The eight winners of the Seventh Annual Construction Startup Competition will compete for gold, silver and bronze medals at this year’s Pitch Day, November 7 at Trimble’s Dimensions User Conference in Las Vegas.
Construction Startup Competition is the largest and longest-standing startup competition in the construction industry globally, searching for ‘Builders of the Future’ who are creating solutions to make building more sustainable, efficient and innovative. Dysruptek, Haskell’s innovation and venture capital arm, is one of eight sponsors along with Cemex Ventures, Black & Veatch, Ferrovial, Hilti, VINCI Group’s Leonard, NOVA by Saint-Gobain, Trimble, and Zacua Ventures.
The eight winners have the opportunity to pitch to executive representatives, network with industry leaders, access capital investment and real-scale pilots. For the first time, the top three will receive cash prizes. Dysruptek Managing Director Cutler Knupp is one of the judges.
“We've been partnering with Construction Startup Competition for over three years now, and we’re excited about the growth and diversity of applicants,” Knupp said. “There has been an expansion of the startups coming into the space. Also, it’s great to see the innovation coming out of regions we haven't necessarily seen much activity in prior years, examples of this include seeing an uptick in submissions from India and Africa as well as other less-developed markets.”
The eight startups selected correspond to one of the competition’s four market-driven verticals. In the “Green Construction” vertical, the winners were Firstplanit and Vizcab. Frontline, FYLD and RodRadar represented the “Enhanced Productivity” vertical. Construex won under the “Construction Supply Chain” heading, and Civ Robotics and sensmore won in the “Future of Construction'' vertical.
Here is a look at the eight finalists:
- Civ Robotics (United States) builds autonomous layout systems with an emphasis on solar farm and road projects that require thousands of coordinates a day with a press of a button
- Construex (Ecuador) digitizes construction suppliers across Latin America, offering software tools to suppliers (mostly SMBs) to help them manage their digital presence, find and manage clients, and grow their businesses with data
- Firstplanit (United Kingdom) provides designers, developers, and manufacturers with insights on the Environmental, Social, Health, and Monetary benefits of building materials and products through a holistic, transparent, data-driven, user-friendly digital platform
- Frontline (Singapore) is a construction planning simulation and optimization platform that developed proprietary optimization algorithms that enable operators and contractors to quickly identify best-in-class construction plans with optimal activity sequencing and resource allocation
- FYLD (United Kingdom) is an AI-driven work execution platform bringing real-time remote site visibility to construction operations. Workers use the FYLD platform to record work and safety-related activities using unstructured data (video, audio, text), which FYLD’s neurolinguistic programming (NLP), computer vision and predictive reasoning analyze feed in real-time to remote managers
- RodRadar (Israel) offers an unprecedented technology, Live Dig Radar® (LDR), which automatically detects underground utility infrastructure in real-time during excavation without the need for expert analysis, improving construction safety and productivity
- sensmore (Germany) is an AI Automation 2.0 software company that leverages novel radar technology and artificial intelligence to create a plug-and-play, vehicle-agnostic software for heavy machinery that improves on vision-based systems in mining, quarries and similar sectors
- Vizcab (France) is the leading 360° Building Carbon Platform, focusing on the embodied carbon impact of materials and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), offering comprehensive solutions from carbon budgeting to regulatory accounting and reporting
Dysruptek is already involved with three competitors – Civ Robotics, Construex and Rod Radar. Dysruptek became an early investor in RodRadar, and Haskell became the first contractor in the United States to take delivery of the startup’s debut product, LDR (Live Dig Radar), an excavator bucket with integrated LDR radar-imaging technology.
Rod Radar is the only one of the eight finalists that will present virtually. Because of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, many members of the company’s team have been called to active military duty.
“We're very proud of the Rod Radar team and their perseverance to continue to drive the business forward, even with the tremendous challenges that they're facing,” Knupp said.
Through Dysruptek, Haskell leads the construction industry in technological development and adoption. Contact the Dysruptek team to discuss your idea “For the Betterment of the Industry.”
