Construction companies deal with so much paperwork that it's difficult to process and manage it all. According to a recent survey, one-third of construction professionals find access to documentation a challenge in completing projects, and one-quarter say inaccuracies in project documentation contribute to construction delays.
Sarah Buchner knows this all too well: a former carpenter who founded Trunk Tools, a startup that provides automated tools for organizing unstructured construction documents.
“I grew up poor in a small village in Austria and started working as a carpenter at age 12,” Büchner told TechCrunch. “After many years as a carpenter, I moved to a general contractor and worked my way up from foreman to project manager to group leader. Through my PhD research, I realized I could make a huge impact in my field by developing disruptive construction technologies, so I decided to move across the world to Silicon Valley and enroll at Stanford University to get my MBA.”
Trunk Tools' platform can ingest files like PDFs, spreadsheets, drawings, blueprints, tables and more, and answer questions about them with a chatbot-like interface (e.g., “What type of power outlets will be available in the art studio?”). Trunk Tools can also “link” planned construction activities to related documents to identify potential project issues and uncover insights.
Image credit: Trunk Tools
“Traditional construction software like Procore focuses on documenting workflows and storing data within predefined systems,” says Buechner. “In contrast, we're introducing a paradigm shift where Q&A and AI enable construction teams to interact with information using natural language.”
Buechner said one client for a $500 million high-rise apartment building in New York City had 3.6 million pages of paperwork. Considering the time it takes to sort through such huge file folders, it's no wonder construction workers hate paperwork.
According to a poll conducted by construction accounting software vendors Dodge Data and Viewpoint, only 28% of contractors are comfortable with paper-based processes and only 47% are satisfied with spreadsheets. 79% of poll respondents indicated they intend to implement a construction management tool.
“If you printed and stacked those 3.6 million pages, they would be three times the height of the building itself,” Buechner says. “It would take a human 50 years to read them, but Trunk Tools can structure them and provide insight in seconds.”
Image credit: Trunk Tools
For a construction software market that could be worth $7.5 billion by 2032, Trunk Tools competes with vendors such as Briq (which uses AI to automate construction finance processes), Join (a construction “decision-making” platform) and PlanRadar (which digitizes construction and real estate documents).
But Trunk Tools appears to be holding up, with “double-digit” construction customers and thousands of users, and Buechner said the company is aiming to quadruple its revenue-to-burn rate ratio.
To help achieve that goal, Trunk Tools raised $20 million this month in a Series A funding round led by Redpoint. Buechner says the new capital will go toward expanding Trunk Tools' 30-person New York-based team and developing new services, such as Trunk's recently launched construction worker incentive program.
“Construction technology to date has focused primarily on digitization, taking work that was previously done on paper and putting it on the computer,” Buechner says. “Schedule delays and rework can completely crush any modest profits on a construction project, but Trunk Tools can mitigate both.”