Contech Firm Trunk Tools Closes $40M Series B Round

Trunk Tools, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that helps construction teams interact with project data, announced Thursday that it closed a $40 million Series B round, bringing its total funding to $70 million.

Global software investor Insight Partners led the round, with participation from Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, StepStone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Prudence.

The latest investments followed Trunk Tools quintupling its revenue over the last six months, said Sarah Buchner, CEO of the Manhattan-based proptech firm.

“If you grow revenue 5x in six months [it’s because] our margins are good and our growth is high,” said Buchner about raising the Series B. “So we didn’t have a problem at all, which is almost embarrassing to say, because I know how hard it is out there right now. But what you have to think about is that the whole world believes that AI is changing most business models, and application AI is really something that over the last year or two has really become the focus of investment, because that’s where the real economic value is being created.”

That includes in construction, one of the world’s largest industries, she said. “We’re really the only large player that does application AI for construction. I think that’s why we didn’t really have a problem in the market.”

Trunk Tools will split the latest funding 50-50 between product development and market expansion, said Buchner. The company uses AI to address the unstructured data problem in construction, converting documents, most of them PDFs, into structured data for each project. The AI system, trained for each job, can enhance workflows for field workers and office staff. 

The company plans to expand its services to subcontractors and owners, emphasizing the importance of adopting AI to augment human capabilities in construction, Buchner said.

“Construction has a data problem,” explained Buchner. “The data is unstructured, it is siloed, and it’s constantly changing. We’re trying to solve all these data problems. They’re so bad that when you take an average high-rise — a $500 million high-rise building — it takes about three and a half million pages of documentation to build that building. By the way, if you print three and a half million pages, the stack of papers is three times the size of the building, because that’s the insanity that we are dealing with in construction. And almost all of these three and a half million pages of documentation are PDFs. So very unstructured documentation, very defined and very hard to use.”

The paperwork that Trunk Tools uses its AI for includes drawings, specs, requests for information, schedules and submittals. The platform enables teams to ask natural-language questions and receive instant, accurate and actionable answers sourced from the relevant information, according to the company. Fully autonomous agents are now handling entire workflows that once required human input, while simultaneously connecting data to the project schedule to flag potential issues before they lead to delays or often costly rework.

“Trunk Tools is helping define a new category of AI with its construction platform,” Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Partners, said in a statement. “Project-level information in the construction industry lives in multiple siloed systems, and accessing that data is a time-consuming and error-prone process for field teams who need it in real time. Sarah and her team of construction tech experts are applying their deep industry experience to address this with modular AI agents.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.