Fresh Ink: Welcoming Trunk Tools; ushering in a new era of efficiency in Construction with the power of AI
The Ink: Trunk Tools’ $21M Series A funding
Investors: Meera Clark and Erica Brescia
Massive Pain Points Create Massive Opportunity: Construction is a $10Tn+ industry employing 7% of the global workforce defined by masses of siloed and unstructured data. Consider the fact that for one $500M high-rise project in Manhattan, there are 3.6M pages of documentation! Yet approximately 96% of all industry data is unused or underused, leading to information gaps and errors that contribute to $500Bn+ in rework costs each year, not to mention countless hours lost and schedules slipped. We see this overwhelming amount of data as a prime opportunity to leverage generative AI to drive greater efficiency across the entire construction industry.
However, AI has historically been challenging to implement in the world of construction as technology in the field needs to be incredibly easy to use and highly dependable given the costliness of errors, while also seamlessly integrating into existing document and data repositories. Due to the lack of effective purpose-built solutions, the industry has long been a technology laggard, despite a growing pull from general contractors who today face debilitating labor and process coordination constraints that threaten to break the profitability thresholds of their businesses.
Enter Trunk Tools: Trunk Tools is an AI-powered software platform that materially improves construction industry efficiency and visibility by empowering AI agents to complete the monotonous, manual, and time consuming administrative tasks that have historically weighed on productivity. By aggregating and synthesizing the dynamic and disparate unstructured data across a construction site, Trunk Tools saves teams hours of administrative work by enabling users to query, make sense of, and act upon this data via semantic prompts.
As Trunk Tools continues to expand its army of purpose-built AI agents across the industry’s wide range of productivity pain points, you can envision a world where almost any administrative workflow across the field of construction is powered by one of Trunk Tools’ AI workers, enabling construction companies to boost their labor throughput and contribution margin while also better managing process visibility and risk. Just one example of this is the recently released Scheduling Agent, which automatically identifies schedule changes based on delivery date updates, staff scheduling issues and more, saving countless hours of manual tracking work.
The Team Behind the Tech: Founder and CEO Dr. Sarah Bucher is an outlier of a vertical SaaS founder, having spent 15 years in the field as a carpenter, foreman, superintendent, and general contractor before transitioning to the world of construction tech where she successfully started, scaled, and sold multiple companies prior to founding Trunk Tools. While her PhD in Civil Engineering and Data Science and her MBA from Stanford speak to her brilliance, Sarah’s horsepower and commitment to excellence is incredibly apparent in the caliber of the team she’s recruited to build Trunk Tools. There are few teams that marry both technical acuity and deeply developed industry insight as well as this one, and we’re excited to see what productivity unlocks this will afford for one of the world’s largest industries.
The Investor Perspective: At Redpoint, we believe that AI will fundamentally transform the way that work gets done in construction, like we’ve seen in other historically analog industries with vast amounts of data and labor constraints. And we’re big believers in Trunk Tools’ positioning as an early market leader in driving this transformation at the industry level.
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Trunk Tools, where we’re joining a group of standout Angels and institutions including our friends at Innovation Endeavors, Fifth Wall, and Foundation Capital. Read more about the fundraising announcement here — and if you’re excited about exploring a career at the intersection of construction and AI, check out their open roles here!
