A New York startup that has built an AI agent for handling admin tasks in the construction industry has raised $40 million in funding.<\/p>\n
Trunk Tools takes unstructured construction industry data \u2014 such as documents, drawings, blueprints, and schedules \u2014 and turns it into structured datasets to feed into its AI.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“So it’s a ChatGPT for your job site,” Trunk Tools’ CEO, Sarah Buchner, told Business Insider.<\/p>\n
In the last 18 months, Trunk Tools has rolled out AI agents that can autonomously handle entire workflows, such as scheduling and project tracking.<\/p>\n
Buchner told BI that the startup has built custom large language models because general-purpose AI struggles with construction data. <\/p>\n
“We trained multiple models completely from scratch from construction drawings, construction objects, room boundaries, and so on,” Buchner said. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Buchner started her career as a carpenter with her dad at age 12 in a small village in Austria.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It brings Trunk Tools’ total funding to $70 million, which includes a $20 million Series A round in 2024.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Here’s an exclusive look at the pitch deck Trunk Tools used to raise its $40 million Series B.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A New York startup that has built an AI agent for handling admin tasks in the construction industry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24030,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,8667,254,255,64,63,13302,1548,5004,438,23887,23886,2494,14264,23888,23884,201,105,23885,23889],"class_list":["post-24029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-agent","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bi","tag-business-insider","tag-chatgpt","tag-company","tag-customer","tag-drawing","tag-funding","tag-ph","tag-pitch-deck","tag-sarah-buchner","tag-startup","tag-technology","tag-trunk-tools","tag-unstructured-construction-industry-datum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}