A worker in a residential building under construction in the Las Palmas district in Medellin, Colombia, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025,.
Esteban Vanegas | Bloomberg | Getty pictures
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Homebuilding has long been one of the slowest industries to modernize, and commercial construction is not far ago. His scale is enormous and still remains one of the least digitized industries in the world.
This lack of innovation in commercial technology contributes to outdated documentation and errors in tasks that then draw both redons and administrative. It is an enormous drainage for the time, budgets and materials and can lead to costly delays and unnecessary environmental waste.
Overall, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute, it contributes to almost 1 trillion US dollar in lost productivity per year. In the past, construction companies spent an average of less than 1% of the income, less than a third of what is common in automobile and aerospace.
Sarah Buchner learned all of this on the hard tour. The daughter of a carpenter in Austria came to the United States to learn to build, and worked for Foreman, superintendent and finally on construction companies.
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“At the peak, I had a high-rise of $ 400 million, 600 people who worked for me in the job. On this special building on this special building, I had a death that unfortunately happened under construction,” she said. “But I think I was very young and couldn't fully process what happened.”
Buchner decided to build a health and security app and to change the career of building software and design technology. A decade later, she started with the spread of Ki Trunk tools, a generative AI platform that was trained on real construction work processes. It automates some of the more difficult tasks and also shows project risks and simplifies the documents.
“We take all unstructured documentation on a construction site and use different AI and machine learning tools to restructure them,” said Buchner and found that an average high-rise building in New York City, which costs about half a billion dollars, would require about 3.5 million pages of documentation.
“These pages change every day because the planning at the time you start building is not over,” said Buchner.
Terms often receive contradictory orders and cannot search the documents to clarify them. For example, take the installation of an emergency exit door. A data record says that it requires electricity, but the electrical drawings have no socket there. According to Buchner, inconsistencies in the data not only waste money, but also contributed to carbon emissions due to work efficiency.
Trunk Tools' technology can process millions of unstructured documents, from blueprints to drawings to drawings and specifications, and then return them in a clearer format, which the employees can better follow. The startup works with Microsoft to integrate the technology into the company's options.
Trunk Tools has just announced a round of funding from Series B of 40 million US dollars, which Global Software Insight Insight Partners led with the participation of Redpoint Ventures, Innovation Efforts, Stepstone, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Smart. This investment brings your total financing to 70 million US dollars.