry players. It takes a lot of time to gain their trust in this space,' Laboe explained. 'Having corporate backers in your investments gives them immediate economic reason to adopt the technology and help guide it toward the future.' Where contractors fit The question then becomes how are contractors getting involved? And how are they putting their money to use? Atul Khanzode, CTO at DPR Construction works with WND Ventures to seek out new solutions for the firm to leverage on its jobsites. He maintains that there's a time and place for the cash, as long as it's paired with boots-on-the-ground experience or even experimentation. For those firms that already have financial backing from strategic investors, WND and other contractor venture arms have an interesting value proposition beyond dollars: contractor input. 'They are very interested in our opinions about how useful their technology is or not, and want to partner with us even sooner,' Khanzode said. Wan Li Zhu, the co-founder and managing director of Suffolk Technologies, the venture capital offshoot of Boston-based Suffolk, offered a different sort of analysis. The firm's venture arm, Zhu said, sits at the intersection of the funding ecosystem to be an early-stage validator. Some startups, he said, come in with grand expectations. 'A lot of entrepreneurs that don't come from construction may have a perception that it's trillions of dollars of volume, so there must be a significant technology budget. That's often not the case, and the fragmentation is part of the friction as well,' Zhu pointed out. So, what's next? The simple answer, experts said, is more investor cash, particularly fueled by the AI boom, a sentiment that has borne fruit through the first quarter of 2025. Already, investors have pumped $521 million into AI-based contech offerings, the highest amount since 2021. And those investors seem to be willing to stay the course — a survey from Burlingame, California-based Zacua Ventures, an investor in the contech space, showed that few are backing down. Its data showed that 90% of surveyed contech investors intended to either increase, at 47%, or maintain, at 43%, their capital deployment in 2025. Percentage of surveyed investors that are planning to change their investments by year. This embedded content is not available in your region. 'This trend reflects the recovery in early-stage ConTech investment sentiment observed since the sharp decline in 2022, indicating growing confidence in the market's long-term potential,' the firm wrote in a summary of its results. Zhu, for his part, is bullish on innovation. 'I think the next five years are going to look very different from the last two decades in construction time,' Zhu said. 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