A New York startup that has built an AI agent for handling admin tasks in the construction industry has raised $40 million in funding.
Trunk Tools takes unstructured construction industry data — such as documents, drawings, blueprints, and schedules — and turns it into structured datasets to feed into its AI.
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.
“So it’s a ChatGPT for your job site,” Trunk Tools’ CEO, Sarah Buchner, told Business Insider.
In the last 18 months, Trunk Tools has rolled out AI agents that can autonomously handle entire workflows, such as scheduling and project tracking.
Buchner told BI that the startup has built custom large language models because general-purpose AI struggles with construction data.
“We trained multiple models completely from scratch from construction drawings, construction objects, room boundaries, and so on,” Buchner said.
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.
Buchner started her career as a carpenter with her dad at age 12 in a small village in Austria.
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.
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.”
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.
It brings Trunk Tools’ total funding to $70 million, which includes a $20 million Series A round in 2024.
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.
Here’s an exclusive look at the pitch deck Trunk Tools used to raise its $40 million Series B.
