The New York startup, which built an AI agent to handle managerial tasks in the construction industry, has raised $40 million in funding.
The trunk tool captures unstructured construction industry data such as documents, drawings, blueprints, schedules, and more, and converts it into a structured dataset to feed AI.
Construction workers can ask AI questions in amateur languages, such as “Does this door need electricity?” AI provides the answer along with source material.
“So it's a chat gupt for your work site,” Sarah Buchner, CEO of Trunk Tools, told Business Insider.
Over the past 18 months, Trunk Tool has deployed AI agents that can autonomously handle the entire workflow, including scheduling and project tracking.
Buchner told BI that the startup has built a massive custom language model, as general-purpose AI is fighting construction data.
“We trained multiple models from scratch, from construction drawings, construction, room boundaries, and more,” Buchner said.
The company primarily sells software as a subscription service, but some of its new AI agents are billed for each business outcome. Its clients include Suffolk construction, Gilben and DPR construction. The 60-person company operates in the US and Canada.
Buchner began his career as a carpenter at the age of 12 in a small village in Austria.
She worked towards group leaders in the construction industry, building construction safety apps and earned her PhD. Civil Engineering and Data Science.
Buchner compared the client organizations that Trunk Tools deploys AI experts in their client organizations to manage behavioral change and recruitment “Palantir does in future deployment engineering.”
Insight Partners led the startup's $40 million Series B round, including participation from Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endevors, Stepstone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Prudence.
The total funding for Trunk Tools is $70 million. This includes the $20 million Series A round of 2024.
Buchner told BI that the startups will allocate about half of their fresh capital to product development and the other half to strategies that are on the market.
This is an exclusive look at the pitch deck trunk tools used to raise the $40 million Series B.
