An Exceptional Year: Demoing Dozens of Exciting New Built World Startups

Although Covid may have forced us to take our Demo Days online last year, we continued with monthly presentations from dozens of promising new startups. In total, we logged nearly one hundred new demos with solutions leveraging AI, sensor and reality capture, and robotics technologies for everything from project management and estimating to rebar tying, scaffolding, 3D printing, inspections, building maintenance and management, logistics and materials management, and much more.

An Increasingly Global Startup Community

Because presentations were digital, we were more able than ever to examine startups from around the world, and there was indeed a bumper crop of startups based in a variety of countries and serving customers well beyond their home boarders. Promising groups like WakeCap and Buildots from the Middle East as well as digital twin-focused companies like ynomia and Willow from Australia. Meantime robotics and logistics companies like KEWAZO and Propergate from central Europe presented alongside infrastructure and IoT-focused companies like Civalgo and Ottogee from Canada. In fact, about a third of the companies selected to present by our Venture Program members were from outside of the United States.

AI, Sensor Technology, and Robotics Plays Proliferate

As our recent benchmarking survey illustrates, industry players are beginning to look more seriously at solutions beyond more traditional accounting and project management applications, and as they do so, we see many more startups like Buildots, ALICE, and Openspace touting artificial intelligence applications. Meantime, companies like WakeCap and Guardhat are pushing deeper into wearables technology, while groups like Revizto and reconstruct continue to push the bounds of reality capture for project management. Other groups like Willow and Helix are advancing digital twin technology in buildings, while groups like CarbiCrete push to address the sustainabilty of the building materials, themselves. So, even as the number of solutions grow, so too are the number of different use cases for tech in the sector, making it a truly exciting and dynamic environment.

Many More To Come:

This month, with our Construction Tech Conference, we held our first in person Startup competition in more than a year. It was great to see the presenters in person, and we wish a healthy congratulations to the team from Gearflow for their win. Our Venture Program Members will be picking new crops to present in person at our US Summit on September 1st as well as at our upcoming Venture East and Venture West Conferences, and there will also continue to be monthly Demo Days exclusively for the Venture Program Members, whose ranks continue to grow, as more industry players look to venture investing as an important strategic way to learn about emerging technology and to learn with other key players in the ecosystem.